Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

Wayland is dominating the recent news about FOSS GUIs - even dignified elder Xfce's official support is getting close. However, X11 is very much not dead yet, and new developments keep appearing. Last week, Norwegian FOSS developer Geir Isene announced his all-new server for the venerable X11 display protocol. Its description is in the title of the announcement post: Frame - the first Linux Assembly X server. Isene explains his motivation thus: On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching... the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly." (This, for clarity, is extremely dry Norwegian humor. Writing your own X11 server in assembly language is the polar opposite of what most Unix developers would consider reasonable..." But there is a reason behind the decision, and you may already have guessed it.) Isene also has his own window manager, Tile; his own terminal emulator, Glass; and even his own shell, called Bare. He calls the whole stack CHasm - CHange to ASM. All the tools are standalone binaries, implemented in x86-64 assembly language, targeting Linux, with no external dependencies. To go with them, he also has a similarly compact suite of Rust-based tools as well, named FeO. It reminds us of the Suckless collection of extremely minimal, statically linked Linux apps, which once included a entire statically-linked Linux distro called Stali. Although Stali has been unmaintained for nearly a decade now, there are others: one current statically linked Linux distro is Oasis.) If you like a hyper-minimalist Linux setup, Isene's custom stack of tools sounds amazing - perhaps even too good to be true. (That's a hint, or what we gather fiction writers call foreshadowing.) yserver Remarkably enough, Frame is not the first new X11 server for Linux that has appeared recently. That distinction goes to yserver, which appeared last month. Developer Jos Dehaes describes it as a modern X11 server written from scratch in Rust." This also sounds good, especially if you're an admirer of Rust. We have started using a few Rust-based projects here in the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers. They tend to be small, fast, stable, and quite clean of legacy baggage. They offer a significant contrast with Electron-based ones. In terms of tech legacy baggage, they score very well on what sometime Reg contributor Verity Stob measured with the Stob Cruft index. Yserver looks impressively complete: for instance, Dehaes has a list of 13 existing environments that run fine under it, from Enlightenment to Xfce. But - there's always a but" - before you get too excited, there's a catch. Both Frame and yserver were built using LLM bots. (Vibe coded" feels too harsh for programs of this complexity, but some will apply it anyway.) So, although Isene says of Frame, I wrote my own in Assembly," further down the same page, he concedes: When something breaks or I want a feature, I turn to my buddy Claude and describe the itch." To be honest, for this staunchly AI-skeptical vulture, this means Isene didn't really write the CHasm programs himself: he presumably wrote a detailed spec, from which a bot generated code. This also arguably means he doesn't strictly own the software, but on that point, to his credit, he does not call it open source or free software: instead, he put it in the public domain under the Unlicense. There's less info about yserver development than Frame, but yserver's Github repository contains both CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md, and both OpenAI Codex and Github Copilot have commits in its history. Previously... There is also a third new X11 server, which we already mentioned back in January. That one is called Phoenix, and it's written in the relatively new Zig language. Phoenix's original Git repo seem to be down, and although the homepage is there, it hasn't been updated in a couple of years and doesn't mention Phoenix at all. Even so, the Github repo is active, with commits just three weeks ago at the time of writing. We have no information as to whether the developer, known only as dec05eba, is using any LLM tools to work on it. As well as all these, there is the XLibre fork of the X.org server, whose announcement we covered a year ago, followed by its gathing vocal endorsement, including Devuan. Multiple distros and OSes include or support XLibre. Development is active: the project has put out 27 releases so far. (XLibre development does seem to be happening significantly faster than the Wayback project, which appeared a month later. Wayback is a sort of Wayland display server" to enable entire X11 desktop environments to run on a pure-Wayland display stack. As far as we can see, there have only been three Wayback releases so far, and the last was six months ago.) Arcan Alongside whole new X11 servers, whatever they're written in (or how), there is also an active project that is far more technologically ambitious than all of them put together. The Arcan display server hit a significant anniversary in June, and developer Bjorn Stahl marked it with a blog post: Arcan: 10 Years of Online Obscurity. We wrote about the project back in 2022, in Lash#Cat9: A radical new Linux UI for keyboard warriors. That article focused on just part of the project, its shell Cat9. Cat9 is a shell in the sense of the Windows Shell: it's a user interface. Cat9 happens to be a command-line one, and it also contains quite a lot of what in traditional Unix terms would be a terminal emulator. Arcan is a lot more than that. Arcan covers a display protocol (called A12) and a display server (comparable to X.org). It includes a command-line shell (Cat9), but also a desktop environment called Durden. Durden isn't the only one: there's also a Zooming user interface (ZUI) called Pipeworld. So you can run X11 apps, Arcan has an X server called xarcan, and it can also run Wayland client apps over a module called Waybridge - a pun on weighbridge. Arcan is the sort of ambitous rethink of the Unix display stack we wanted to see - and which Wayland's developers didn't even think about, let alone attempt. Arcan doesn't just let programs open windows over the network like X11. Arcan lets networked computers send media streams to each other, and because it understands hardware 3D it enables remote 3D acceleration, for instance for network gaming. It integrates multitasking and 3D and media right into the Unix command line: shell commands can fade into the background while displaying grapical progress meters, or play media streams in the terminal, or multiple updating parallel zones of text output. There are multiple prices to pay for this, and they are formidable: in the learning curve, and the maturity of the tools, and in interoperability with existing solutions. Arcan really deserves wider attention. Its potential is amazing. It's also all hand-coded by a tiny team. As far as we can tell, there are no coding assistants here. This is the sort of thing the Linux world deserved, not some modest improvement to local 2D desktops that has taken nearly 20 years to reach minimal usability. (R)