X11 Server Development Pace Hits a Two Decade Low (phoronix.com) 108
Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While Mesa's development has been very vibrant this year, the X.Org Server development pace has continued pulling back greatly from its late 00's and early 10's highs. This year saw just 156 commits to the xserver Git master branch, down from 331 last year and well off the highs of 2,114 as the most ever back in 2008. This jives with the downward pace over the past decade of the number of new commits continuing to slide. But it's not just on a commit basis but in overall code churn, 2022 was another low for the X.Org Server. With the 156 commits this year, there were just 3,618 lines of new code added and 888 lines removed.... Compared to last year with its 331 commits seeing 31.4k new lines and 179k lines removed.
The X.Org Server development this year on a commit basis hasn't been as low since 2003 when there were just 125 commits under their old development model and even back then meant there was +865k lines /680k lines removed across that span of commits. There hasn't been so little code churn to the X Server since 2002. [...] This year saw commits from just 32 different email addresses, down from 48 in prior years and that number of different authors hasn't been so low since 2003 when there were just 10 recorded. Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat was the most prolific committer to the X.Org Server this year with nearly a quarter of the commits. Following Olivier was Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, Peter Hutterer, Michel DÃnzer, Alan Coopersmith, and Sultan Alsawaf. This year's X.Org Server development metrics can be found here.
The X.Org Server development this year on a commit basis hasn't been as low since 2003 when there were just 125 commits under their old development model and even back then meant there was +865k lines /680k lines removed across that span of commits. There hasn't been so little code churn to the X Server since 2002. [...] This year saw commits from just 32 different email addresses, down from 48 in prior years and that number of different authors hasn't been so low since 2003 when there were just 10 recorded. Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat was the most prolific committer to the X.Org Server this year with nearly a quarter of the commits. Following Olivier was Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, Peter Hutterer, Michel DÃnzer, Alan Coopersmith, and Sultan Alsawaf. This year's X.Org Server development metrics can be found here.
So it is Stable (Score:5, Insightful)
and it has features that accommodate most.
Re: So it is Stable (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: So it is Stable (Score:5, Insightful)
What we need is basically people who understand the code base and also to keep scouring it for any vulnerabilities or 0days. I remember back in the 90s many configurations were just bad enabled by default .. the shit you could do to your coworkers, especially the ones who had xhost +, was tons of fun. This was decades ago, before anyone would go crying to HR.
Re: So it is Stable (Score:2)
I know, I'm a freak
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Re: So it is Stable (Score:2)
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Does anybody really use it over the network?
Yes. Any more questions?
Re: So it is Stable (Score:5, Interesting)
Just use the -Y option with ssh, seems secure enough for me. Use -C for compression and -L port redirection to redirect audio.
All over ssh! I am doing just that as I type this.
This only redirect remote programs to the local X display although but it does the job most of the time.
I also run Xdisplays on the remote computer and simply access the display with ssh -C -L and a vnc client.
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I haven't seen the -Y option before. I looked at the man page but am a bit stumped. What is the difference between -Y and -X?
It looks like the -Y bypasses some security that -X doesn't. Is that about right and when would that be useful?
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I used to use -X in the old days but now I use -Y but I don't recall why :) Something changed at some point. I would have to re-read the docs just like you :)
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I think plain old -X doesn't work anymore without tweaks. -Y use an auth cookie/token or something thus making thing safer and easier to use IIRC. e.g. "Enables trusted X11 forwarding"
Most client and servers nowadays support "trusted X11 forwarding" thus -Y. -Y didn't exist in the beginning IIRC.
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-Y -X this seems to make sense:
https://askubuntu.com/question... [askubuntu.com]
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I use it over the network all the time. But it is true that this works only over the LAN and not the internet due to latency. The sad thing is that this has nothing to do with the protocol. The protocol is extremely flexible and asynchronous. It is just that the toolkit do not support this properly. (If you implement it your own using XCB, you can show this works fine). Enhancing toolkits so that this works would been a worthwhile effort.
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Works fine over the Internet for me, just use ssh -Y -C to display on your local X server or run VNC virtual Xdisplay on the remote host and connect to it with ssh -C -L(port). The trick is to enable compression with ssh otherwise you'll get poor results.
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I've used X2Go for remote X11 work for many years, even for remoting individual apps, not desktops. X2Go is based on NoMachine's X11 proxy server (nxproxy) which eliminates the round-trips to the X server over the ssh connection, which makes remote X11 work quite comfortable.
