A one-man X server fork created by Enrico Weigelt (metux) the same morning his freedesktop.org account was banned, after years of his 800+ commits being ignored or broken. 'History repeats' was his first message: it is the same story as XFree86, the project X.Org replaced.
Fork of the X.Org X server aiming at better driver support and a cleaner codebase, including removal of deprecated features and support for modern graphics hardware. Where X.Org is committee-maintained and conservative, Xlibre is a single-person project with aggressive release cadence and direct community contributions via GitHub instead of GitLab.
X.Org is the display server that has run Unix workstations for three decades, famously maintained by a handful of elderly volunteers on infrastructure owned by Red Hat. Enrico Weigelt, known as metux, started contributing to the X server in January 2024, and over the next year and a half pushed 806 commits: driver fixes, refactoring, and modernization of the server's ancient codebase. He was never a maintainer, and he says his patches were repeatedly closed without explanation - a claim the X.Org Foundation disputes, saying his code was merged where appropriate and broken where it was not. What is certain: on the morning of June 6, 2025, his freedesktop.org account was banned, his merge requests were deleted, and his account page returned only 'This user is blocked'. The Register confirmed the ban days later.
Hours after the ban, the Xlibre repository appeared with the tagline 'Together, we'll make X great again' and the first release shipped two weeks later, titled 25.0.0.0 'Summer Solstice'. Weigelt framed it in exactly the terms of the project's own history: 'History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org'. The free-software world saw the symmetry immediately - X.Org itself was founded when the XFree86 license changed and the community forked, and now the same cycle played out with a ban instead of a license change. Xlibre continues in 2026 with a stable 25.1 series, adopted by a few distributions, while Weigelt's second fork, Libre-WD-40, applies the same one-man approach to the Git source control system.
metux begins contributing to the X.Org X server, eventually totaling 806 commits.
metux is banned from freedesktop.org; his account reads 'This user is blocked' and his merge requests are deleted.
The Xlibre fork is created the same day.
The Register reports on the ban.
Xlibre 25.0.0.0 'Summer Solstice' is released.
Stable 25.1 series reaches 25.1.9.
“History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org.”
“Jokes on Twitter about closing metux's merge requests.”
The ban turned a little-known contributor into a press-worthy founder overnight. Xlibre has roughly 4.7k GitHub stars, a small distribution footprint, and a stable release series - enough to be an irritant and an insurance policy for X.Org, but not yet a threat. Its long-term significance may be as the trigger for the second X-org story: Weigelt's Git fork, Libre-WD-40, spun out of the same one-man maintenance philosophy.