Bad estimates for the share of users of DEs on Linux

Bad estimates for the share of users of DEs on Linux

The devs working on the graphics code in DDXes now just work in Mesa - they've dropped the DDXes a while ago. This is why Glamor exists, to provide a DDX that's backed only by an OpenGL driver (and which is used by Xwayland, too, so is maintained by Red Hat and Oracle people for people running X11 apps on GNOME). The remaining chunks of Xfree86 code were being worked on by people who were paid to do it so that GNOME continued to work; they've moved onto other things now that their employers don't care about GNOME/X11.

And because all the people who care have moved onto other things, nobody cares about the demise of the Xorg DDX code, bar some distros who are scared that Xserver will have a security flaw that needs fixing, and nobody willing to roll up their sleeves and fix the code. Previously, Oracle and Red Hat provided that by paying people to work on this so that GNOME/X11 worked. Now that GNOME doesn't need an X11 server, those people aren't being paid to work on the Xserver code base, and they've moved onto something else because that code is so horrible that people won't work on it unless paid.

Some people who are trying to get Someone Else to carry the maintenance burden of Xorg DDX code portray this as "they want to hurry the demise of the Xorg DDX code", but it's simpler than that - nobody cares enough to become the Someone Else who works on that code for the benefit of X11 DEs. It used to be the case that Red Hat and Oracle cared if there was an exploitable flaw in Xorg DDX code, since that would result in their paid product containing an exploitable flaw in GNOME; now, they don't, and Someone has to step up to the plate for WindowMaker, XFCE, Cinnamon, Trinity and any other DE that depends on X11, or accept that sooner or later, there will be an exploitable flaw in the X server where distros will fix it by removing the X server completely.