Fedora Looks To Provide Standalone XWayland Package Tracking X.Org Server Git

With the X.Org Server being "abandonware" but at the same time the upstream XWayland portion of the codebase continuing to be worked on, Fedora developers at Red Hat are looking at splitting XWayland into its own standalone package to make it easier to ship it without having to use the rest of the xorg-server code-base.

While Red Hat developers previously worked to manage X.Org Server releases, there isn't much upside to that these days and they would rather ship a standalone XWayland package for Fedora users rather than go through the process of new xorg-server releases.

XWayland is fairly self contained and doesn't have the API headaches of the rest of the X.Org Server nor other major obstacles. Thus the standalone XWayland package would work with a stable X.Org Server installed. The plan would continue to be using the stable X.Org Server packages available on Fedora but the XWayland package would be tracking the latest upstream Git state.

This change should be of big benefit particularly to those leveraging XWayland for running Linux games atop the default GNOME Shell Wayland environment of Fedora Workstation. A lot of improvements can be found in the XWayland code of Git master that haven't yet appeared in a stable release or otherwise. Among the work currently found in the latest XWayland code are tear-free improvements, initfd support, better RandR handling, and other optimizations. More details on this planned change via the Fedora Wiki.