VNC is more suited to remote desktops, which is not what the OP was referring to. VNC was never that great a tool for remoting on Linux.
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just use ssh -Y to forward only apps and not the whole desktop. VNC works fine for me with compression
I also access a few machines with X2go and it seems to simply use ssh under the cover in the setups I have (I connect to the ssh port)
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Does anybody really use it over the network?
I do.
It just wasn't designed for the Internet. Too intolerant of latency.
I've found one way to mitigate latency is to use X11 with ssh, increase the amount of compression and use CPU to reduce the amount of bandwidth. Then be tolerant and grateful that I can even use a UI in such a way.
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You obviously don't know the history of X. It certainly was designed to be used over a network. Back in the day everything from fonts to widgets were done server-side. This made X apps work quite well remotely. I used to use XEmacs over a modem! And it was just fine because all the rendering was done locally on my X server. However this model soon proved to be limiting when it came to modern requirements like anti-aliased fonts. So over the years 90% of X is now unused and bitrotting, and client-side re
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Hmm Internet vs Network. Definitely designed for a network, working over internet maybe not, although there wasn't much difference between the internet and the network back in the day, and I'm sure in the beginning it was definitely used over the Internet. Back when men were real men and Telnet was enough security for everyone.
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Does anybody really use it over the network?
Yes. I use it from a Linux virtual machine to a Windows host running VcXsrv, and I suspect plenty of others use it from WSL to Windows.
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Are you sure? I am not but I encountered frustrations with unbuntu 23 or something, the one after 22.04 which is already based on debian 12 (currently dev version of debian).
Anyway, I kicked out wayland and installed X and the simplest GUI xfrt or something (I always forget the name) then installed vnc on the server I connect to it with a vnc client and it works spotlessly now!
I still use an old version of a VNC client I got in 2005 or something (kind of official paying version of vnc, still working fine wi
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P.S. Yes I tried x2go before kicking out wayand but in the end, I went with quick and dirty fix but this doesn't prove anything :)
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Does anybody really use it over the network?
Every day.
Re: So it is Stable (Score:5, Insightful)
It just works
Errr no. It is an incredible pain to setup and get running, and once it does it's stable. The term "it just works" implies no effort on the user. X11 doesn't fit that description in the slightest.
And that is a problem. Just because software is stable and functional doesn't make software good or fit for purpose. And anyone with a laptop that regularly connects and disconnects from external monitors will not consider X11 to be either stable or functional.
Just because something works for one use case, doesn't mean development is done and software is perfect.
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When you used to have to edit Xorg.conf (and whatever it was called before that, XFree86.conf? I forget now) then yes, it was an incredible pain to setup.
But nowadays it mostly seems to "just work" using xrandr.
Having said that, I've been having problems getting a dual 4k screen rpi4 working with stock debian - this thread has made me think of trying Wayland instead of X.
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But nowadays it mostly seems to "just work" using xrandr.
For you. xrandr fails on so many edge cases you're left wondering if you have edges at all or are just looking at a perfect circle. Well over half the machines I have Linux running on needed manual intervention to get the GUI working correctly. In some cases it's as simple as a display not being powered on at boot, or a display being changed. Both incredibly common use cases.
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It just works
Errr no. It is an incredible pain to setup and get running, and once it does it's stable.
True that - I remember the days when you had to encode the refresh rate of the monitor and display resolution parameters. So glad those days are over. One thing I find in X11 that I haven't been able to do that in windows or Mac is I can configure mouses to be ambidextrous with the button arrangements reversed from left handed to right handed for the mouse on my left and right hand.
I also remember the days when you could set the desktop to be larger than your monitor and so when you hit the edge of t
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Why do you want to switch the buttons? I'm ambidextrous with my mouse, with it switching hands and the side of the keyboard many times a day depending on what I'm doing and overuse discomfort levels. I'd think switching the buttons every time I did this to be an inconvenience and also cause me problems if I sat down at somebody else's computer where the buttons weren't switched. Oh, I've got a right-handed ergonomic mouse too, but I guess notice that.
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Why do you want to switch the buttons? I'm ambidextrous with my mouse, with it switching hands and the side of the keyboard many times a day depending on what I'm doing and overuse discomfort levels.
Yeah - I went through that phase too. Eventually I bought a mouse for each hand, so two mouses, one on each side of a "ten key less" keyboard.
