New X11 Servers Keep Coming as Wayland Gains Ground

Even as Wayland dominates Linux desktop headlines, X11 is still drawing new development. Last week, Norwegian FOSS developer Geir Isene introduced Frame, which he calls “the first Linux Assembly X server.”

Isene says the project grew out of a desire to fully control his software stack.

“On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly.”

Frame is part of Isene’s broader CHasm stack — short for CHange to ASM — which also includes the Tile window manager, Glass terminal emulator, and Bare shell. The tools are standalone x86-64 assembly binaries for Linux with no external dependencies. He also maintains a compact set of Rust tools called Fe₂O₃.

But Frame is not the only recent X11 effort. Last month, developer Jos Dehaes released yserver, described as “a modern X11 server written from scratch in Rust.” According to Dehaes, 13 existing environments run under it, from Enlightenment to Xfce.

The catch, as The Register notes, is that both projects appear to rely on coding assistants. Isene writes elsewhere on the Frame page:

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“When something breaks or I want a feature, I turn to my buddy Claude and describe the itch.”

The Register also points to CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files in yserver’s GitHub repository, along with commits from OpenAI Codex and GitHub Copilot.

Other X11 projects still moving

A third newer X11 server, Phoenix, was mentioned back in January. It is written in Zig. While its original Git repo appears to be down and its homepage has not been updated in a couple of years, the GitHub repository remains active, with commits as recently as three weeks before publication. The Register says it has no information on whether developer dec05eba uses LLM tools.

There is also XLibre, a fork of the X.org server announced a year ago. The project has attracted support including Devuan, and multiple distros and operating systems now include or support it. Development remains brisk, with 27 releases so far.

By comparison, Wayback — a display server layer intended to let full X11 desktop environments run on a pure-Wayland stack — has moved more slowly. The Register says it has seen only three releases, with the latest six months ago.

Arcan is aiming much higher

Beyond replacement X11 servers, The Register highlights Arcan as the most ambitious project in this area. In June, developer Björn Ståhl marked its 10-year anniversary with a blog post titled Arcan: 10 Years of Online Obscurity.

Arcan is more than a display server. It includes:

• the A12 display protocol
• an Arcan display server comparable to X.org
• the Cat9 shell
• the Durden desktop environment
• the Pipeworld zooming user interface
• xarcan for running X11 apps
• Waybridge for running Wayland client apps

The project also supports networked media streams and remote 3D acceleration, including for gaming. The tradeoff is complexity: a steep learning curve, less mature tooling, and weaker interoperability with existing systems. Still, The Register argues that Arcan stands apart because it is both highly ambitious and, as far as it can tell, developed by a tiny team without coding assistants.