14 DAY TRIAL // X.Org Foundation's Adam Jackson was happy to announce the other day the release of the first maintenance update to the X.Org Server 1.19 display server series for Linux-based operating systems.
X.Org Server 1.19.0 launched almost two months ago, on November 15, 2016, and we still haven't seen a GNU/Linux distribution making the switch to the most advanced X.Org Server version to date, which brings many improvements for AMD Radeon (AMDGPU/Radeon) and Intel graphics cards.
And now, two months later, X.Org Server 1.19.1 is already here as the first point release, bringing a lot of changes. From the release notes, it looks like a total of 20 fixes are implemented in this maintenance version, addressing some Randr and Glamor issues, as well as adding improvements to XWayland, XFree86, Xinerama, and EDID.
Looking closer, we can see that "damage: Make damageRegionProcessPending take a damage not a drawable" was reverted, and the new update also patches a segfault that occurred when the xorg.conf.d directory was not present, adds a quirk for the ADA 1024x600 7-inch display, and restores vfunc handlers on init failure for Glamor.
Coming soon to a distro near you
While OS vendors have to take care of all of their users, offering them the latest Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics drivers, both open-source and proprietary, sometimes they need to take sides. For example, Arch Linux is already shipping with X.Org Server 1.19.1, while Solus has reverted to X.Org Server 1.18.4 due to AMD hybrid issues.
Ubuntu 16.10 is also "still" using X.Org Server 1.18.4, and we don't think that Canonical has any plans to switch to X.Org Server 1.19 anytime soon. That being said, you should choose what's best for you and use an operating system that offers the best software and drivers for your hardware.
On the other hand, those of you who fancy compiling software from sources can now download the X.Org Server 1.19.1 tarball from our website. Below, we've attached the complete changelog if you're curious to know what exactly was fixed in this new maintenance release.