X.Org Server Reaches Second Release Candidate for 26.1, Its First Major Update Since 2021
X.Org Server's second 26.1 release candidate landed September 9, alongside a companion Xwayland RC, nearly five years after the project's last major tagged release.
Overview
X.Org Server, the display server software that has underpinned Linux desktops for decades, published a second release candidate for version 26.1 on September 9, moving the project closer to what would be its first major tagged release since X.Org Server 21.1 debuted in October 2021, according to Phoronix.
What We Know
The release candidate, tagged xorg-server 26.0.99.902, was announced by developer Alan Coopersmith, who wrote that it is “the second release candidate of the upcoming standalone xorg-server 26.1.0 release (or xorg-server 26.1.0 rc2 for short),” according to the xorg-announce mailing list.
The rc2 changelog credits nine contributors. Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia’s commits included a fix described as “RegionValidate: Fix double free of badreg->data on the error path,” along with several keymap group-count guards in the keyboard extension, according to the rc2 announcement. Daniel Monteiro’s change kept a failed GPU screen initialization from being treated as fatal. Ivaylo Dimitrov fixed display power management so it no longer wakes the display from input “when timeouts are disabled.” And Ben Song corrected cursor handling on multi-monitor setups by changing the code to “save cursor in master’s sprite_priv instead of slave’s,” per the same announcement.
A companion release, Xwayland 26.0.99.902, was announced separately the same day by developer Olivier Fourdan as “the second release candidate of the upcoming standalone Xwayland 26.1.0 release (or Xwayland 26.1.0 rc2 for short),” according to the Xwayland rc2 announcement.
The first release candidate, xorg-server 26.0.99.901, landed August 19 and set the direction for the 26.1 line, according to the rc1 announcement. It included “Removal of autoconf/automake build system, leaving only meson” as the project’s build tooling, and made the server “Disallow byte-swapped clients by default.” The announcement also recommended that testers build “against libpciaccess 0.19 (released in March 2026)” to work correctly with the new fixes.
According to Phoronix, the stable 26.1 release will be “the first new tagged feature release since X.Org Server 21.1 debuted back in October 2021,” incorporating “new features, many code reverts, and many bug fixes merged over the past five years.”
The X.Org Server project continues independent development even as parts of the Linux desktop world move away from the protocol it implements: GNOME 50 fully removed X11 support in March. The rc1 announcement notes that 26.1 still covers Xorg alongside legacy tools including Xephyr, Xnest, Xvfb, and the Xwin and Xquartz variants for Windows and macOS, according to the rc1 announcement.
What We Don’t Know
Neither the xorg-announce mailing list nor Phoronix has published a target date for the final 26.1 stable release, or said how many additional release candidates the project expects to cut before then. The full list of new features accumulated since X.Org Server 21.1 has not been published in a single changelog; only the individual rc1 and rc2 fix lists have been announced so far.