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Those of you that have 5+ on the tag, do you think it would be appropriate to point it as a synonym to ?

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X11 and X.org are two different concepts. While an overwhelming majority of questions are about X11 as implemented by X.org, there are a few questions about other implementations. Furthermore X.org may one day no longer be the de facto standard X11 implementation (remember XFree86?), so I don't think we should lock ourselves to it.

I'm aware that X.org's overwhelming domination makes this difficult, but we should strive to use on questions about X11 in general and on questions about the X.org implementation specifically. This is similar to the distinction between (which is implicit on all questions on this site) and , or between and .

For example:

  • How do I minimize a window from the command line?
  • How do I make my graphics card work?
  • Keyboard remapping
  • OpenGL acceleration

There are undoubtedly many gray areas.

There are surely a lot of questions with the wrong tag right now, but we should try to get it right most of the time.

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  • I had thought that XFree86 -> Xorg was just a name change, but I notice now it is actually a fork, even if XFree86 is dormant. And of course, point taken on the difference between protocol and implementation.
    – goldilocks
    Commented Apr 29, 2013 at 17:17
  • Desktop X servers are not the only ones implementing the X protocol, nor the only thing related to X11 even on platforms where xorg is the dominant X desktop implementation (think XDMCP, X11 authentication, X11 extensions, security, ssh X11 forwarding, vnc servers, Xephyr/Xnest, x11vnc, xtox...)
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Commented May 6, 2013 at 14:45

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