Giving in to my ambidextrous nature was a good good thing and I've never had overuse syndrome in my arms since then. I took it a step further and standardized my configuration on dual Logitech trackballs, it was the best ergonomic decision I ever made. I haven't experienced fatiguing in my arms for decades.
What I do find is I can distribute my mouse move whi
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Sounds like you have a very specific setup tailored very well for your needs, and that you probably don't change your environment much! Well done on fine tuning it so well. My environment changes a lot so I don't particularly want to customise my way to trouble when seated somewhere else.
BTW, I'm not actually ambidextrous! Somebody told me of the benefits of using the mouse with the off-hand when we first got a computer with a one: I can use my dominant right hand for writing, typing, etc, without having
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My environment changes a lot so I don't particularly want to customise my way to trouble when seated somewhere else.
Fair enough, do keep in mind that strain injuries get worse over time so look after your self.
BTW, I'm not actually ambidextrous! Somebody told me of the benefits of using the mouse with the off-hand when we first got a computer with a one
I would agree, I was taught handedness at school however I eventually found I could write with both hands, could left and right throw and hit targets, use a hockey sticks left or right . It's also was handy when I would compete martial arts and switch to south paw mid fight for a bit of an edge. Brush teeth left hand, shave, drum. Here is a laugh for you, I have a customized ambidextrous double kick for my drum ki
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The last Time I installed X11, was on a Mac. It just worked.
The first time I installed it myself was on X486 - roughly 1995, on Slackware: it just worked.
No idea what your problems were :P though.
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No idea what your problems were :P though.
Well documented and shared by countless users online. No seriously, I'm happy that it works for you, but it would seem that 90% of any discussion forum around X11 online is about it *not* just working, and better still thanks to different distributions setting up configurations in different ways in some cases the proposed solutions, even if correct, end up pointing to the wrong location thanks to the configuration file being in a different place, or being auto-overwritten at boot and requiring editing elsew
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Sorry that hasn't been true for many years now. I can't remember the last time I even touched the Xorg.conf file. It does just work. Even with nVidia proprietary drivers.
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It's true today. Right now. That you haven't hit one of the countless edge cases that causes it to fail is good for you, but doesn't help the literally countless forum posts being made daily from people for whom it very much does not "just work".
nVidia proprietary drivers don't help with a lot of things. They don't help changes in hardware detection, they don't help support changes in refresh rates, they don't resolve KVM switches which have the image stretched 0.5x vertically for whatever reason (the worka
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What problems do you run into? When I first started using linux in 2003, I had problems getting xfree86 to use my nvidia card instead of my onboard video card but I haven't had any issues in the past 10+ years.
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Displays not detecting, displays detecting with the wrong resolution. Pointer devices being erratic. KVM switches shitting themselves. I have a KVM switch that inexplicably displays a stretched vertical resolution. Displays showing wrong resolution when switching out of wine games. I even crash the entire X session if I switch workplaces in certain games. Good luck also getting high refresh monitors working if one of the displays doesn't have a high refresh rate, e.g. a laptop.
It reminds me of the good ol'
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I don't understand, some of the issues you talk about are you putting things onto X11 that are the management of X11. I'm certainly not saying X is perfect, just that you can get it to do what you want it to do if you put the effort in.
Displays not detecting, displays detecting with the wrong resolution. Good luck also getting high refresh monitors working if one of the displays doesn't have a high refresh rate, e.g. a laptop.
Is this because you're expecting X11 to configure itself for your monitors? Are you saying you've configured X11 manually for those displays and their refresh rates and they don't work?
Pointer devices being erratic. KVM switches shitting themselves.
C'mon you're blaming hardware issues on X11? I've gone through that with pointers, I've t
Re: So it is Stable (Score:2)
This. I just came back after a long time to work with some software to upgrade an old site, and the new versions of all the old software I used to use basically have rearrangements that make them worse than it was several years ago, with no new features. Like the programmers needed to look busy, so they sold a rearranged version of the same thing. But you know what the ideal is? Math. Look at the Pythagorean theorem. Over two thousand years and no one has needed to rearrange it. Once they got it right 2000
Wayland?? (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone moved to Wayland, yeah?
Re: Wayland?? (Score:3)
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There's nothing mature about software which shits itself when trying to dynamically handle multiple monitors (an insanely common desktop OS use case).
