The Linux world is abuzz with news of XLibre, a fork of the venerable X11 window display system, which aims to be an alternative to X11’s successor, Wayland.

Much of the Linux world is working to adopt Wayland, the successor to X11. Wayland has been touted as being a superior option, providing better security and performance. Despite the Fedora and Ubuntu both going Wayland-only, the newer display protocol still lags behind X11, in terms of functionality, especially in the realm of accessibility, screen recording, session restore, and more. In addition, despite the promise of improved performance, many users report performance regressions compared to X11.

While progress is being made, it has been slow going, especially for a project that is more than 17 years old. To make matters worse, Wayland is largely being improved by committee, with the various desktop environment teams trying to work together to further the protocol. Progress is further hampered by the fact that the GNOME developers often object to the implementation of some functionality that doesn’t fit with their vision of what a desktop should be—despite those features being present and needed in every other environment.

The XLibre Fork

In response, developer Enrico Weigelt has forked Xll into the XLibre project. Weigelt was already one of the most prolific X11 contributors at a time when little to no improvements or new features are being added to the aging window system.

Weigelt says XLibre is necessary as a result of what he calls “toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic ’embrace, extend, extinguish’ tactics.”

That description is a reference to Red Hat’s outsized influence over Linux development, including pushing Wayland adoption. In addition, despite Wayland still offering 100% feature parity with X11, despite 17 years of development, X11 is squarely in maintenance mode.

Ongoing Drama

Adding to Weigelt’s claims that Red Hat and Big Tech exercises undue influence on development, the developer says he was banned from all work on X11 right as he forked it.

Right after journalists first began covering the planned fork Xlibre, on June 6th 2025, Redhat employees started a purge on the Xlibre founder’s GitLab account on freedesktop.org: deleted the git repo, tickets, merge requests, etc, and so fired the shot that the whole world heard.

The freedesktop.org Code of Conduct (CoC) Committee was responsible for the ban, although there has been no information about exactly what, if anyting, Weigelt did to warrant it. Needless to say, the CoC Committee’s silence has not been a good look and lends weight to Weigelt’s complaints.

XLibre’s Inaugural Release

Weigelt has wasted no time releasing the inaugural version of XLibre, XLibre 25.0. The release includes a slew of improvements.

For quite a year, I’ve put a tremendous amount of work for backporting a hundred of MRs back for across 1k commits onto xorg master, but finally it’s not worth at all spending any more time with that, if nothing substantial getting merged ever. If Xorg wants to die, so be it. But Xlibre will live on.

Since this is the first major release of the Xserver since years (with about 3k commits in between), there might be some yet unnoticed bugs. So this .0.0.0 release is considered beta. Feel free to play around and give feedback ☺. I’m especially inviting people from all distros/ operating systems to check it out and let me know what you need in order to make it work smoothly. And all of those having their own forks, extra modules, etc – let’s come together and collaborate.

Given how much X11 has been stagnating since the focus on Wayland, it’s both shocking and encouraging to see so much work being down on XLibre, including new features and bug fixes. What’s more, the project plans to address X11’s shortcomings, including adding various security improvements to help make it comparable to Wayland.

Industry Adoption

Only time will tell if XLibre will gain enough industry support to rival Wayland and provide a full-fledged replacement for X11, but at least one major Linux disto is already considering replacing X11 with it. Ironically, that distro is none other than Fedora, the upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In a post on the Fedora development list, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is already proposing replacing X11 with XLibre.

A long time has passed since the last major release of the X.Org X11 Xserver. Even bugfix releases have become rare. Therefore, this Change proposes replacing the nearly unmaintained upstream with a maintained fork, the X11Libre XServer.

The upstream maintainer of X11Libre had been the most active remaining contributor to the X.Org X11 Xserver before the fork. The Change Owner is well aware of the controversies around the X11Libre upstream maintainer (FreeDesktop.org CoC violations, controversial political views, conspiracy theories, rants against Red Hat), but believes that the benefit of shipping maintained software outweighs the potential annoyances when having to deal with upstream.

While it’s too early to tell if XLibre will be able to establish itself as a replacement to X11 and a modern rival to Wayland. If it does succeed, however, it could provide Linux and the various BSD UNIX systems a viable alternative to Wayland, one that works, has the features users depend on, and maintains backward compatibility with decades of existing software,