28 October, 2020

on abandoning the X server

There's been some recent discussion about whether the X server is abandonware. As the person arguably most responsible for its care and feeding over the last 15 years or so, I feel like I have something to say about that.

The thing about being the maintainer of a public-facing project for nearly the whole of your professional career is it's difficult to separate your own story from the project. So I'm not going to try to be dispassionate, here. I started working on X precisely because free software had given me options and capabilities that really matter, and I feel privileged to be able to give that back. I can't talk about that without caring about it.

So here's the thing: X works extremely well for what it is, but what it is is deeply flawed. There's no shame in that, it's 33 years old and still relevant, I wish more software worked so well on that kind of timeframe. But using it to drive your display hardware and multiplex your input devices is choosing to make your life worse.

It is, however, uniquely well suited to a very long life as an application compatibility layer. Though the code happens to implement an unfortunate specification, the code itself is quite well structured, easy to hack on, and not far off from being easily embeddable.

The issue, then, is how to get there. And I don't have any real desire to get there while still pretending that the xfree86 hardware-backed server code is a real thing. Sorry, I guess, but I've worked on xfree86-derived servers for very nearly as long as XFree86-the-project existed, and I am completely burnt out on that on its own merits, let alone doing that and also being release manager and reviewer of last resort. You can only apply so much thrust to the pig before you question why you're trying to make it fly at all.

So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86.

And if that sounds like a world you'd like to see, please, come talk to us, let's make it happen. I'd be absolutely thrilled to see someone take this on, and I'm happy to be your guide through the server internals.