X.Org News Archives

YSERVER continues seeing a lot of activity for this vibe coded X11 server written in the Rust programming language. YSERVER has been seeing many apps and desktops working fine on this creation crafted in large part by Claude Code and continues chipping away at more X11 features. YSERVER 1.7 is out today with the latest fixes and improvements.

The open-source YSERVER project as a modern X11 sever written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code is out today with a new feature release. Most notable for this AI Rust X11 server is X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) support for multi-user shared desktops.

We're getting closer to the X.Org Server 26.1 stable release as the first new tagged feature release since X.Org Server 21.1 debuted back in October 2021. There have been some new features, many code reverts, and many bug fixes merged over the past five years that will culminate with the X.Org Server 26.1 stable release.

Announced a few months back was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in the Rust programming language. In getting the project off the ground quickly and given the size of X11, it was largely vibe coded with Claude Code. The project continues and is attracting contributions from more users with today marking the YSERVER 1.5 release.

The annual X.Org Developer's Conference "XDC 2026" is happening later this month in Toronto. A great number of interesting talks are planned this year from new Wayland features to OpenCL over CUDA, the possibility of Vulkan Gallium, and a lot of exciting driver developments.

Following today's release of XWayland 26.1 RC1, X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 was tagged. This xorg-server 26.1 release is aiming to become the first major feature release in five years, succeeding the xorg-server 21.1 series.

Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of XWayland 26.1. This is the first new tagged feature release since XWayland 24.1 back in 2024! As such there are many new features in tow.

As the first new release since IceWM 4.0 released back on New Year's Day for this X11 window manager, IceWM 4.1 is now available.

A new software creation that debuted this summer was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust largely by AI via Claude Code. This YSERVER implementation has continued implementing more X11 protocol and other functionality to get more desktop environments and apps working surprisingly okay on this vibe coded X11 server. YSERVER 1.4 is now available as the latest in this quest.

For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage.

Previously we covered YSERVER as an X11 server written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code. A Phoronix reader wrote in today to share an even more esoteric X11 server implementation that has come about and again written in large part by AI/LLM usage: Frame is an X11 server written in pure x86_64 Assembly.

Two more security issues were made public today concerning the X.Org Server codebase and in turn XWayland also being affected.

One month ago we reported on YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust with the help of Claude Code. Since then YSERVER has continued to advance in supporting more X11 functionality thanks to the help of Claude Code (AI) and out today is version 1.3 o this display server.

Open-source developer Jos Dehaes wrote in to Phoronix today in announcing a new X11 server he has been working on from scratch that has been quietly developed to this point but now ready to announce to the world... The YSERVER.

There are nine new security vulnerabilities impacting the X.Org Server as well as the XWayland component. Yep, more than a decade after X.Org Server security issues began coming to light with a security research acknowledging it's a disaster and "it's worse than it looks", it continues holding true.

X.Org Server 21.1.22 is out today and driven by five new security vulnerabilities being disclosed for the aging codebase. In turn these vulnerabilities also impact XWayland too and thus necessitating the XWayland 24.1.10 release.

This Valentine's Day there is a lot of red on the screen for the X.Org Server with the code delta as a result of renaming of their main Git development branch and in the process selectively dropping questionable patches to the prior "master" codebase.

The X.Org Foundation has announced that this year's X.Org Developers Conference will be taking place in Toronto, Canada and hosted by Arm.

While we wait to see what comes of the new X.Org Server Git branch plans and a possible X.Org Server 26.1 release, several X.Org libraries saw new point releases this weekend. These seldom-updated libraries saw new releases to ship various build fixes and other minor improvements.

A proposal has been laid out for a new X.Org Server "main" Git branch to house their development going forward and cleaning up the development lapses over the past few years. Ultimately the hope is for having a new cleaned-up X.Org Server and XWayland Git branch for shipping new releases in 2026.

X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.

An important fix has made it into the X.Org Server XWayland codebase ahead of the new year. XWayland has been fixed to avoid sending incorrect pointer coordinates to X11 clients on pointer enter events.

For X11/X.Org fans there is a new Christmas surprise: Phoenix as an in-development X Server written from scratch using the Zig programming language.

