A new X11 server in Rust appears — just as Wayland finally won the desktop

A ground-up X11 server, arriving after the war was decided

Yserver is an X11 server written from scratch in Rust — not a fork of Xorg, a new implementation. The README is concrete about what it does and what it refuses to do. It runs full MATE, XFCE and Cinnamon desktops, plus FVWM3, e16 and wmaker; it's been tested on AMD, Intel, Apple Silicon via Asahi, Snapdragon X1, and VMs; it implements 19 X11 extensions including Composite, DRI3, GLX and RANDR; it even works under NVIDIA's proprietary driver, minus some NVIDIA-specific features. The trade is explicit: it deliberately drops "multiple screens, non-TrueColor visuals, indirect GLX, the DDX driver ABI, endian-swapped clients, and so on" as legacy baggage.

That trade is where the thread immediately catches fire.

"Don't call it legacy because you don't use it"

For people who use the dropped features daily, calling them legacy is the whole problem.

"Looked nice, but crossed it off as soon as I saw that, as I'm working on a project currently that uses many screens. Can't just call a thing legacy because you and the people you directly know aren't using it" — an engineer running a multi-screen project

And the deeper reason some still want X11 at all is the one feature Wayland walked away from:

"I really wish people gave a damn about the 'gui over the network' problem x11 solves. Wayland drops this use case entirely so we're pretty much universally stuck with vnc" — le-mark

A constructive counter came from someone thinking about how to shrink the server further: move work to the client.

"I'd be interested in seeing how much more could be shaved off by doing things like offering an xcb/xlib shim that moves more functionality to the client side (e.g. server-side font support are trivial to move client-side)" — vidarh, a consultant doing devops and software architecture

The other fight: is this a project or a prompt?

The sharper split isn't X11-vs-Wayland — it's whether Yserver is engineering or an LLM artifact dressed as one. The skeptics were blunt.

"Projects like this really need to disclose how much ai was used. Otherwise my default assumption is it's slop, which would be a bummer if someone carefully crafted this with some light ai assistance" — kennywinker

"I'm really just tired of all these 'projects' that in the end just turn out to be Claude… Everyone with an API key can achieve the same if you hand them the prompt. This is like committing build artifacts to version control" — hypfer

But someone actually compiled and ran it, which is the data point the slop accusation lacks:

"I compiled it on Debian 13 and it works with XFCE4. Granted, things are a bit squirrely until you disable the compositor… I ended up launching it from a TTY. This was on an AMD mini PC I had lying around" — Venn1, who does audio/video work at InterfacingLinux.com

The irony nobody missed

The quietest comment landed hardest: the would-be X successors only show up now that the fight is over. "Something like XLibre or Phoenix would have been taken very seriously 5 years ago," one reader observed. A working X11 server in Rust is genuinely interesting as a demonstration that the protocol can be reimplemented lean. As a bet on the desktop, it arrives a decade late — and the network-transparency crowd it might have served is exactly the constituency its "legacy baggage" cuts leave behind.