Xorg

2 Articles

yserver screenshot demonstrating compiz comptibility

Why Not Yserver? It’s Xserver, But Rust-y.

June 14, 2026 by 21 Comments

If you’re not into Wayland as a display manager, it seems like your options are slowly dwindling. Xorg isn’t exactly a hotbed of activity, and the one fork everyone knows about is best known as a political lightning rod. Luckily, Rust developers can apparently never see a tool without pulling it into their heavily oxidized bucket of crabs, so we now have another option: the creatively named yserver, released under the MIT license by [joske].

The name, yserver, for the record, is just a placeholder name, but we rather like the simple logic of “Y comes after X” — sure, you could call it X12, but that could imply continuity, and this is a clean break. It’s also not a full reimplementation of the huge, sprawling mess that Xorg has become over the decades. It can’t launch multiple screens and thus lacks full multi-monitor support. So, for now, it may be too bare-bones for some people’s use cases.

As it uses Vulkan, it is limited to relatively modern hardware, but has been tested on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple chips. The target kernel is good old Linux, but the docs do cover compiling for FreeBSD; just be aware that that’s very much a secondary target. FreeBSD users are probably used to that, though.

On Linux, a standalone DRM/KMS yserver can successfully run not just window managers but full desktops — specifically MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE, as they’re not on the Wayland bandwagon. It even supports Compiz, in case you missed the cube and wiggly window animations. You can also use yserver via Xwayland or even Xorg. Speaking of Xorg, [joske] has run the X.Org X Test Suite (xts5) against this proposed successor, and it currently scores 66.2%, which seems pretty good considering the project explicitly does not plan to copy all of Xorg’s functionality.

Aside from multiple screens, one thing that would have been neat to see is support for the Asterinas rust-based Linux-compatible kernel — though if that project achieves full Linux compatibility, that may be a non-issue. Even if you aren’t an oxidization enthusiast, you might find reasons to be happy to see more competition in the display-manager market — after all, Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User. If Xorg really is destined to the slow death critics predict, perhaps yserver could cover the holdouts.

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Welcome To The Year Of The Diagonal Linux Desktop

December 31, 2023 by 73 Comments

Sometimes you come across one of those ideas that at first appear to have to be some kind of elaborate joke, but as you dig deeper into it, it begins to make a disturbing kind of sense. This is where the idea of diagonally-oriented displays comes to the fore. Although not a feature that is generally supported by operating systems, [xssfox] used the xrandr (x resize and rotate) function in the Xorg display server to find the perfect diagonal display orientation to reach a happy balance between the pros and cons of horizontal and vertical display orientations.

As displays have gone wide-and-wider over the past decades, some people rotate their displays 90 degrees to get more height instead, which is beneficial when reading documents, yet terrible when watching most video content, barring vertical videos, so you either need more than one display, keep rotating, or settle on an optimal intermediate compromise. Interestingly, this wasn’t found at a straight 45°, but instead at 22° of rotation for [xssfox]’s 21:9 ratio ‘ultra-wide’ display. The xrandr settings for other display ratios can be easily calculated using the provided formula and associated JS-based tool.

So what are the advantages here? You get to keep long line lengths in IDEs, while gaining more vertical pixels in some areas. As disadvantages it only works with Xorg at this time, it’s a terrible setup for people prone to vertigo, and it’s decidedly hostile towards top-of-display mounted webcams. Yet with others picking up on this new trend, Linux might just corner the diagonal desktop.