Phoronix ran a story this morning with this headline: "It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware."

It quoted Daniel Vetter of Intel's kernel graphics driver team and DRM co-maintainer saying: "The main worry I have is that xserver is abandonware without even regular releases from the main branch. That's why we had to blacklist X. Without someone caring I think there's just largely downsides to enabling features." Then again, that coming from an Intel Linux developer isn't too surprising considering it's been more than six years since the last xf86-video-intel DDX release.

It pointed out that the last major release of the X.Org Server was in May 2018 and the long-awaited X.Org Server 1.21 is has gone into Duke Nukem status.

This comes as X.Org Server development has hit a two decade low, the X.Org Server is well off its six month release regimen in not seeing a major release in over two years, and no one is stepping up to manage the 1.21 release.

A year ago was a proposal to see new releases driven via continuous integration testing but even that didn't take flight and as we roll into 2021 there isn't any motivation for releasing new versions of the X.Org Server by those capable of doing so.

Red Hat folks have long stepped up to manage X.Org Server releases but with Fedora Workstation using Wayland by default and RHEL working that way, they haven't been eager to devote resources to new X.Org Server releases. Other major stakeholders also have resisted stepping up to ship 1.21 or commit any major resources to new xorg-server versions.