Xlibre forks to the rescue – but Kubuntu gives X11 the boot

Summer Solstice release lands as another distro ditches the old display protocol

Depending on who you ask, the recent turbulent times in the world of X11 could be a new dawn – or the eddies around a sinking ship.

Xlibre 25.0.0.0 is out, the "Summer Solstice" release of this new FOSS X11 server forked from the X.org server. This is a preliminary release – as project lead Enrico Weigelt says:

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.

We reported news of the fork a couple of weeks ago. There was a lot of response across various FOSS forums and message boards, some of it very positive. Weigelt's positions on matters such as COVID vaccines and diversity, equality, and inclusion are, to put it diplomatically, controversial, and these are not the only things, as has been discussed in the Fediverse.

As we covered last week, some other projects such as Devuan have come out in support, and that in turn is polarizing more people. Some of the responses that this vulture has received online have been very negative indeed, including several ad hominem attacks. Then again, vituperative flame wars are nearly as old as software itself. (The words "software" and "bit" were coined in 1952 by the late John Tukey, recently celebrated in XKCD.) Some flame wars are infamous enough to have their own Wikipedia articles.

We've seen many criticisms and attacks on Weigelt's coding skills, but as well as fixes for the multiple security issues, the announcement of Xlibre 25.0 contains three new features:

1. Xnamespace extension: a novel approach for isolating clients from different security domains (e.g. containers) into separate X11 namespaces, where they can't hurt each other (for cases where Xsecurity from 1996 isn't sufficient)

2. Xnest ported to xcb – no more dependency on old Xlib anymore

3. per-ABI driver directories (allows distros installing multiple ABIs at the same time, e.g. for smoother upgrades)

Many people have invested far too much emotion in matters as arcane and ultimately trivial as Unix display protocols. Now that some of his work is out there, those interested can try it for themselves.

Some other news in the exciting world of Unix display protocols is less reassuring for X11 fans. KDE developer Nate Graham's blog is a good source of what's new in that community, and his latest post is About Plasma's X11 session. He says more than 70 percent of KDE Plasma users who permit telemetry are already using Wayland, and the numbers have been pulled down slightly by last month's release of SteamOS 3.7, which defaults to X.org. Graham says the KDE developers intend to continue to support X11 for now:

… this is up to distros, not us. It wouldn't make sense for us to get rid of Plasma's X11 support while there are still major distros shipping it by default…

Well, on that front, we have more news. A recent comment from the Kubuntu team's Rik Mills says:

on latest Questing daily ISO we no longer install the Plasma X11 session by default.

He continues:

… it is highly improbable that we can support the X11 session in 26.04 LTS (or now even), so like Ubuntu desktop it is probably better to rip off this sticking plaster in 25.10 and concentrate on wayland with less distraction.

The comment is on the issue of migrating X11 support individually to the various Ubuntu desktop flavors. That change results from the removal of X11 from default GNOME edition in the forthcoming 25.10 release, which we covered earlier this month.

Software is human ideas and human thought turned into computer code. Commercial software exists as a result of capitalism, and FOSS is a response to the commercialization of computers. The GNU Project began in response to the founding of the Lisp machine companies LMI and Symbolics.

People have different ideas. To some, it's clear that Wayland is the future. Graham's blog post says "it's just obvious that X11 is in the process of outliving its usefulness" and states as fact that "Wayland is better for modern hardware."

This is not obvious or a matter of fact to everyone in this space – any more than the idea that encrypted bootable images unlocked by a TPM chip are everyone's idea of a better Linux boot process. Despite mainstream acceptance, systemd remains widely controversial. There have been problems with snap packaging and many favor Flatpak, but that has had issues too, and in recent years Flatpak development has slowed.

The widespread integration of controversial new tech in the big-name commercially backed Linux distributions, and changes such as its developers making GNOME more dependent on systemd and thus Linux, are good news for the smaller, niche distros and desktop environments, or even entire OSes. The more corporate Linux gets, the more FreeBSD and the other BSDs will appeal. ®