As I told my 70 year old father after he bomb dived the pool and spilt my beer in the process, age != maturity.
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I use dual monitors on my Debian install with no issues. I am able to remove, disable, reenable them via the gui with no problems.
Every now and then, I do need to reboot to get it to see a new monitor plugged in, but I occasionally get that error with Windows as well.
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In my experience, this behavior varies heavily based on what connection the monitor uses. HDMI and DVI, things tend to work great. DisplayPort is uniquely bad for a desktop use-case, where even permanently connected monitors go away from a desktop connection when you power them off. Or, I should say, that behavior is implementation specific depending on who built the monitor.
KDE seems much worse at handling monitor add/removal that other DEs, too. But I haven't seen it being a problem with X. Maybe the
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There's nothing mature about software which shits itself when trying to dynamically handle multiple monitors (an insanely common desktop OS use case).
I have a workstation with two monitors, and a workstation with three monitors. They both work flawlessly. All of my other desktops have single monitors.
Re: Wayland?? (Score:2)
The x11 built into wsl seems to work fine with multiple monitors, and yes, using the laptop scenario
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I do it multiple times per day. I walk back from a meeting room to my desk and plug my laptop into the dock. A couple of hours later, another meeting and out comes the dock cable and off I trundle to the next meeting room.....or the cafe / pub depending on who it's with.
Re: Wayland?? (Score:2)
Re: Wayland?? (Score:2)
Re:Wayland?? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty much, actually. All the major distros and desktop environments have. The transition is far from complete with many components and apps still using X11, but Xwayland is integrated quite nicely and you can't really tell which apps are using the Wayland protocol natively and which are using X11. It's almost but not quite the best of both worlds. With the major UI tookits supporting both backends, even from the same binary, the transition is pretty smooth. And you can maintain app remoting ability by falling back to X11 over ssh. However the real concern here is that path will bit rot long before anything equivalent has been built into Wayland.
I still am not using Wayland because KWin has some annoying bugs when it comes to focus-follows mouse behavior under Wayland I'm not sure whether KWin can fix it, or if the problem stems from Wayland's refusal to support such a thing. I get the feeling Wayland developers think we should stop doing that kind of thing along with middle-click paste. I also like my Compiz configuration. I don't do wobbly windows but I do like the cube transition, and like the "Unfold" option Compiz has for unfolding the cube to see all the desktops quickly. Hopefully some time we can get something similar in a Wayland compositor.
After I upgrade my Fedora workstation to the latest version of the Mate spin I'll give it another shot and see if Marco does any better than Kwin did.
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or if the problem stems from Wayland's refusal to support such a thing
NOTABUG WONTFIX
Where have we heard that before?
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has some annoying bugs when it comes to focus-follows mouse behavior under Wayland I'm not sure whether KWin can fix it,
It drives me crazy too.
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has some annoying bugs when it comes to focus-follows mouse behavior under Wayland I'm not sure whether KWin can fix it,
It drives me crazy too.
Hell, yes on the mouse behavior. Fundamentally, deeply broken. I've had open arguments about this on Slashdot before and people have tried to tell me that any behavior I want is available through the different settings. Except that it isn't. And the behavior that makes the most sense (which was implemented by X in the first place) just isn't possible.
And omigod, Wayland is so frelling buggy. I have to reboot my laptop on a daily basis, often multiple times a day, because Wayland gets confused. On some
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The whole thing smacks of the current generation of programmers thinking they can do a better job than the previous ones.
I wouldn't even go that far. But (as you mention) it does take skill, and they don't seem to have it.
Re:Wayland?? (Score:5, Informative)
You'll find that most of the video apps don't work properly in Wayland.
I've tried to enable Wayland on Fedora ever since they `made it the default' on F35. Neither vlc nor smplayer works correctly on it. I've tried every single video display driver supported by both of these, and they all have weird issues.
Furthermore, there are too many weird annoyances and breakages all over. Since I no longer have the time to reproduce and file bugs, I just use X instead. In my estimate it will be a very long time indeed before Wayland becomes stable even for basic desktop use... leave along more complex network display use cases.
I hope they can keep X going till then.
Re:Wayland?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Wayland?? (Score:2)
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I am indeed using Nvidia. Between continuing to use Xorg and springing for a new video card, the choice is clear. One thing to keep in mind is that nVidia is still the market leader in graphics cards and will continue to be for a long time. It is not reasonable to deprecate X until Wayland properly supports that.
