GhostBSD 26.1 now based on FreeBSD 15.0, switches to XLibre
Posted by somerandomxander@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 77 comments
Posted by somerandomxander@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 77 comments
Horseshoetheoryreal@reddit
ELI5 XLibre, is it fork of X11?
Nisheri-kun@reddit
basically taking an old car, like a really really old car but it still can run somehow. so peeps try to fix it and try to make the parts modernized and the drivers seat wont make your butt hurt.
so yes, it is a fork of X11
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
if only it was just that. it was also "anti-DEI" and other crap.
Sol33t303@reddit
It's more correct to call it a fork of Xorg.
X11 is the protocol.
Nisheri-kun@reddit
gotcha, noted
sacules@reddit
Except the car parts are being replaced with crappy temu ones, and now sometimes the seat belt comes loose but that's ok I've been driving this for ages i know it inside out trust me bro lol
BackgroundSky1594@reddit
It's a fork by a ... let's say "destict personality" who has some "controversial opinions" around a variety of topics.
They want to stay on X11 and keep improving it instead of letting it rot in "maintenance mode" like it has been for the last decade. That is something a lot of people like and support (and is a good thing if it's done well), because they either don't like Wayland or it actually doesn't work for them. The main reason for the X11 -> Wayland transition is that there just hasn't been enough developers contributing to X11 and many of the former ones went off to work on "the new thing" aka Wayland. So the idea of a version of X11 that's actually actively being developed and improving, not just on minimal life support until Wayland can replace it is really exciting to them.
But the way that developer has gone about doing that was ... not universally appreciated. They apparently tried to push some substantial refactorings to make the code (in their opinion / by their preference in coding style) "better" and "cleaner", but at the same time introduced a number of actual regressions, so once people noticed the changes were reverted. The developer didn't like that, so made their own fork (XLibre). Apparently some of the new changes are just being vibe coded, which is a whole other topic.
But in general some people see it as the "promised resurrection of X11", while other people see a butthurt individual who's "a bit loopy up there".
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Oboi here we go
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
It is only a matter of time until all distributions shipping X11 will have switched to XLibre. Xorg is dead and its maintainers want to move everyone to Wayland.
KaMaFour@reddit
Or you know... Wayland.
As villanised as it is wayland is the future of linux. Using X will be limited to either distributions for purists or distributions that for whatever reason can't make the move
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Deserved as it's against the Linux ethos.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
no your compositor developer assumes that, x11 fucking sucks and gives you even less control
A wayland compositor has ultimate authority to allow anything
Natural_Night9957@reddit
If the protocol exists and the portal allows it then it's like you said. However, what really happens is that everything is vetoed then it's taking the user's freedom away.
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
and whos fault is that? freedesktop for having some degree of bureaucracy, or the fact that nobody but freedesktop gets anything done? I guess both, but regardless I think its worse for the people who complain 24/7 as I have seen zero code from them.
Natural_Night9957@reddit
The devs are also doing deliberate choices
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
Yeah so the people who actually write the display servers
S7relok@reddit
Don't look at the mainteners of the kernel you would have a seizure
Natural_Night9957@reddit
I'm pretty aware of the sorry state of the LKML and the US based Linux Foundation.
A paradigm shift is bound to happen.
S7relok@reddit
Keep dreaming, sweet lamb
Natural_Night9957@reddit
I'm not dreaming, the shift will be towards enshittification. The community's reaction isn't set in stone. These'll be pretty interesting times.
S7relok@reddit
I don't see where is the enshitification. When I began more than 20 years ago, having a DE working on linux was 2h of PITA doc search and testing. Now it's working like a charm when you pick AMD card and Nvidia require only a case to check on user friendly distros.
There's even hobbyist distros like gaming ones, with preinstalled tools that differ greatly in utility than any arch fork with only changes for file browser, terminal and a wallpaper.
Linux just becomes better with time
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Disengaged people like you never get the greater picture. Linux got traction because of software freedom. It's such a pity that a long time user cannot see that or is blissfully bending knees to the man, in this case the same corpos that the old men were fighting againt in the beginning.
S7relok@reddit
And now Linux is fueled by a mix of individual contributors and companies of diverse sizes, all doing open code. Also, it's becoming more and more user friendly while keeping more technically challenging options for those who like it.
