A Programmer Is Rebuilding a 40-Year-Old Computer System From Scratch

A developer named joske has released yserver, a new version of X11—a core piece of software that lets you use a desktop on Linux computers. What makes this notable is that joske wrote it completely from scratch, using a modern programming language called Rust, rather than updating the existing version that's been around since the 1980s.

To understand why this matters, you need to know what X11 is. It's the invisible system that draws windows on your screen, handles your mouse and keyboard, and lets programs talk to the graphics part of your computer. Most Linux desktops have relied on the same X11 code for decades. That code was written in a language called C, and over the years, security vulnerabilities have been discovered in it repeatedly—bugs that let hackers take control of your system.

Rust is different. It's a newer programming language designed to prevent certain types of errors before they can become security holes. An X11 server has a special challenge: it runs with special privileges (meaning it has power to do almost anything on your system) and it receives commands from many different applications. That's a combination that historically attracts hackers. Rust's design helps prevent the kinds of attacks that have affected X11 before.

The old X11 system was originally designed in 1984 for a world of networked computers that looked completely different from today. It has been replaced in many places by a newer system called Wayland. But X11 hasn't disappeared. Some people still use older software that only works with X11. Others run remote desktops or specialized tools that Wayland doesn't yet support. So X11 persists—not because it's ideal, but because millions of users still need it.

Joske's approach keeps the X11 protocol (the language that programs speak to the display server) but throws out the decades of old code underneath. This is ambitious work. An X11 server has to support a long list of features and extensions that thousands of applications depend on. Documentation published in June 2026 shows that yserver is being built to work not just on Linux but also on BSD systems—FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. These systems have smaller developer communities and have stuck with X11 longer than Linux did.

Whether this project will actually replace the existing X11 system depends on how much of that feature list yserver ends up supporting. The documentation doesn't spell out exactly what's working and what isn't yet. The project appears to be in early stages of development, not ready for most people to use as their main display server today. For anyone thinking about switching to yserver, that's an important caveat.

The choice of Rust for this job makes sense from a security standpoint. It's the same language choice that other projects have made when building security-sensitive software over the past several years—including parts of the Linux kernel itself. The memory-safety guarantees that Rust provides are worth the effort for software that runs with high privileges and handles untrusted input.

What happens next will depend on how thoroughly joske builds out the system. The hard part of any X11 server is getting graphics acceleration right—the path that lets games and professional software draw 3D graphics quickly. That's where the real work lies, and also where we'll know whether this becomes something people actually use or remains a technical curiosity. For now, it's worth keeping an eye on—especially for anyone who cares about the long-term future of Linux and BSD desktops.