In the past two days, we reviewed the development and changes of Mesa in the past year. Now let’s take a look at the changes and development of the X Window System in the past year.

Users who are familiar with Linux should know that X11 is already a somewhat “aging” technology. Due to historical problems and system bloat, its development has been seriously affected. At present, most developers have turned to Wayland. Simply put, Wayland is also a display server protocol designed to replace X11. Wayland is designed to be easier to use than X11, and Wayland also aims to make it easier for developers to integrate it into Linux systems through more straightforward code.

X.Org Server is a free and open source implementation of the X Window System display server managed by the X.Org Foundation. In contrast to Wayland’s rapid development, we can roughly guess that developers’ investment in this area in the past year should not be large. However, when looking at X.Org Server’s Git statistics for 2022, it’s surprising that developers actually invested in the project, as the number of commits and code modifications in 2022 hit a 20-year low.

As can be seen from the picture above, before 2008, X.Org Server experienced a period of rapid development, the number of submissions increased every year, and reached the highest point in 2008, creating a historical record for the highest number of submissions . Since then, the development speed of X.Org Server has declined year after year, and the number of submissions in 2022 is even similar to that of 20 years ago, that is, in 2003.

In 2022, the project’s Git master branch will have just 156 commits, compared to 331 in 2021 and a high of 2,114 in 2008. Developers have not only seen a decline in the number of submissions, but the overall code volume is also showing a downward trend. Another low point for X.Org Server in 2022 was just 3618 new lines of code added and 888 lines removed out of 156 commits in 2022, compared to 31,400 new lines of code added in 331 commits in 2021 .

Judging from the total number of lines of code in the figure above, the code of X.org Server has maintained a relatively “stable” state in the past few years, basically a straight line, and even has a downward trend in the past two years.

Even in 2003, when the number of commits was similar, X.Org Server’s code changes were not as small as they are today. Even though there were only 125 commits in their old development model at the time, they still had 865,000 lines of code added and 680,000 lines of code removed. The X.Org Server hasn’t had this few code updates since 2002.

In 2022, only 32 developers contributed code to X.Org Server, which is a further decrease from 48 developers in previous years, which is also a new low in the past 20 years. As a comparison, in 2003, there were only 10 developers at that time Developers have commit records. Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan was the most prolific committer on the X.Org Server in 2022, accounting for nearly a quarter (23.08%) of his commits. After Olivier came Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, Peter Hutterer, Michel Dänzer, Alan Coopersmith and Sultan Alsawaf.

Full data available 🙁Link)