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Comment Considerable new activity is happening both in the established X.org X11 server and around its new fork, Xlibre.

Suddenly, over in X11 land, everything seems to be kicking off. As we reported last week, there is a fresh fork of the X.org server called Xlibre, which seems to have stirred up lots of activity.

The project was begun by developer Enrico Weigelt, who had already featured in The Register more than once before this move. About four years ago, Linus Torvalds rebuked him for spreading anti-vaxxer misinformation on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Weigelt surfaced again a year ago with some patches to improve refresh rate handling on multihead X11 setups, and a new tool he called the "Xorg testing ground," used to build and test the X.org server in a jail. That can now be found on GitHub, as Weigelt's account on Freedesktop.org was closed.

We must confess to a mistake here. In reporting on the new fork, we referred to him as a long-time X.org maintainer. Some folks from X.org got in touch to point out that this wasn't in fact the case. He only started committing code in early 2024, and was never a project maintainer. We do suspect he's been the single most active developer in that time period, though. We would offer some evidence of this, such as a link to his commits, but along with blocking his account, as Phoronix reports, the X.org team has been busily reverting lots of his merge requests.

Despite this burst of activity, the team has put out not one but two new releases, both of the X.org X server. On Tuesday, the project released versions 21.1.17 of the X server, and 24.1.7 of Xwayland, due to multiple security vulnerabilities that were discovered back in March, confirmed in April, and fixed this month. It seems they missed one. On Wednesday, these were superseded by xorg-server version 21.1.18 and Xwayland 24.1.8.

Meanwhile, the new Xlibre project is attracting lots of interest. This month, there have already been dozens of threads on its mailing list. (Interestingly, the list was created back in February, so Weigelt has apparently been planning this for a while.)

Back then, apart from an initial test message, the only post was one in which Weigelt announced the project's Telegram group. This is called x11dev and has nearly 500 members and many thousands of threads. On GitHub, Xlibre has been starred some 2,200 times.

We can't tell if this is despite its position on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and nonexistent Code of Conduct (ENOENT is Unix-speak for "Error: no such entity") — or because of it. Either way, it's working.

Over on the social network that is now appropriately enough called X, the Devuan project has posted in support of XLibre:

Welcome XLibre! "This fork was necessary since 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." — Devuan GNU/Linux (@DevuanOrg) June 18, 2025

XLibre shows once again what is happening to the GNU/Linux community and why forks are made necessary by the corporate land-grab of community developments. And they just removed libsystemd-dev dependencies. We will support this effort as much as possible! — Devuan GNU/Linux (@DevuanOrg) June 18, 2025