X.Org Server 26.1.0 Takes First Shape With Major Architecture Overhaul
The first release candidate strips out Xwayland, kills autoconf, and drops decades of legacy code from the X Window System.
X.Org Server 26.0.99.901 dropped yesterday as the first release candidate for 26.1.0, and it arrives with one of the most aggressive cleanups in the project's roughly 35-year history. Lead maintainer Alan Coopersmith uploaded the tarball to the X.Org archive yesterday morning, and the changes inside are anything but incremental.
The jump from 21.1.x to 26.0 isn't a typo. X.Org bumped the major version number to reflect how much of the old tree got thrown out the window. Xwayland now lives in its own repository. The project itself has been renamed xorg-server. Autoconf is gone. Roughly 6,580 commits since the 21.1 era have been consolidated into a meson-only codebase.
Keep in mind that this is still an RC. The 26.1 branch was cut on August 12, and the version bump to 26.0.99.901 is just the first public test shot. The final 26.1.0 release is still a ways off, but the direction is unmistakable.
Why Xwayland Left the Building
The single largest change is a straightforward one. Xwayland was moved into a standalone project and entirely excised from the xorg-server tree. The merge request that did the deed touched 55 files and deleted 21,657 lines of code. If you need Xwayland to run X applications on Wayland, you will have to build and install it separately now, available from the newly minted xwayland repository. Xwayland 26.0.99.901 shipped on the same day, so the split is cleanly versioned.
This shift makes sense given where the ecosystem is headed. Most modern Linux distributions default to Wayland now. The X server is primarily a compatibility layer for legacy apps and games rather than the foundation of the desktop. Keeping it bundled with the core server was becoming a maintenance burden, and dropping it finally gives both projects room to breathe.
Meson, Security Defaults, and a Cleaner Codebase
Autoconf and automake have been fully removed. Meson is the only option now, with a minimum version requirement of 1.0.0. That might throw a few older build scripts for a loop, but it eliminates decades of technical debt in one pass.
Security defaults have tightened noticeably. Byte-swapped clients, a legacy feature from when servers and clients rarely spoke the same endianness, are now disabled by default. You can still enable them with -byteswappedclients, but you have to ask for it. Font server connections follow the same logic. That move aligns with libXfont2 2.0.9 security patches from August 5, which patched heap corruption and buffer overflow flaws in font server clients. Disabling the font server by default closes that attack surface unless you explicitly re-enable it.
The cleanup extended to display driver extensions. DMX, EXA, and the miext/shadow code are gone. EXA and the shadow pixmap extension have been replaced by glamor for years, and DMX was a distributed multihead setup that almost nobody used anymore. Kdrive got partially stripped, though Xephyr survives as a nested server. Head here to the GitLab issue tracker if you hit bugs while testing the release candidate.
What Actually Ships With 26.1.0
Beyond the teardown work, the release brings a handful of practical additions. DPMS 1.2 support lands with a new notification event for power management. XFixes bumped to 6.1. Administrators gain a new AllowForceTerminate xorg.conf option for controlling whether clients can be killed outright. DRM platform support now works on BSD systems, and Xvfb virtual framebuffers finally support multiple CRTCs and up to 13 mouse buttons.
Xvfb's new multi-CRTC support is a niche change, but it's genuinely useful for CI pipelines that need to simulate multi-monitor setups without touching real hardware. Non-root Xorg server logs now follow the XDG Base Directory Specification 0.8, writing to $XDG_STATE_HOME/xorg instead of scattering into home directories.
The XLibre Parallel
The timing is worth noting. XLibre, a community fork created at the start of 2025, has quietly gained significant traction. With nearly 4,800 stars on GitHub and regular contributions from users who wanted older Nvidia drivers and more community-driven governance, it's carving out its own space. The fork backports unreleased upstream features and follows a similar versioning scheme, so it will almost certainly adopt these changes as they stabilize. Both projects are developing in parallel, and for now, they're serving different slices of the legacy driver and distribution market.
It's a sizable architectural pivot for a project that predates most of its contributors, though the stripped-down codebase and clearer separation between Xwayland and the core server do help it somewhat. The tarball sits around 3 MB compressed, and the full source is tagged at xorg-server-26.0.99.901 on GitLab.
Head here to download the xorg-server-26.0.99.901 source code. The checksums are:
SHA256: 24f16885a6152d9abb384a90c52b2e417fafdc474ff914d8faddf6b6b9566c45 xorg-server-26.0.99.901.tar.xz SHA512: 67267e8af43cd8be0ee0bac984837114598a69817bda0219e703f0395c8624a81203a98f36240bfc74ce8524335ee0954104e99ece6b9ab3c1104adbf57c2c43 xorg-server-26.0.99.901.tar.xz
