There is a New X11 Server, Written in Rust, With the Help of AI

Publish Date: 2026-06-13 00:12:00

If you have been keeping an eye on the display server situation on Linux, you know where things are headed. Wayland is taking over as distros are dropping X11 sessions one by one.

So naturally, someone went ahead and built a brand new X11 server from scratch. Developer Jos Dehaes recently went public with yserver, a new MIT-licensed X11 display server written entirely in Rust.

Now, this will either impress you or make you shout “Clanker!” but this project was built with significant help from Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent. The repo has both a CLAUDE.md and an AGENTS.md file in plain sight, making this a proper vibe-coded project.

What is it?

Well, yserver isn’t aiming to clone X.Org, rather it is meant to be a practical X11 server for modern Linux that focuses on what real desktop environments and applications actually need today.

Everything that has accumulated over decades and serves no purpose in today’s computing environment has been dropped. That includes the DDX driver ABI, multiple X11 screen support, non-TrueColor legacy visuals, indirect GLX, and endian-swapped clients.

Under the hood, yserver drives hardware directly through DRM/KMS and Vulkan, skipping the usual middleware layers that sit between the display server and the GPU. This means a more direct path to the hardware with fewer moving parts sitting in the middle.

According to the project’s documentation, yserver uses libseat for seat management, which ensures it can run without root and the core is deliberately single-threaded, resulting in predictable protocol behavior.

What can it do?

Compiz running under yserver. Video courtesy of Jos Dehaes.

Currently, yserver can already boot into MATE, Xfce, and Cinnamon sessions, and it has also been tested with window managers like FVWM3, e16, and Window Maker. FreeBSD support is on the roadmap, but work on it has not started yet.

Hardware coverage is wider than you might expect. In…

Source