GhostBSD to ditch Xorg for XLibre as Red Hat's Wayland crusade leaves X11 fans out in the cold

GhostBSD plans to move to the XLibre X11 server to better support its flagship MATE desktop – as well as Xfce and the new Gershwin. Eric Turgeon, maintainer of the easy-to-install graphical GhostBSD distribution of FreeBSD, has published a blog post to explain Why GhostBSD is Moving to XLibre. In the post, Turgeon talks about several reasons for the move, including the stated plans that GTK 5 will probably drop support for X11. We looked at that threat – or promise, depending on how you look at it – back in 2022. Turgeon also discusses the relatively slow development of the MATE desktop, related subjects such as Wayland and systemd, as well as the new GNUstep-based Gershwin desktop. Although these are mostly Linux tools and technologies, they still affect FreeBSD as well. There's a greater point about this that is often overlooked: the controversies, arguments, and schisms that happen in the Linux world have wider ramifications, in a world that the Linux folks tend to forget even exists. In the post, Turgeon expresses concerns over the directions of modern Linux development: In recent years, Wayland has gained more ground. It seems everything tied to Red Hat is being forced to go with Wayland. I've been concerned about the state of Xorg not making progress. With the state of MATE and Wayland, I've been cautious and not thrilled at the idea of Wayland trying to kill X11. There was hope at one point that Xorg would get improvements, but that hope was crushed fast. I won't get into the story. I think everyone reading this will know what happened. We covered the story to which Turgeon alludes as it unfolded. In early June 2025, Enrico Weigelt, who often uses his company name of Metux IT Consult online, announced the new Xlibre X11 server, forked from the old X.org server. We had covered some of Weigelt's work previously, but even before the Reg FOSS desk joined the team, The Register had reported on his sharing of conspiracy theories – and was told off by Linus Torvalds himself. Within weeks, two security updates for the X.org server followed. In that story, we linked to Linux news site Phoronix reporting that the X.org developers were busily reverting many dozens of code changes that Weigelt had submitted over the previous year. There was considerable discussion on the X.org Gitlab boards about Weigelt's changes. Undeterred, since then, Xlibre's Github Releases page records some 18 releases: the original xlibre-xserver is now up to version 25.0.0.21, and the following version 25.1 is up to release 25.1.2. The project also has a page entitled Are We XLibre Yet? listing projects with Xlibre: 13 with first-party support, and another 33 with third-party support, although there is considerable overlap and the list includes preliminary and work-in-progress efforts. There's even an experimental SteamOS version. There is no conspiracy here. What is happening is simpler. Thousands of companies, organizations, and individuals contribute to the development of Linux and its myriad related projects, which makes it very hard to try to outline any coherent direction. However, one backer is so big, and employs so many FOSS developers, that its efforts tend to outweigh any other single entity, and that is IBM's software subsidiary Red Hat. Sometimes its influence is quite direct, and sometimes less so – for instance, much of the cooperation between different desktops is coordinated by Freedesktop.org – its entry on Wikipedia includes a list of its efforts and initiatives, which since 2019 has included X.org itself. Originally called the X Desktop Group, Freedesktop was founded in 2000 by Havoc Pennington – who at the time worked for Red Hat. We are not implying that Red Hat tells Freedesktop what to do, or anything like that. Red Hat merely chooses what its products include, and what its staff work on. If the company decides that its paid-for flagship product will no longer include LibreOffice, or that it's redeploying people away from media and Bluetooth support, or that a forthcoming release will be Wayland-only, these things have repercussions far outside Red Hat and its products. It's only an indirect influence, not any kind of formal guidance or direct pressure. Even Red Hat-sponsored projects can go in other directions. For example, in 2017, Red Hat dropped Btrfs support from RHEL, and yet a couple of years later, Fedora 33 switched to it. Oracle Linux supports it, and more recently, AlmaLinux added support too. The people behind Freedesktop.org, on the other hand, do sometimes tell other projects how to behave – as, for example, with Hyprland. That's a separate issue, but the result of the fracas was that Hyprland is now considered a controversial project. As an example of indirect effects, if Red Hat directs its efforts away from some tool or subsystem, volunteer-driven projects using it can find themselves badly shorthanded. Without the efforts of some passionate, highly-motivated (perhaps, sometimes, obsessed) individuals, a lack of upstream corporate backing tends to result in slower development. In turn, that leads to a perception of neglect, obsolescence, or stagnancy. If GhostBSD does indeed switch to using Xlibre instead of FreeBSD's own Xorg port, this will be an interesting development. It doesn't grab the headlines so much, but FreeBSD powers a fair chunk of the Internet, including Netflix's video-stream servers. It's primarily a server OS, though, and it's not easy to configure as a graphical desktop system, although as we have reported, its foundation is working on it. In the meantime, the GhostBSD project is by far the easiest way to try out a graphical FreeBSD desktop system. So, although it might not have many users, it's disproportionately visible. If this goes ahead, it will be a small but significant win for the Xlibre project. The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware FreeBSD 15 trims legacy fat and revamps how OS is built Price of popularity: Linux Mint's success also means maintainer stress Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter 'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP This matters due to Weigelt's controversial views and positions. The Xlibre fork was one motivation behind the announcement of Wayback, a Wayland display server that reached version 0.3 just before the holiday season. Its leader's views make Xlibre controversial, as do those of the Ladybird browser we covered recently. That puts some people off, and encourages others. But that's politics for you. Bootnote If you're curious about FreeBSD as a desktop OS but you don't want to commit to installing either it or GhostBSD, we would be remiss if we didn't mention that there is also NomadBSD, a live system that runs directly from a USB key. ®