XLibre Xserver
XLibre is a major fork of the Xorg Xserver, created to push forward X server technology through extensive code cleanups, architectural improvements, and enhanced functionality. This project was born out of the need to maintain active development and innovation in the X server ecosystem, ensuring this critical infrastructure continues evolving to meet modern computing demands.
Project Background
The decision to fork from the original Xorg project was driven by a lack of progress and institutional barriers that were limiting meaningful contributions. After journalists began covering the planned XLibre fork on June 6th, 2025, the founder's account and infrastructure on freedesktop.org were abruptly removed — including repositories, merge requests, and issue trackers. This forced the project to relocate development elsewhere, reaffirming the importance of decentralized infrastructure and open collaboration.
This project preserves and builds upon prior work by contributors such as @Metux, whose contributions were later removed from the original upstream.
Project Philosophy
- Independence: XLibre is a fully independent project, free from corporate control, political organizations, and institutional sponsorship.
- Technical Merit: Development is driven by quality, security, and real-world needs, not by marketing trends or centralized agendas.
- Transparency: All decisions and technical discussions are public and community-driven.
- Focus: Our goal is to build a modern, secure, performant, and maintainable X server for the UNIX ecosystem.
Inclusive and Community-Driven
We believe that good technology must be built by inclusive communities.
XLibre welcomes contributors from all backgrounds — regardless of nationality, race, gender, age, political views, or lived experience. We explicitly welcome those who are neurodivergent (e.g. autistic, ADHD, etc.) and understand that inclusion means more than just allowing access — it means providing equity of opportunity, recognizing that some contributors face unique barriers in open source spaces.
As long as you treat others with respect, you are welcome here. Whether you’re a seasoned systems developer or a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri — you belong.
This is a project where everyone deserves a fair chance to learn, contribute, and improve X11 together.
Technical Vision
- Modernization: Improve the Xorg architecture while preserving compatibility with existing X11 clients.
- Performance: Optimize rendering, reduce latency, and improve throughput across diverse hardware.
- Security: Apply modern hardening practices, improve privilege separation, and reduce attack surface.
- Code Quality: Clean up legacy code and reduce technical debt accumulated over decades.
- Portability: Maintain support for UNIX-like systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, GNU/Linux, Illumos), and compatibility layers such as Cygwin for Windows.
- Stability: Continuous testing and validation to ensure long-term reliability.
Together, let’s make X great again — by modernizing it, decentralizing it, and making it for everyone who wants to build.