Fedora Will Begin Upgrading The X.Org Server As A Distribution Update

While Fedora is working to migrate over to Wayland by default, the X.Org Server won't disappear anytime soon for legacy X11 application support and other purposes. With Fedora 21 and going forward, Fedora is likely to be getting in-place X.Org Server updates upon new releases.

While the Linux kernel and Mesa packages in Fedora Linux get new stable release updates for existing distribution releases, the X.Org Server in Fedora traditionally hasn't seen major updates for already existing Fedora releases. Going forward though, new versions of the X.Org Server will be sent down the wire as distribution updates. Then again, with new X.Org Server releases coming every six months or so, this isn't going to be a frequent occurrence for Fedora users.

Adam Jackson of Red Hat laid out his plans for an X.Org Server update strategy in Fedora 21 and newer. Given that Fedora 21 has abandoned a lot of legacy DDX drivers, it's much easier for the Fedora X packages to push down new versions of the xserver code. As part of Adam's plan, he'd likely wait until the first point release to a new major X.Org Server release before sending it down. "The kernel rebase policy seems like a pretty reasonable model: F21 would stay on 1.16.x until there's an upstream 1.17.1 release, and (if F20 were to be affected by this policy) F20 would wait until 1.17.1 had been tested in F21."

However, with the API/ABI routinely breaking for the X.Org Server and this causing problems for AMD Catalyst and sometimes the NVIDIA Legacy driver, they may be conservative in some cases to avoiding the breaking of systems for those using the binary blob GPU drivers -- though Fedora doesn't ship with the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA drivers.

More details on the "xserver update strategy" can be found via this mailing list post.