For X.Org Server users there is a new release of xorgproto for the holidays. Xorgproto as the set of headers and specifications for the X11 core protocols and extensions is out with its first new release since March 2024.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, a new point release is now available in the 21.1 series. While most often X.Org Server stable releases these days are driven by shipping new security fixes, the X.Org Server 21.1.21 release is to fix several regressions introduced for various functional issues.

Red Hat's leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer released libinput 1.30 today as the newest update to this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland desktops.

One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that's happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets.

The libinput input handling library for the Linux desktop on both Wayland and X.Org based systems is rolling out Lua plug-in support. Out today is libinput 1.30-rc1 with the initial infrastructure for supporting plug-ins written in the Lua scripting language.

The Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative has uncovered three more security vulnerabilities affecting the X.Org Server and the derived XWayland source code.

The xf86-input-mouse driver for mouse support when using the X.Orrg Server on operating systems like the BSDs, Illumos, GNU Hurd, and Solaris is out with a rare update.

Announced just once month ago was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components. In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with a goal of being production-ready next year and has also already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella. Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer.

Nearly one year after the merge request was first opened, back-ported now to the X.Org Server 21.1 stable branch are a number of GLAMOR 2D acceleration fixes around OpenGL ES 2.x as well as supporting OpenGL ES 3.x shaders for this generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL for the xorg-server and XWayland.

A nice improvement was merged today to the X.Org Server for benefiting the GLAMOR 2D acceleration code when using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

XLibre 25.0 was just released as the first tagged release of this recent X.Org Server fork.

Released yesterday were X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 to address another batch of six security vulnerabilities reported by security researchers. Out today is X.Org Server 21.1.18 and XWayland 24.1.8 in order to further button up one of the security issues reported yesterday.

The X.Org Server 21.1.17 and XWayland 24.1.7 point releases were issued today to fix the latest batch of security issues.

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code.

Pixman as the open-source pixel manipulation library used by the X.Org Server and Cairo graphics library is out today with Pixman 0.46 as the newest feature release.

One month ago FreeDesktop.org/X.Org experienced a new cloud crisis with Equinix Metal shutting down and losing access to all the FreeDesktop.org cloud/hosting resources at the end of April. FreeDesktop.org GitLab powers not only the X.Org projects but also Mesa, Wayland, and countless other Linux desktop open-source projects. Fortunately, it looks like they will have a new solution in time.

Eight new security issues have now been made public around the X.Org Server codebase that also impact XWayland.

About five years ago X.Org / FreeDesktop.org was experiencing a cloud hosting crisis with their cloud costs running out of control after losing free credits for Google Cloud and the continuous integration (CI) testing driving up expenses. They ended up switching public cloud providers over to Equinix. Equinix ended up sponsoring the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org with their cloud/hosting needs but now on short notice that is coming to an end.

To much surprise, the X.Org Server Git tree saw the most commits in 2024 going all the way back to 2014... While there were many more commits than in years prior, it's not a sign of resurgence for the X.Org Server with Wayland continuing to become the dominant force on the Linux desktop.

Xcompmgr 1.1.10 was released yesterday as the newest update to this basic X11 compositor providing "eye candy" effects for classic X.Org usage.

CVE-2024-9632 was made public today as the latest security vulnerability affecting the X.Org Server. The CVE-2024-9632 security issue has been present in the codebase now for 18 years and can lead to local privilege escalation.

It's taken until now to add FreeBSD to the X.Org Continuous Integration (CI) automated testing so that all proposed changes to the X.Org Server can now be build-tested on FreeBSD rather than just Linux.

Alan Coopersmith of Oracle -- thanks to his work on Solaris and maintaining the X11 support -- continues to be one of the few developers left managing new X.Org software component releases. This weekend Coopersmith released libX11 1.8.10 as the newest version of this client-side library for the core X11 protocol.

Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support.

Open-source developer Enrico Weigelt has in recent months taken to near single-handedly maintain and further enhance the aging X.Org Server codebase. The latest area that Weigelt has been working to improve is around the X.Org Server's Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

Last week marked the inaugural release of the X.Org Testing Ground Toolkit to make it easier to compile the X.Org Server. That v0.0.1 release was limited to supporting Debian/Apt-based Linux distributions while now this helper toolkit has been extended to support FreeBSD and NetBSD too.