PeppermintOS announced on 21 September that its upcoming ISO refreshes move from Xorg to XLibre, the maintained fork of the X11 server. The project also says it has no immediate plans to move to Wayland, and that it is watching how XFCE handles supporting both.
What XLibre is, in the project’s own words
Development on original Xorg stalled once organisations shifted focus to Wayland, so XLibre exists to maintain, modernise and clean up the X11 codebase with security fixes and bug fixes for people who prefer X11. It is built as a drop-in replacement for xorg-server and tries not to break desktop environments, window managers or old drivers. PeppermintOS says testing so far looks fine, and that the visible experience of the nightly build is identical to the current stable release.
There is a footnote about the build itself: this is the project’s first Debian-based ISO built without Debian’s traditional live-build tooling, starting from mmdebstrap instead. The Devuan edition has moved to XLibre too.
The precedent is not encouraging
Artix tried this first. Its April 2026 ISO made XLibre the default X server, and by August it had switched back to Xorg after what its own news page calls an unusually high volume of XLibre-related bug reports. What followed is the part worth reading: backlash from XLibre over the reversal, harassment of a long-time Artix developer who had made XLibre work on the distribution, and his resignation. Artix no longer packages XLibre at all, and existing users are told they will be moved back to Xorg packages, with the third-party repository as an unsupported alternative.
So the fork now has one distribution arriving and one departing within the same year. PeppermintOS’s announcement does not address the Artix episode, and says only that its own testing looks fine.
My read
The case for XLibre is straightforward for anyone with a working X11 setup and old hardware or drivers: a maintained server that receives security fixes beats an unmaintained one, and “drop-in” is the right design goal. The case against is now about people as much as code. Artix’s departure was driven by bug volume and then by how the project handled the criticism, and a fork that burns the packagers who integrate it will struggle to hold a place in distributions, however clean the code turns out to be.
What PeppermintOS has going for it is a smaller, simpler target. If you run their stable release, the shift arrives with a routine ISO refresh and the interface stays the same. If you are an X11 holdout with a machine that will not run Wayland properly, this is a distribution to watch and the nightly is up for testing now. What is not yet answered is whether XLibre ships security fixes on a cadence a distribution can depend on. That is the question I would want answered before trusting it on a machine that faces the internet.
Sources: the PeppermintOS project post and the Artix Linux news page