Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/07/14/frame-a-new-x11-server-implemented-directly-in-assembly/5270498

Publish Date: 2026-07-14 06:37:00

Wayland is dominating the recent news about FOSS GUIs – even dignified elder Xfce’s official support is getting close. However, X11 is very much not dead yet, and new developments keep appearing.

Last week, Norwegian FOSS developer Geir Isene announced his all-new server for the venerable X11 display protocol. Its description is in the title of the announcement post: Frame – the first Linux Assembly X server. Isene explains his motivation thus:

“On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly.”

(This, for clarity, is extremely dry Norwegian humor. Writing your own X11 server in assembly language is the polar opposite of what most Unix developers would consider “reasonable…” But there is a reason behind the decision, and you may already have guessed it.)

Isene also has his own window manager, Tile; his own terminal emulator, Glass; and even his own shell, called Bare. He calls the whole stack CHasm — CHange to ASM. All the tools are standalone binaries, implemented in x86-64 assembly language, targeting Linux, with no external dependencies. To go with them, he also has a similarly compact suite of Rust-based tools as well, named Fe₂O₃.

It reminds us of the Suckless collection of extremely minimal, statically linked Linux apps, which once included a entire statically-linked Linux distro called Stali. Although Stali has been unmaintained for nearly a decade now, there are others: one current statically linked Linux distro is Oasis.)

If you like a hyper-minimalist Linux setup, Isene’s custom stack of tools sounds amazing – perhaps even too good to be true. (That’s a hint, or what we gather fiction writers call foreshadowing.)