14 DAY TRIAL // Google is now building its own X11 server replacement, Freon, and it's been already made available on a few devices that are running ChromeOS.
It looks like making your own display server is now the latest thing and Google has joined this trend. The old X server is no longer cutting it and various companies and developers decided to make their own. Linux developers have been working for some time for an X replacement and we already have Wayland and Mir, which are both in different stages of readiness.
Now Google is looking to do the same, to shed the X11 dependency by developing and promoting their own graphics stack in the form of the new Freon. Unless you're at least 30, you probably wouldn't know that the use of Freon gas in body sprays has been outlawed and that it's actually illegal to dump this gas or its variants into the atmosphere. But Google has probably another use for the word Freon in mind.
Freon is already here
Unlike Wayland and Mir, which have been in development for a long time and are only implemented on a handful of platforms, Google has just done it and it's already pushing it in its ChromeOS distro. This is a Linux-based OS used by Google on its laptops.
"After reading last Stable Channel notes, you may wonder what is this brand new freon graphics stack. So in a nutshell, project ozone¹/freon is Chrome OS without X server. This project is about removing X11 dependency and add hardware overlay support in order to provide better performance/reduced power consumption for WebGL and video and reduce Chrome OS binary size," wrote Google's François Beaufort.
Unless you're a particular keen observer or a developer that actually pays attention to this, you won't find any differences. The same would be true for Wayland or Mir. In any case, it will be interesting to see how the ChromeOS will do now without the help of X11.