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I've been using home computers since 1984 and have supported thousands of users on their computer and supported large and small businesses. I will summarize my feelings about x and linux:

Linux will not succeed in a big way on the desktop so don't worry about the x/xorg issues. It's a moot point.

From a normal user perspective these are the problems modern distributors have to fix. They may not fix xorg alone, but they can fix annoying problems around it. I think bulletproof-X has shown whats possible. It is a nice improvement.
The so called "audio disaster" is very bad not only for users but also for the image. I still don't know how for example Canonical could ever include it in Ubuntu 8.04. I hope that pulseaudio will be useable in Ubuntu 9.10. Btw. there are still linux distributions not using pulseaudio, e.g. Xubuntu, ZevenOS , ....
I will stick with Alsa and will test pulseaudio when Ubuntu 9.10 reaches beta and we have to consider which audio system we will use for ZevenOS 2.0 .
And we will take a deep look into it, test applications like skype , flash and all these other applications that a normal desktop user would use. (also audio recording of course)
I think that is one point Ubuntu missed to do the last releases. (e.g. xserver-xorg-video-intel and kernel incompatibility which resulted in a unusable slow graphics system )

I hope that this will improve in the next versions and that we can improve it also

Edited 2009-08-25 09:32 UTC

jjmckay - the problem is that yes, XOrg is complicated. But the reason XOrg is doing so well these days is because they *don't* tell people to mind their own business. I could talk about the bad old days of XFree86, but that's getting on to another topic.

You shouldn't have to muck around with xorg.conf now, and you REALLY shouldn't need to mess with modelines. Every monitor made in the last 10 years has EDID, and will tell X what it supports. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of old information on the internet. If you modified your xorg.conf, it will take that as the word of god, so if you removed a monitor, it will still act as is it is there.

The best thing users can do is to make sure there are more developers on X. XOrg is getting by with such a skeleton team of devs, it is unreal.

How I would suggest getting more developers .. pointing people that know how to write code and want a challange to XOrg; make sure Google SOC money goes to X; make sure distros that have money to spend know to spend it on X; donate money; get other users together and make payouts for developers doing work on X.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Well that's the thing, when I look at Firefox and how well it's doing and how there's no big need for users to try to get developers involved in developing Firefox because there seems to be a lot of interest because firefox inspires developers to code for it without much need for users to advocate for it. On the other hand x/xorg doesn't seem to be inspiring people to code for it, for whatever reason I don't know. Maybe doing graphics work is top dollar high paying work and doing a massive graphics system overhaul is not something that's going to happen for free and by itself, unlike a new ls command.

I care, yes. But the issues I see with the basic model of how unix/linux does GUI's seems antiquated from a local desktop perspective. In the 1970s we had the mainframe mentality and that was fine, but technology evolved. Sure, many admins still use remote x sessions and it's efficient and elegant for that. (I love ssh2'd x sessions, hehe)

I have a basic model idea of how xorg needs to evolve or be replaced. The idea is similar to what happens with Direct3D on Windows where instead of evolving and adapting new techs to through old ideas, they just walk around the old tech and develop something new.

More specifically, lets say KDE could use an alternate rendering path, call it xorg3d v1. Then any app that assumes it's using x is actually tunneled by the kde renderer (or compositor) through the new path (system calls, etc) that uses a local framebuffer or whatever is needed. Yeah, my knowledge is limited but I think the idea might point to what needs to happen. For all I know, this has already been done, I don't know, but I've never heard of Gnome or KDE being able to use any other display route than x/xorg, except perhaps compiz but I think even that still hangs on to legacy stuff from x. I don't know.

Just like how the KDE guys have redone it from scratch, so too does unix/linux land need to start over, for the sake of the desktop users. I don't see why it can't be done so that it is compatible and invisible to apps that assume x/xorg.


Note:
I had no xorg.conf when xorg broke after removing the powered-off second display (the crt) so I'm sure I didn't break xorg. By default F11 doesn't have an xorg.conf. I have yet to copy a skeleton type xorg.conf into the right directory so I've not put a new xorg.conf there yet.