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After I upgrade my Fedora workstation to the latest version of the Mate spin I'll give it another shot and see if Marco does any better than Kwin did.
Mate + Marco is a lot slower than KDE + KWin in Wayland support. Or should I say, almost 0%.
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I still am not using Wayland because KWin has some annoying bugs when it comes to focus-follows mouse behavior under Wayland I'm not sure whether KWin can fix it, or if the problem stems from Wayland's refusal to support such a thing.
Gnome also has some bugs under wayland with focus follows mouse. It is incredibly frustrating.
I use wayland on my laptop where I mostly just consume, but on my developer workstation, wayland doesn't cut it yet. I still have too many things using devilspie, wnck, and other x only tools that don't quite have replacements on wayland yet.
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Wayland is still too buggy for daily use, espcially with video apps. Also, GNOME on Wayland cannot be reloaded ("F2 r" works as before with GNOME on X.org), and the GNOME shell extention to open windows maximized doesn't work on Wayland.
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Re:Wayland?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone moved to Wayland, yeah?
No.
Possibly for people who install a distro then use the machine for a bit of web surfing, maybe. The default kind of works. I've not met anyone who uses wayland: no one makes an active choice ot switch to it because it doesn't bring anything significant to the table, what it mostly does is remove things and worse despite more than a decade of development, it's all been backwards looking to re-"solve" problems that X11 did OK but failed to solve any of the new problems.
Things Wayland brings over X:
* Less screen tearing? Not sure never been much of a problem for me under X for me but a big fuss was made.
* Apparently the GNOME desktop feels less shit under Wayland?
* The kind of fragmentation that would make the old school unix wars days hackers blush
* GNOME supremacy (everything else is a crapshoot)
Things which don't work properly:
* Focus follows mouse apparently
* Screen capture and streaming. Kind of works, but only under some compositors
* Remote windows. Kind of can work but also only under some compositors properly
* Command line tools to control the GUI. Kind of but only works under some compositors properly
* Everything other than GNOME
* Nvidia which is why no one I know uses Wayland.
And of course they have been spending the last 10 years trying to match feature parity, somehow, and neither system has a great solution for mixed resolution monitors yet (I can think about about 3 simple solutions).
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Well, misuse and all the other problems.
I can see why Nvidia haven't: Wayland doesn't actually add anything for the average user. So it's going to be pretty low on their priority list.
They support the pro cards on Linux with the pro features so it's not like you get substandard graphics with Nvidia.
x.org's been around since, what, the 90s? (Score:5, Informative)
At this point, significant "code churn" should almost certainly be interpreted as a problem.
Re:x.org's been around since, what, the 90s? (Score:5, Informative)
"X1" was 1984... X11 dates back to 1987, and I used it on SunOS 4.1.1 on 68k hardware in the early 90's. X.Org... I think was 1996-ish... But by then CDE, SVR4, and the Unix wars had f***ed everything up...
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x.org was in 2004. Maybe you are thinking of xfree86?
Re:x.org's been around since, what, the 90s? (Score:4, Informative)
x.org was in 2004. Maybe you are thinking of xfree86?
No... I was thinking of when the MIT governance changed, but I was wrong even there... XFree86 forked from X11R5 in '92. There were significant changes to governance in '93 and '96, but it was all mostly vendor controlled. The X.Org foundation finally took control in 2004, and got control of the x.org domain from the vendor controlled Open Group. There's where the confusion lies, the domain vs. managing foundation...
Anyhow... Lots of crazy stuff happening there in the late 80's and early 90's that we take for granted now days, and a lot of it rode on top of X11. Sadly, Pizzatool was never updated for the Menlo Park campus. :'(
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 [medium.com]
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Either way, it's amazing how far things have progressed in the x11 front. I almost quit linux when I first started due to issues with xfree86. I'm glad I didn't and I learned a lot. But I'm even more glad that I no longer need to use what I learned to get a functional desktop :)
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At this point, significant "code churn" should almost certainly be interpreted as a problem.
That only makes sense if computers are still the same as they were in the 90s. They are not. X11 as a desktop GUI fails to meet many of the core requirements of a modern OS's use case, e.g. dynamically handling different monitors being plugged and unplugged mid-session - something that basically occurs in any business using laptops.
