After six months of development, the project XLibre 25.1.0 has been released. This project is a fork of the X.Org Server, and the first release of the XLibre XServer 25.1.0 branch is considered to be of beta quality for testing purposes. Two more beta versions are planned to be released before declaring the branch stable in release 25.1.3.
The developer of the project is Enrico Weigelt, who has made a significant number of changes to the X-server. Before the fork, Enrico had contributed approximately 1600 changes to the X.Org Server and more than 1200 changes are included in the fork codebase. Enrico is also the maintainer of the AMD FCH GPIO and VIRTIO GPIO drivers in the Linux kernel, as well as the maintainer of Xnest.
The decision to create the fork was a result of disagreements with the policies of the X.Org maintainers, which led to stagnant development. Enrico advocated for active development and a cleanup of the X server. However, the maintainers were dissatisfied with Enrico as some of his changes caused problems such as regressions, ABI violations, and build failures. Enrico also accused Red Hat of deliberately slowing down the X server development.
Some changes in the release of XLibre XServer 25.1 include:
- Added support for the libseat library and the seatd background process, offering session management capabilities and access to shared input and output devices.
- Improved support for proprietary NVIDIA drivers, including older branches like 340, 390, and 470.
- The Xfbdev X server has returned, using a device-provided framebuffer on Linux.
- Added support for the Cygwin platform.
- Added the ability to set the DPI property in relation to different monitors.
- Discontinued support for the outdated DGA 1.0 protocol in the dga driver.