We are shifting the display server Xorg over to Xlibre for our upcoming PeppermintOS ISO refreshes. What this does is, handles basic graphical rendering, window drawing, and input devices (keyboard/mouse) under the X11 protocol.
The reason Xlibre exists is, development on original Xorg is stalled since some organizations shifted focus to Wayland. XLibre was created to maintain, modernize, and clean up the original Xorg codebase adding security updates, bug fixes, and feature improvements for users who prefer X11 over Wayland. XLibre is created to be a drop-in replacement for xorg-server, it tries to not break standard desktop environments, window managers, or old drivers, and so far in the current testing of things seems to be working as expected .
The Wayland question…..we have no immediate plans to transition PeppermintOS to Wayland for the foreseeable future. Looking at XFCE’s current development roadmap, the desktop environment team seems to be leaning into a balanced approach of supporting both Wayland and X natively.
If you have some spare time and want to see where we are heading, our latest 64-bit Debian flagship nightly build is available for testing at https://nightly.peppermintos.org/deb64/flagship/
When you boot into this updated ISO, you can expect updated core packages and a fresh Linux kernel and the backend shift to XLibre. On the surface, the user interface and overall experience remain identical to our current stable release.
This is also our very first Debian-based ISO built without relying on Debian’s traditional live-build tools. Just like with Devuan we have migrated our build system to start directly from mmdebstrap rather than debootstrap, mirroring the architecture we built for our Devuan edition. We expect there might be a few rough edges or minor bugs in the build process itself your feedback here would be super helpful.
Our Devuan build has also been updated to use XLibre as its display server. We are currently finishing up a few final fixes on that image, and we will announce it for community testing as soon as it is ready.
Thank you all for your continued support, testing, and feedback. Please jump into the forums or chat channels to let us know if you run into any issues or have questions about the transition.
Update Sep 23 2026 – The PepDevuan builds are posted for testing:
https://nightly.peppermintos.org/dev64/flagship/
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I believe in individualism and see where the linux community is being railroaded to accept core architcture across the board of iso releases. Anybody who codes systems that do not use systemd and uses open codebases such as xlibre is a hero in my book. I also see how some linux OS’s are actually a honeytrap which I believe mx linux is as an example. The devs there will fix absolutely ANY problem for any hardware but also push wayland and will actively harrass and shadowban you if you disagree with anything at all they say. IOW, they claim to be doing it for free but I have actually witnessed stripe.com attached to their repos via noscript. Plus their moderators never change. A little bit off base but one must understand that as the push to move from windows to linux, this will automatically create those (nwo crowd) who would take advantage of the everyday user’s gullibilty to simply accept whatever’s released just because it works. Security IS privacy. PERIOD. Break privacy and your “security” is thus rendered null. Ergo individualism is paramount. Xlibre negates an attack vector so I wholeheartedly support it. Full Stop!
The biggest problem with Wayland is the license it’s under, in my opinion. Wayland is licensed under MIT, and this is the same thing the original X windowing system was licensed under. This ultimately killed the project, due to a massive surplus of mutually exclusive proprietary forks. It’s one of the things that contributed to the fracturing of the Unix ecosystem. Unless they move to GPL, there is no way to ensure this doesn’t happen to Wayland also.
Excellent a small step but a big step for gpl license