The initial list of sponsors have been announced for the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) where Wayland, Mesa, and the X.Org Server tend to dominate the discussions for improving the open-source/Linux desktop.

Unrelated to this week's announcement of Microsoft acquiring GitHub, the X.Org code repositories will soon be managed on GitLab.

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial EGLStreams for XWayland support to allow X11 on Wayland client application support for use with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, the support isn't automatically available when needed. Fortunately, that's being corrected for a future point release.

Peter Hutterer at Red Hat remains quite busy near single-handedly improving the Linux desktop input stack.

In addition to the Vulkan Virgl project another one of the interesting projects for Google Summer of Code 2018 is the development of VKMS, a Virtual KMS DRM driver.

While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial support for XWayland with EGLStreams so X11 applications/games on Wayland can still benefit from hardware acceleration, in its current state it doesn't integrate too well with Wayland desktop compositors wishing to support it. That's changing with a new patch series.

Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20.

When it comes to open-source ARM Mali graphics driver efforts there has been the Panfrost driver targeting the Mali T700 series that has occupied much of the limelight recently, but there has been a separate effort still working on open-source driver support for the older 400/450 series.

Thomas Hellstrom of VMware who has worked on Mesa going back to the Tungsten Graphics days is developing a remote KMS back-end that could be transmitted over VNC or similar protocols.

Usually X.Org DDX driver releases aren't too notable these days with most of the open-source Linux graphics innovations happening elsewhere in the stack, but for those using the VMware graphics virtualization support available through their different virtualization products, the xf86-video-vmware update out today is on the heavier side.

Following the long drawn out and feature-packed X.Org Server 1.20 cycle, the 1.21 window officially opened up today.

If you were hoping to build the newly-released X.Org Server 1.20 on your system(s) this weekend, be forewarned that a number of the DDX drivers haven't yet been updated for supporting the API/ABI changes of this big server update.

After more than one and a half years in development that is well off their past six-month release cadence, the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 has finally been released as this stable X11 implementation for Linux desktop systems not yet prepared to migrate to Wayland.

While Peter Hutterer has been involved with the X.Org Server's input code and related projects for the past decade now and has spearheaded the projects around Multi Pointer X, X Input 2, and the Wayland/Xorg-using Libinput libraries, he's still had a tough time grasping the X.Org Server's pointer acceleration code.

Release manager Adam Jackson has sent out the last planned patches for integrating into xorg-server 1.20 prior to its long-awaited release.

FreeDesktop.org that is home to the X.Org Server and Mesa development along with Wayland/Weston and other projects like LibreOffice and GStreamer is working on migrating their services to GitLab.

With the release of the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 finally being imminent, here is a look at the many features that were merged over the past year and a half for this long drawn out release process. While more of the Linux desktop continues moving towards Wayland, X.Org Server continues evolving as shown by the 1.20 release and as part of that is also plenty on the XWayland side.

X.Org Server 1.19 was released 18 months ago and in the days ahead will finally be succeeded by the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.20 release.

With the recent release candidates to the long overdue X.Org Server 1.20, OpenGL rendering has been broken when using DDX drivers like Intel and Nouveau rather than the generic xf86-video-modesetting. That was fixed today.

Adam Jackson of Red Hat today announced the X.Org Server 1.20 Release Candidate 5, which he believes will be the last test release before going gold. Most excitingly about this new release candidate is the merged support for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

It's still not clear if the EGLStreams XWayland support will be merged for xorg-server 1.20 but at least the patches were revised this week, making it possible to merge them into this next X.Org Server release for allowing the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work with XWayland.

The 2018 X.Org Board of Directors elections are over with 49 of the 91 X.Org registered members having casted a ballot.

Texas Instruments is still dealing with Imagination Tech PowerVR SGX GPUs and has now posted an open-source DRI3 WSEGL plug-in for getting this binary blob to work with 3D acceleration under an X.Org Server using Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3.

This year's X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2018) has already received some big name sponsors.

On Tuesday a new X.Org Server 1.20 release candidate was issued by Red Hat's Adam Jackson for this prolonged development cycle now stretching well more than one and a half years.

The lengthy X.Org Server 1.20 development cycle continues with today Adam Jackson of Red Hat having put out a third release candidate.

As we have covered previously, the annual X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) for 2018 is being organized by the folks at consulting firm Igalia and will be hosted in A Coruña, Spain at the local university. This event is taking place from 26 to 28 September and they have now issued their call for papers.

Adam Jackson at Red Hat has announced the second release candidate to the long-in-development X.Org Server 1.20.

It looks like the much-delayed X.Org Server 1.20 release with its initial Meson build system support will almost be to feature parity with the server's Autotools build system integration.

If you are a member of the X.Org Foundation, it's important to get out to vote now.