Xserver Alternatives

xserver reviews and mentions

• Are We XLibre Yet? · X11Libre/Xserver Wiki
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 May 2026
• Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Backs KDE with €1.3M
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 May 2026

  Funding is nice, though ... why so much into KDE? Not other projects?

  I think KDE was better in the past. With its "wayland-only" future it will leave behind several linux users.

  > I also think it's worth reflecting on just how much stuff KDE gets done with so little money. I dropped them 50€ yesterday, and would encourage people to do the same

  So the donation daemon worked. Though, if they now have so much money, why would you recommend more money to KDE and not other projects? Why not xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver or gtk2-ng https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng? Granted, these have fewer users, but there should be more diversity among those receiving funding.

  I also donate a small part of my monthly income, but I don't feel a need to say where to or nudge others to do the same. It would not make any difference to me personally if Joe donates to abc or xyz.

• Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 May 2026

  > It's impossible to convince the "frequent upgrader" that maybe that's a risk in terms of introducing new issues.

  Well, you critisize people who run the latest software here. Two counter-arguments:

  1) If you don't upgrade frequently, you end up with super stable debian stuck on ... ancient software.

  2) Even debian systems would be vulnerable to copy.fail. So that strategy is also not automatically better.

  Personally I am among the frequent update folks. I use ruby scripts to automatically update to the latest, in hope that the people who write code are not incompetent. There is no guarantee that newer software is possible. I don't have the time and resource for infinite security audits. I need to get things done and this approach, different to the "everything is scary" crowd, works super-well for me. I use a versioned AppDir approach on linux though, so I don't run into many issues of "can not upgrade because of same .so name issue", so I can conveniently switch to other versions as-is, including the kernel. (Excluding ABI differences and glibc, but for about 98% of the programs this works very well. I am also not alone with the get-everything-working approach, see xserver or gtk2-ng: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng - granted, for the linux kernel this does not work that well ... I think we need better strategies for the linux kernel, things such as copy.fail should not be possible. I have no good solution here, AI will find many more exploits. No clue how we can prevent this or mitigate this more easily. I was surprised when the local instructor showed us how easy it is to use python for gaining superuser access as-is.)

• Blah
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 May 2026

  > It’s inspired by GNOME Web (Epiphany)

  So basically, it will be useless. How many use epiphany please? That thing has been so extremely ineffective. It's like 1999 (not that everything was bad in 1999).

  > follows GNOME’s design guidelines: no menubar, a hamburger menu

  Oh. my. god.

  So Ladybird worships uselessness now. Also, GTK progressively gets worse and with GTK5 they will (try to) kill of xorg-server too. Some people disagree with that - https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver and https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng; I get it that there are not that many folks using that, but the point is that the GNOME corporate mindset has a tiny bit of competition. Perhaps that seed of competition grows over time until the corporate gnomeys have to change course (won't happen, as they are paid to abolish what is "old", but more competition is good, if only to try to "reason" with mr. ebassi and other hardcore gnomeys; sadly KDE also goes that way with wayland-only, thanks to anti Robin Hood Nate and his donation-pester daemon. Oldschool KDE devs didn't waylay people for money, now it is "pay or get nagged", thanks to Natey Nate).

  We kind of need competition in the browser landscape, so in some ways having Ladybird is good. I don't really have much hope that ladybird will be able to challenge the evil Google empire though. But perhaps more people realise that Google controlling so much of the www-ecosystem (again, just look at how they nerfed google search in the last years) is a huge problem.

• MAUI Is Coming to Linux
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Mar 2026

  Wayland is a mess.

  Perhaps https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver can revive the older ecosystem. Almost nobody writes for wayland. About two years ago I tried to switch, then gave up when I realised how many things are missing on wayland. And then I noticed that barely anyone wrote software for wayland. It feels like a corporate advertisement project really. GNOME and KDE push for wayland now.

• Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2026

  Many theories. A simple one is that corporations wanted more control. See systemd's rise - not related to wayland as such, but to corporate-driven influence.

  I am not saying all of the design is corporate-controlled. But a ton of propaganda is associated with how wayland was advertised, until some folks had enough with it and decided to stop buying the "xorg is dead" routine these corporations push on:

  https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

  It will be interesting to see what will happen though. The GTK devs said they will help kill off xorg with GTK5. KDE also wants to kill xserver. It would be kind of cool if that would not happen - imagine if a non-corporate controlled ecosystem would emerge. Not likely to happen, but it would be a lot of fun. As well as more real competition with wayland. Wayland broke its biggest promise: that it is a viable alternative to the xorg-server. I don't want to lose any feature, so it is a drawback for me.

• Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jan 2026

  > Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value

  There were a lot of MRs with valuable changes however Red Hat wanted certain features to be exclusive to Wayland to make the alternative more appealing to people so they actively blocked these MRs from progressing.

  > someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right?

  That's precisely what happened, one of the biggest contributors and maintainers got bullied by Red Hat from the project for trying to make X11 work and decided to create X11Libre (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver) which is now getting all these fancy features that previously not possible to get into X11 due to Red Hat actively sabotaging the project in their attempt to turn Linux into their own corporate equivalent of Windows/macOS.

• XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2026
• Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Dec 2025

  Complements XLibre[0], an active fork of the X11 server from Xorg.

  0. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

• Gnome 50 Ends the X11 Era After Decades
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2025
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