Yeah. That traction that allows now to use linux with the ease of any widespread concurrent OS isn't done by old grumpy tech nerds or politically matrixed teenagers. What makes linux advance is technical development, not neverending arguments on forums or ML that nobody cares about. Seriously, what was born from the init war? Only shit clones of popular distros that are more unstable than the original ones.
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Neoliberalism and its sweet child (fake) Technocracy ate your brain. There's no point using Linux if Linux becomes Windows.
S7relok@reddit
An OS is made to be used. Not to be a thing for political bullshit. Welcome to real world. The real benefit of linux being open source is that every people with enough brain can work improving it easily, should it be as a pro or as a hobby. More people, more ideas, more improvements. What you vote, nobody gives a F
Natural_Night9957@reddit
I guess rednecks also use Linux.
S7relok@reddit
Better than that. I'm lucky enough to not be american so not a redneck. and Linux, more than a hobby, also helps me pay my bills.
So, no time for virtue spreading
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Good luck with that EU tech independence, unless you've being Brexitted (by Palantir and CA), 51st state.
S7relok@reddit
Haha at least we're not dumb enough to elect a brainless madman twice, and not weak enough to do protest that looks like a Sunday walk in a park
TerribleReason4195@reddit
Well, Wayland sucks on older nvidia drivers unlike X.
Journeyj012@reddit
X just sucks everywhere (I say as an X11 user because of Nvidia issues)
TerribleReason4195@reddit
I like wayland's architecture over the monolith, but I do not see a problem with X day to day. Screen tearing is fixed on xlibre, so that is not an excuse.
Kevin_Kofler@reddit
I actually like X11's architecture much more.
On X11, there is one central server, with basically one implementation (all the commonly used ones are all forks of one common parent, though there is now also the recently started Phoenix implementation that is a true independent reimplementation), handling the protocol and the compositing (or the traditional display brokering, because on X11, server-side compositing is actually optional). The protocol also natively supports advanced functionality such as screenshots/screencasts and network transparency.
On Wayland, almost every compositor has its own reimplementation of the protocol and the compositing. Some use a library such as wlroots, but even there, there are multiple competing ones now, e.g., Smithay (yes, you guessed it: because "let's rewrite everything in Rust"). And basically every Wayland window manager (of which there have always been many) its its own compositor (the exception being window managers for the River compositor). So there are a lot of compositors. Which means a lot of duplicated code reimplementing the same things, each reimplementation with different bugs. There is also no longer the option for the user to turn off compositing, because Wayland cannot display anything at all without compositing. And lots of functionality that every user would consider basic (even the clipboard) is in optional add-on protocols that any given compositor may or may not implement. There is also functionality such as screenshots/screencasts or network transparency that are being sometimes (screenshots/screencasts) or always (network transparency) punted to external out-of-band protocols: for the former, a stable add-on protocol now exists, but the 2 most popular compositors refuse to implement it and force the use of a portal (from the FreeDesktop/XDG portals initiative, initially designed only for Flatpak) instead (and the API of the portal also forces the use of Pipewire because it directly returns a Pipewire stream handle instead of a DMA buffer that can be read with any media library); the latter is not possible within the Wayland protocol at all and requires an out-of-band replaying tool such as Waypipe. Together with the huge number of independent implementations, this hodgepodge of completely optional add-on and out-of-band protocols that every implementation can arbitrarily refuse to support leads to a lot of interoperability issues, e.g., applications showing only undecorated windows on GNOME because its Mutter compositor refuses to support server-side window decorations (and expects every application not using GTK or Qt to either come up with their own client-side window decorations or add libdecor as a forced dependency, just because Mutter arbitrarily refuses to support the server-side fallback).
Indolent_Bard@reddit
How does GNOME refusing to use server side decorations relate to Wayland? Was this not an issue under x11?
the_abortionat0r@reddit
That's an Nvidia problem not a Wayland problem.
OneQuarterLife@reddit
It's also not true
Subject-Leather-7399@reddit
BSD is not Linux. Wayland has deliberately been programmed so it only runs under Linux. Wayland can't be ported to BSD.
Same with systemd.
So, BSD OSes don't really have an alternative.
crystalchuck@reddit
Completely and utterly wrong. Even the statement "Wayland has been programmed..." shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Here's the FreeBSD handbook chapter on running Wayland compositors btw: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
Subject-Leather-7399@reddit
You have no idea what you are talking about.
FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer which provides linux specific kernel interfaces: - KMS - evdev - GBM - logind - udev
FreeBSD now supports Wayland because that BSD deliberately went out of their way to make ports for Linux specific functionalities.
As of April 9th 2026:
https://www.freebsdsoftware.org/blog/freebsd-wayland-2026.html
dnu-pdjdjdidndjs@reddit
The wire protocol itself is so ridiculously cross platform its almost obnoxious, there is not 64bit types by default and everything is serialized to 32bit words
The fact that bsd cant figure out its own API like DRM is bsds fault, implementing DRMs api is the logical approach since they don't have the manpower or expertise to draft their own API. The entire DRM, mesa, and set of drivers in the kernel is dual licensed MIT so BSD can use it just fine. a lot of it even has HAL stuff built in like amdgpu.
A wayland compositor doesnt even need to use DRM. If you can run vulkan WSI then you render the vulkan image offscreen then your compositor calls whatever drm equivalent api to display images to the screen. The biggest compatibility thing would be that every app uses drm syncobjs and dmabuf so those are the practically mandatory things to have working for other OS's
So its pretty clear that the issue is lack of developers for the bsds than anything else
Also udev isnt needed either... Neither is libinput. My compositor doesn't even use libinput because I found out libinput has a statistical inaccuracy bias that rounds mouse movement in a way that can compound to multiple pixels of error in a way that's noticeable. This stuff is not rocket science. Like did you know libinput tries to normalize mouse dpi by looking it up in hand written quirk files, but practically falls back to 1000 for nearly every mouse, but theoretically if you could easily input your dpi you could use a high dpi (4000+) mouse without setting your sensitivity in games to absurdly low values? This software isn't perfect and libinput did not invent basic calculus or the homer simpson rule or mouse debounce or hysteresis filters.
udev doesn't even do much man it just gives canonical names your devices and has some database of hardware overrides, like seriously I promise you guys the 30 libinput quirk files do not matter and even if they did reimplementing these things can be done insanely easily. I don't know if the hwdb thing udev has matters that much but if it does it's still not rocket science to make your own implementation that uses hwdb.
Oh and GBM isn't really needed either, generic vulkan buffer management can work fine too. My compositor doesn't use gbm.
and logind also is just dbus slop that barely does anything important, seatd abstracts everything away in a cross platform way. Even seatd is doing too much, once VTs are destroyed by tomahawk missile a "seatd" daemon is then just a proxy that hands out fd handles to input devices as a privileged daemon so that your user doesn't need to be in the input group or have /dev/input permission or have permission to directly own the drm master block device in /dev/dri/.
Basically you guys are all just lazy complainers who don't even know what these software pieces are doing you cant blame the freedesktop group for your own development failures
creeper1074@reddit
That's just not true. Wayland works very well on FreeBSD, and by extension GhostBSD.
Subject-Leather-7399@reddit
It was a very long journey making ports of Linux Specific Kernel interfaces and it is indeed better supported now. A year ago when I tried it, it was impossible to use.
https://www.freebsdsoftware.org/blog/freebsd-wayland-2026.html
And see my other answer above. It is a system built for Linux first.
Also see: https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/talks/BSDCan2025-jeff_frasca-wayland-presentation.pdf
the_abortionat0r@reddit
Where did you even get that idea? Wayland hasn't even been programmed you dolt it's a protocol.
pautanglima@reddit
FreeBSD.
Ontological_Gap@reddit
Lol, no. Have you never heard of xwayland? It's great
Xoph-is-Fire@reddit
No
mortuary-dreams@reddit
Delusional.
kansetsupanikku@reddit
The delusional part being "XLibre can be trusted way more than "X server can remain useful with some maintenance.
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Maybe-monad@reddit
Isn't XLibre a Xorg fork made by a guy who was unhappy because his patches were rejected for introducing regressions?
algaefied_creek@reddit
So many security regressions too. XLibre is a bunch of vibe coded nightmarebinary.
But ok make them your main windowing system instead of trying to get the remain X users to build the X26 stack (X2026 idk)
Need better management or a reboot of existing stuff, not regressing because womp.
KrazyKirby99999@reddit
Do you have a source for these claims about security regressions and vibe coding? The last news I heard of xlibre was someone getting banned for submitting AI slop.
