On the summer solstice—the longest day of the year—Enrico Weigelt unveiled Xlibre 25.0, a fresh fork of the aging Xorg X server. The fork aims to revitalize the decades-old display server with much-needed updates, security fixes, and a more open development philosophy.
In case you missed it, this new project stirred up quite a bit of buzz and sparked heated debates in the open-source community. It emerged as a direct response to what contributors describe as stagnation and resistance to change within the official Xorg project.
According to Weigelt, the decision to fork came after months of frustration with the Xorg maintainers—primarily associated with IBM/Red Hat—who allegedly blocked substantial contributions and new features.
“If Xorg wants to die, so be it. But Xlibre will live on,” Weigelt stated bluntly in the release announcement. The situation escalated when his work was abruptly removed from freedesktop.org, a move he attributes to corporate influence.
So, rather than continuing to fight an uphill battle, the Xlibre team opted for a clean break, incorporating years of backlogged fixes and enhancements in one sweeping release.
Key Improvements in Xlibre 25.0
This initial release is packed with notable changes, including:
- Xnamespace Extension: A novel security feature that isolates clients from different security domains (such as containers), preventing them from interfering with each other—a modern solution where the older Xsecurity mechanism falls short.
- Xnest Ported to xcb: Eliminating legacy Xlib dependencies, making the codebase more maintainable.
- Per-ABI Driver Directories: Simplifying distribution upgrades by allowing multiple driver versions to coexist.
- Numerous Code Cleanups and CVE Fixes: Addressing long-standing technical debt and security vulnerabilities.
Weigelt acknowledges that, as a beta release, Xlibre 25.0 may still contain undiscovered bugs. However, he encourages distro maintainers, developers, and enthusiasts to test it extensively and provide feedback.
For more information, see the announcement.
The source code is available on GitHub, with additional instructions in the README. Notably, the team has maintained compatibility with NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers, though they caution users to rely on Xlibre’s own repositories to avoid subtle incompatibilities introduced by Xorg.
On my laptop X11 does not work, but Wayland does. Probably rare case…
I don’t really understand all this hype. People behind X11 want to maintain it. Xlibre wants new features. If Xlibre gets some traction then some fast moving Linux distro will include it as replacement for X.org, then others will follow etc. If XLibre does not advances enought or Linux distros do not see the X11 way, than this will also be fine. You people… just relax.
X11 is usable, Wayland is not. This situation has not changed in over a decade, and I have no expectation that it will ever change.
I have not used x11 for years and neither has many others so your statement does not reflect the majority of users. With major distros pushing wayland for years it is only a matter of time before almost nobody uses x11. Wayland has been rock solid on my own systems and on the systems I use at work.
Wayland is perfectly usable for me and has been so for many years.
“perfectly usable” – and still no standard way to manage windows, get mouse position, emulate input, capture/share screen. Sure it’s perfectly usable for kiosks
You must either be retarded or not know what you are doing if you can not do those things.
Some compositors implement some features in their own way. There is no “Wayland desktop”, but “GNOME desktop”, “KDE desktop”, “wlroots desktop”, “hyprland desktop”, and so on. This is why Wayland can never be fixed
I can do most of those things but I use a few simple scripts i found on the net resource many use for these type of things and have been using them for sometime.
When using OpenShift the VNC Microsoft Windows way.
People are free to do as they please of course, but what a complete waste of time to try and revive/sustain a project which everyone else is actively trying to kill off because it is holding everything back.
There is only one type of person who wants Xorg to live on, and such people are disappearing very fast!
What a strange comment. IBM working on another mass cull like they previously aided in Germany?
There is always people like this every time things change and it is always a small handful of people that think whatever is happening is garbage blah blah they will never use whatever and so on.
Please enlighten us more about this “type of person?”
Finally we got hope for the Linux desktop. If this fails, we’re left with no hope but forced Waypiss and its fragmentation hell
wayland is way better then this rubbish
Wayland thrash is certainly not better than anything. It’s just yet another Red HAT NIH pet peeve that they pour millions into deep lobbying to manipulate the kool-aid drinkers into believing it’s superior, while the only benefit of wayland is that Red Hat can control it from end to end, and ensure them market share on the Linux enterprise world.
I use both X and wayland depending on my workflow, and I have yet to see any benefit on wayland. If anything, there’s a noticeable performance drop in games.
16 years of development and it’s still underperforming, as most Red Hat projects do (Gnome is a failed design for users, Mutter is totally half baked and one of the weakest Linux compositors, adwaita/libadwaita is probably the most amateur, ugly and inconsistent theme out there, etc…).
Whatever Red Hat touches somehow end up being crap. And wayland is no exception. Basically any competing company with 2 tinkerers in their garage systematically manage to do better than an army of Red Hat employees, this is pretty insane to be so incompetent.
That’s why, even if Red Hat will use all their firepower (pour millions into influencing and manipulating the public opinion) to kill off XLibre, including by spreading misinformation over its main developer to try and ruin his reputation on non-technical grounds, we need this to gain traction and act as counterweight.
They even went as far as attacking on some fake political views, while Red Hat isn’t exactly a saint there either, since they make everything political (which is why software is bad) and is well known for their discrimination policies.
Very interesting/seemingly impressive. I just worry that Weigelt’s apparent craziness will bleed over into the project … I guess time will tell
I see no reason to use it. The large corporation I work for will not be using it either.
“large corporations” are where software goes to die
so I do believe you lol