14 DAY TRIAL // The X.Org Foundation, through Keith Packard, announced the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate (RC) build towards the X.Org Server 1.18 open-source implementation of the X Window System.
According to the overwhelming changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, X.Org Server 1.18 Release Candidate 1 is an enormous milestone that adds approximately 300 changes, including the addition of new features, under-the-hood improvements, and bugfixes.
There are improvements for everything, from XWayland, XFree86, xf86Crtc, XQuartz, and Xephyr, to things like Randr, GLX, DMX, Xi, systemd-logind, Mode Setting, DRI3, and Glamour. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you read the attached release notes if you are curious to know what exactly has been added, removed, or fixed in this release.
Among some of the most important ones, we can mention the addition of _X_ATTRIBUTE_PRINTF to the dmxConfigOutput() and dmxConfigLog() functions, import of the reallocarray() function from the OpenBSD project, the addition of an XaceHookIsSet helper function, as well as the removal of ARGB_CURSOR.
It's not ready for production use
Those of you who want to take the first Release Candidate (RC) build of the upcoming X.Org Server 1.18 software for a test drive can download the X.Org Server 1.18 RC1 sources right now via Softpedia or directly from the project's website, whichever suits you best. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not ready for production use.
The X.Org Server software is a very important component of a GNU/Linux operating system, so once again, we urge regular users to not attempt compiling and installing this version in their distributions. You should wait like everybody else to update the X.Org Server packages via the official channels when the final version is released, most probably sometime at the end of the year.