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.
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