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.
Very interesting/seemingly impressive. I just worry that Weigelt’s apparent craziness will bleed over into the project … I guess time will tell