Just a few minutes ago, Adam Jackson from the X.Org Foundation, the non-profit organization behind some powerful GNU/Linux technologies, had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of X.Org Server 1.18.0.

X.Org Server 1.18.0 is a milestone that brings with it new technologies, fixes many of the issues reported by users since the previous build of the software, and adds dozens of under-the-hood improvements for an increase in performance and reliability.

X.Org Server 1.18.0 is in development since September 1, 2015, when the first Release Candidate (RC) build was unveiled to users worldwide, bringing a huge number of changes (over 300 of them) that were detailed in a comprehensive article.

A second RC build was released to public testers on October 26, 2015, bringing even more improvements. And now, the X.Org developers have published the final bits, wrapped as a drop-in replacement for X.Org Server 1.17.0.

"A few polish fixes here over RC2. I'll start the 1.18 stable branch and update master for 1.19pre in a moment," says Adam Jackson. "Thanks to everyone who helped make 1.18 our best release yet!"

Here's what's new in X.Org Server 1.18.0

According to the release notes, the final build of X.Org Server 1.18.0 adds fewer changes than the previous Release Candidate versions did, among which we can mention the removal of the stale miext/cw include paths and unused event code from vidmode.

The main page of the software has been updated to reflect the addition of -nolisten TCP as default, as well as more information about transports for both -listen and -nolisten options, the Async swap logic has been fixed, and the radeonsi_pci_ids.h file has been synced with upstream Mesa.

Additionally, there are several modesetting improvements in X.Org Server 1.18.0, along with the ability to build Xext with the --disable-xace option, and support for executing the server if target_msc equals current_msc. Download X.Org Server 1.18.0 right now from Softpedia.