// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
PeppermintOS Is Moving From Xorg to XLibre to Avoid Wayland
If you run a lightweight distro and you do not like the fact that Wayland will probably become the default, PeppermintOS has some news you should know about. It's switching its display server from the soon-to-be-retired Xorg to XLibre for its next round of ISO refreshes.
It may look like a sensible call as it keeps X11 alive and skips Wayland (for now). However, XLibre is one of the divisive projects in the Linux world right now. Choosing XLibre won't sit well with some people, at least.
In a recent blog, PeppermintOS announced it's shifting the display server from xorg-server to XLibre across its upcoming builds.
Reason is simple. Development on the original Xorg has stalled and most distributions have switched to Wayland. XLibre exists with the aim to keep maintaining, modernizing, and cleaning up the codebase for people who still prefer X11.
XLibre is built as a drop-in replacement for xorg, and it aims not to break standard desktop environments, window managers, or older drivers, and PeppermintOS says its testing so far has gone as expected.
PeppermintOS says it has no immediate plans to move to Wayland, pointing to XFCE's roadmap of supporting both Xorg and Wayland natively. Xfce is the default offering from PeppermintOS.
By the way, this is the project's first Debian-based ISO built without Debian's traditional live-build tools, moving instead to mmdebstrap, mirroring what PeppermintOS already did for its Devuan edition.
That Devuan build has also been updated to use XLibre and is close to community testing. A 64-bit Debian flagship nightly is already up for testing, and PeppermintOS expects a few rough edges in the build process itself.
Why? Because critics argue XLibre is more of a political fork than a technical one. Also, Xlibre has been in the news for some not-so-positive reasons.
XLibre is a fork of the X.Org server started in mid-2025 by Enrico Weigelt, who was the top commit contributor to Xorg in 2024. Weigelt was banned from freedesktop.org's GitLab around the time the fork went public.