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X.Org Server 1.16 Brings XWayland, GLAMOR, Systemd Integration
An anonymous reader writes The much anticipated Xorg Server 1.16 release is now available. The X.Org "Marionberry Pie" release features XWayland integration, GLAMOR support, systemd support, and many other features. XWayland support allows for legacy X11 support in Wayland environments via GL acceleration, GLAMOR provides generic 2D acceleration, non-PCI GPU device improvements, and countless other changes.
The systemd integration finally allows the X server to run without root privileges, something in the works for a very long time. The non-PCI device improvements mean System-on-a-Chip graphics will work more smoothly, auto-enumerating just like PCI graphics devices do. As covered previously, GLAMOR (the pure OpenGL acceleration backend) has seen quite a bit of improvement, and now works with Xephyr and XWayland.
Anyone thinking about defending systemd should read this.
Mod parent up.
I can tell you I feel similiarly.
But until and unless a large percentage of the community starts coughing up money to directly pay devs otherwise, they're going to do what their corporate masters (primarily redhat, but also other tech incumbents) choose to do.
It's the same reason lots of other tech has made it into the linux kernel but taken years to a decade to make it into BSD. If the community isn't ponying up the cash to keep the development in a direction they desire, then some corporation will coopt it and pervert it into something we hate.
It's not the first nor last piece of software we'll see this happening with.
Here's a true story. I was in a CentOS 7 system via chroot and trying to troubleshoot some problems. If it were CentOS 6 I would just run "service rsyslog start" and have syslog running in the chroot so I can get the diagnostics I was expecting, but since systemd wasn't actually running I couldn't do that. I had to launch rsyslog directly by command-line, but then it didn't listen on /dev/log like it's supposed to and I had no logging. After all, it's systemd integrated now and gets its listen socket a different way. And this is just the most recent incident.
Systemd may be technically better than sysvinit but the latter is just shell scripts which are sufficiently independent of anything else and just work. Systemd takes over your machine and wants to get its hands into everything to the point that you can't even use it anymore without systemd. This is what we're worried about what will happen to X.Org and other software.