Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/20/new_version_of_xorg_x11/

by em-bee • 1 year ago

25 23 1 year ago

em-bee9• 1 year ago

this has been marked as a duplicate before, but it's not. other articles are talking about the Xlibre project it's potential, etc.

this article talks about the effect of the fork on Xorg itself. which is a very different topic, and one that is worth talking about.

for example i remember the fork of GCC and how it affected its development processes. unlike GCC i doubt that Xlibre will be merged back, but it has an influence on Xorg nonetheless. what are your thoughts?

pvg• 1 year ago

Much of this article is about the same drama which is dupey by HN dupes algebra. Maybe it's worth talking about the effects when such effects occur meaningfully.

em-bee9• 1 year ago

ok, i suppose it is to early to tell whether the current flurry of activity on Xorg is just temporary or whether the effect will last.

unlike GCC, X11 is on the way to obsolescence. and so one question is if there is even a point to continued development. but i also have the sense that Xorg devs would want to prevent Xlibre from growing. and the only way to counteract that is increased activity to show that Xorg is still under active maintenance, because the calls to replace Xorg with Xlibre are already coming, not just from those involved in Xibre but from others who are unaware of the drama and just see that Xlibre is actively maintained while Xorg isn't anymore (in their eyes).

theandrewbailey• 1 year ago

I prefer using XFCE, which, despite their team's work, doesn't fully support Wayland yet. Whether it remains compatible with XLibre going forward is unclear, but it seems like XLibre will be the place for new X11 features and fixes.

em-bee9• 1 year ago

yes, well, maybe. for sure Xorg at this point is not the place for new features. but perhaps, if Xlibre does become sufficiently popular, new features will be ported back.

the ideal outcome would be for Xlibre to become a testing ground for new ideas, where the good ones make it back into Xorg. but the planned obsolescence creates a conflict of interest for Xorg developers, and i suspect that new features will only be accepted reluctantly just to prevent Xlibre from gaining ground.

however, there is another potential outcome, in that the development of wayland focuses more on solving problems that prevent people from switching to it. now that would be a real win.

jauntywundrkind2• 1 year ago

Was hoping this would go by unnoticed.

This dude is a hopeless weirdo, who mindlessly refactors for no real reason, and breaks stuff.

The insane conspiracy minded anti-big tech aspect is deeply disturbing. Replying to some of the most respectable food hard working nice people on the planet who have carried huge X subsystems forward for decades with love and care with just frothing madness. There aren't words for the scorn this insanity & batshit deserve.

This comment and first reply have some solid other discussion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44303328

I frelling love the reg, love me a good rag. It was intensely intensely disappointing to see they carrying so much water for this deeply problematic antisocial troublemaker.

em-bee9• 1 year ago

granted. the interesting question now is, why and how this will affect Xorg. at this point any hope for this to go unnoticed is lost, and how Xorg devs are responding will have a significant influence on how this will all play out.

throwaway73563• 1 year ago

There is a significant community for which these are not insane conspiracy theories, but real concerns. Just take anyone watching Lunduke or from anti-systemd/anti-Red-Hat/anti-woke distributions like OpenMandriva or Devuan and you will find many people welcoming this fork specifically because of that.

em-bee9• 1 year ago

i find the discussions of weigelts political opinions not really interesting. they will probably lead to his eventual downfall, but these discussions hide the real problem: that a significant group of people are unhappy with X11 support going away.

Xlibre may just be successful despite weigelts opinions (and maybe even attract some supporters because of them) and the only way for Xorg/wayland to counter the rise of Xlibre is to address the concerns and not to write off Xlibre because of weigelt.

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

If anyone's wondering if the above is true, but doesn't want to take the time to click the link and dig into the accusations and truths: It's mostly sophistry, accusing him of vague things that sound worse than they are. I.E. "defending WWII Germany" (which sounds like he's saying Nazis were the good guys, if you don't bother to read his actual posts.)

dsp_person• 1 year ago

from phoronix:

    Noted changes with XLibre 25.0 include:
    a) Xnamespace extension: a novel approach for isolating clients from different security domains (eg. containers) into separate X11 namespaces, where they can't hurt each other

that seems significant, I wonder why xorg hasn't implemented something like it so far.

znpy• 1 year ago

My understading is that contributions were being sabotaged by some Red Hat wayland fanatics that managed take over freedesktop.org and forcefully halt contributions to Xorg.

Otherwise we would probably have had this years ago.

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

Long live Xorg, I mean Xlibre

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44302650

The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502

em-bee9• 1 year ago

if you search for xlibre you'll find a dozen more.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

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