Although Wayland has largely replaced Xorg, and most major Linux distributions and desktop environments have either already dropped support for the aging display protocol or are in the process of doing so, efforts to extend Xorg’s life or replace it with similar alternatives continue. Recent examples include projects such as XLibre Xserver and Wayback. And now, a new name is joining this group: Phoenix.

It is a new X server project that takes a fundamentally different approach to X11. Written entirely from scratch in the Zig programming language, it is not yet another fork of the Xorg codebase and does not reuse its legacy code. Instead, according to devs, Phoenix aims to show that the X11 protocol itself is not inherently obsolete and can be implemented in a simpler, safer, and more modern way.