Code churn without reason would be a problem. But code churn to adapt to a changing world is not only not a problem, but rather the lack of it shows a bleek future for the softwa
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But you're not thinking with a unix mindset.
udev can detect the monitors changing and call xrandr.
I'm not aware of anyone having worked on a "good" solution for this. My scripts won't help anyone else as they're specific to the monitors my laptop expects to see. Also in my scripts I only look at the resolution of the monitor while a g
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I suspect this is one of those things that comes down to what you're used to. On the Mac, focus follows the mouse only for the mouse. I.e. you can put the mouse over a background window and scroll that window with the mouse wheel. Keyboard always goes to the foreground window. I like this because I find I have fewer accidents typing in the
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Interesting, thanks. I suspect this would be as hard to support in X (and maybe Wayland) as supporting the normal focus follows mouse would be on the mac.
Re: x.org's been around since, what, the 90s? (Score:2)
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Yes it should. But nobody has worked out a way to do that yet. The first problem is that you need some sort of AI image recognition stuff on the laptop so that it can work out where the monitor actually is, whether it's left or right of the laptop. Also how big the monitor is - so that the font size can be adjusted - it probably needs to do some sort of retina and brand scan too - I like a very small font, but when my colleagues come
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I find it shocking how many Linux apps are not hidpi compatible. There is also a big issue with using screens of different resolution (hidpi and normal). X11 may not be responsible for all of that, but it is part of the problem.
Re: x.org's been around since, what, the 90s? (Score:3)
Great! (Score:2)
Must be why shit stopped breaking recently.
Are they developing it in reverse (Score:2)
More people working on Wayland (Score:2)
It faster and has a modern architecture. Running Manjaro KDE with Wayland. It's noticeably faster than X.
Re: More people working on Wayland (Score:1)
Noticeably faster doing what?
Almost every single "graphics" bottleneck I've ever encountered on Linux turned out to have been an i/o or algorithmic bottleneck somewhere in series with graphics.
Fuck, even getting a bitmap of a whole rendered x11 screen over the network using xlib is blazing fast enough. I once wrote a thingie that did it at something like 40 or 50hz and barely noticed any lag or cpu usage spikes...12 years ago. Doing the equivalent using "modern" middleware was actually more laggy and bloaty
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It certainly does not have a more modern architecture. It has the same architecture as X but reduced to essential components and without network transparency. From a technology point of view, I would say it is a step back.
That is a sign of maturity (Score:5, Interesting)
You know the one thing you really, really want in software that must work. In comparison, "vibrant" is just a lie for "unfinished".
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I want software that works. So why is it that X11 doesn't handle dynamically connecting / disconnecting different monitors? I mean that's a perfectly normal desktop GUI requirement for the modern age. Why doesn't it handle monitors with different refresh rates?
X11 is "mature" like a grandpa who never learnt how to use any more than 4 buttons on the TV remote control is "mature". It does a limited set of something to suit a small subset of people, and it infuriates those who question why they won't put a bit
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You can spam "desktop" as often as you want in this thread, but the fact that you act like a chipmunk on speed with your laptop doesn't make it a "common desktop use case".
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I tried Wayland on my work desktop for a couple months and it was fine(I like KDE Plasma). Wayland wasn't better, but I didn't NEED to remove it after trying it so I left it. My company locked down parts of our windows manager setup which made it difficult to use Linux locally.
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Why doesn't it handle monitors with different refresh rates?
I was going to argue that it does, but it turns out I'm running Wayland without having noticed.
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You are confusing "modern" and "works well".
Some advice (Score:3)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Makes Sense (Score:4, Interesting)
These days, almost all the code that does the heavy lifting for video output is abstracted away from X. Video drivers are in the kernel. The X drivers are there for simple stuff like setting up screen geometry, which is pretty basic and doesn't change much. The low-level APIs used to generate graphics are in Mesa now. The higher level stuff is handled by the UI toolkits. X is basically a pass-through for everything else.
Because nowadays X uses kernel modeline drivers (Score:5, Informative)
X development has slowed down because nowadays X skips its native GPU drivers and instead leverages the kernel's own GPU support via X's generic modeline driver.
Jive? Funky (Score:2)
https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]
Systemd smells weakness (Score:2)
Stability .... (Score:2)
It's Stable - and most thing people want fixed are fundamentally broken because that just not how it was designed to work
Wayland, and other alternate systems are there to address this and the development is busy because they have issues and stability problems still, as these are resolved people will slowly migrate to these