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I wish hacking on X and getting patches in had the same coolness factor as hacking on the Linux kernel. The hacking complexity is certainly comparable. X is use

I wish hacking on X and getting patches in had the same coolness factor as hacking on the Linux kernel. The hacking complexity is certainly comparable. X is used by a very large number of people, and contributions can make a big difference.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
The difference is that (sadly) no one seems to care much about desktop Linux. Only Android this Android that Android those...
cycloptic 6y ago
There's still a good number of graphics hackers, but a lot of code has moved out of Xorg and as a result most of the hackers have moved on to working on Mesa, Wayland, and in-kernel GPU drivers. So there is some overlap there with the kernel hackers.
badsectoracula 6y ago
FWIW i played around with Xorg xserver code a while some time ago and i found it quite easy to grasp things in it... or at least not any more difficult than any other relatively large codebase i've worked with (though the X server doesn't really have a large codebase and the entire Xorg project is broken into multiple small libraries that make things easier to grasp). My guess why you do not see as many people working on Xorg is that... it generally works for the majority of people. Personally i'm 100% certain i could fix any issue i have with it, but i never really felt anything missing from Xorg, it works perfectly fine for what i'm doing with it.