Business_Reindeer910@reddit
the security regressions were mentioned. I don't know anything about vibe coding, but i do know that his patches got rejected for being bad.
Maybe-monad@reddit
First thing they should have vibecoded is a suite of tests to make regressions less likely.
Ontological_Gap@reddit
He did introduce a lot of regressions, but everyone was so patient with him. He got banned for continually introducing commits that were nothing but meaningless churn and then bragging about what percent of the git blame he had for Xorg master
kansetsupanikku@reddit
At least he isn't vaccinated, I'm sure he's thinking clearly /s
Maybe-monad@reddit
So cleary he can fry eggs on his forehead
BothAdhesiveness9265@reddit
and saying "make X11 great again" and adding "dei free" to the Xlibre readme and he managed to fuck up a power of 2 operation (which was pushed to main ofc)
idk I don't think he's a very good dev actually and his politics make me want to kick him in the balls
zampano_3@reddit
What's the reasoning behind switching to XLibre? The original PR just says this:
lurkervidyaenjoyer@reddit
Because Xorg is on the way out, with the original project now relegated mostly to being a backwards-compatibility layer for Wayland.
People who want to stay on and continue developing on/for X and see Wayland as the wrong move or just not a path they want to go towards can switch to XLibre, which is an actively-developed Xorg fork. If anything, I don't see a reason why not to switch to it.
Well, I guess if there is one, it's that it's BSD, and OpenBSD has their own Xenocara fork. I'm not sure whether using XLibre on FreeBSD or porting Xenocara to FreeBSD would be easiest or make the most sense, but those two seem like the best long-term options for X's continued future.
Ontological_Gap@reddit
You should check out the code quality. It's not good
Sol33t303@reddit
If you want something thats mature, battle tested, and still actively maintained (which it is, it still gets bugs patched and gets regular maintenance), go Xorg.
If you want modern features expected of an OS, go wayland.
I don't see what possible niche a new Xorg competitor is possibly going to fill. Xorg is feature complete as far as X11 allows. And is not mature like Xorg is. It's the worse of both worlds, without even trying to compete with wayland in modern features. While probably being vibe coded.
varsnef@reddit
I would rather stay on X11 in maintenance mode than go with vibe coded Xlibre. X11 is a rats nest already, lets throw in vibe code and make it better?
It's either old X11 or Wayland.
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Or, you now, Xenocara. Xlibre isn't the only X11 fork around. Although new servers like Phoenix and Wayback are more promising.
martyn_hare@reddit
The future of X11 is as a compatibility layer for legacy software, and that's OK.
Xenocara existed to help privilege separate Xorg for OpenBSD back when the alternative was giving the whole thing full root access; these days, none of it runs as root. They're not adding features, just applying small security and correctness fixes here and there.
Wayback is a means for running legacy desktop environments using XWayland, which already promised to accommodate rootful usage scenarios so that nothing users need will be left behind.
Phoenix is super cool in concept, but being partially X11 compatible means it's going to have to invent its own way to definitively identify clients for those isolation exceptions. It's currently designed to nest inside Xorg and not gonna lie, I think the developer should pivot to making it run atop XWayland with a goal of slowly replacing it with a hardened replacement.
KrazyKirby99999@reddit
Good to see GhostBSD using Zsh instead of Fish. A POSIX-compliant shell is a must.
ULTRAFORCE@reddit
I do wonder if eventually for somewhat serious projects that want to use an X server if Phoenix will eventually be the X server of choice.
AcanthisittaCalm1939@reddit
freebsd has xlibre packages in its repo, so why not, plus, as far as i know, ghostbsd uses mate as default desktop environment
mWo12@reddit
Mate and xfce4
Natural_Night9957@reddit
And MATE is in a tough spot right now.
landsoflore2@reddit
What's going on with MATE atm? I'm quite out of the loop.
the_abortionat0r@reddit
A major dev left but they also dragged their feet on Wayland support for years.
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Long time main dev stepped down in March.
the_abortionat0r@reddit
More proof that BSD does not magically mean pragmatic.
regeya@reddit
okay, that's nice
where linux
LowOwl4312@reddit
I mean, I guess so, because xorg is going to end up like xfree86.
my favourite DE runs on Wayland so I'm glad I'm not affected by this drama
Natural_Night9957@reddit
Is it Budgie?