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The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y agoScrew redhat and microsoft, they have destroyed linux (gnome/systemd/secure(:clown:) boot/linux foundation) x11 works on all my machines, wayland and gnome don't
- throwaway1482 1y agoWell-known developer Enrico Weigelt just forked the X server from freedesktop.org after getting the boot [0]. [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/?sort=created_date&state=closed&first_page_size=20 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests... [1] https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/commits/xlibre/prepare/ https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/commits/xlibre/prepare/
- chrismorgan 1y ago“Getting the boot” is rather vague. Is there any more information anywhere, background, &c.? My general impression (quite possibly incorrect) was that X.Org Server is largely treated as “done”, making only bugfixes and such these days.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- JimDabell 1y agoFrom the readme: > That fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to elimitate competition of their own products. (classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics) > This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.
- hello_computer 1y ago> moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.
- dralley 1y agoX did not "just work" for me 10 years ago, and neither is Wayland "still full of headaches and breakages" I've had no substantial problems because of Wayland in the last, like, 5 years.
- blueflow 1y agoNvidia, vmxgfx. I would run wayland if i could.
- mariusor 1y ago> I would run wayland if i could. You can if you stop buying nvidia. The problem with missing drivers is principally the fault of the hardware vendor not of the kernel community.
- blueflow 1y agoYou know what runs on these platforms? Xorg.
- mariusor 1y agoPerfectly true. What I was getting at is that you should direct your frustration to the correct place: not with the efforts of wayland and kernel devs but with the stubbornness of the hardware vendors that don't want to make their code public, and in the case of nvidia, (or) use the same driver building blocks that the kernel community recommended.
- ZekeSulastin 1y agoThe project readme has some thoughts about why X.Org is treated as done and why the dev forked; I think I get why the OP didn’t link that instead. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/tree/xlibre/master https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/tree/xlibre/master
- moron4hire 1y agoI don't understand why the link is to the commit list for a branch and not to the repo home page, unless OP was intentionally trying to have people avoid reading the README. The README contains a minor political rant that primarily complains about corporate influence but also takes a shot at DEI. The CoC page was intentionally left up with just the content "404". Reading between the lines, it sounds like toxicity all around.
- krautsauce 1y ago[flagged]
- bitwize 1y agoIt's abandonware. None of the grown-ups in the Linux graphics space are interested in maintaining it beyond the minimum necessary. I suppose new features could be added to Xorg, but anyone who actually knows something about the graphics pipeline is 100% committed to Wayland, so it won't be done. And Enrico's code was apparently so shitty and disruptive he's earned himself a ban from Freedesktop.org. Or is that because he associated himself with Lunduke?
- mrweasel 1y agoThat dude had a crazy amount of patches ready to go. I don't have the technical skills to judge if the patches are any good, but that's an impressive amount of work. I'd be a little concerned that this is just one person doing the work, but we'll see if others join in.
- toenail 1y agoI hope so. I've tried to use wayland more than a decade ago, it was unable to replace xorg. Again last year, same story, and we get told that it's our fault because we need to adapt our workflows to wayland. I chose Linux because I get to choose how I work.
- themaninthedark 1y agoExactly. I came to Linux because Microsoft keeps changing; correct way to do things, configuration files/locations all while deciding to shove ads and tracking down our throats.
- ranger_danger 1y agoNobody is forcing you to use wayland, though
- jeroenhd 1y agoThe MR that caused the drama that caused the fork to happen complained about this author doing tons of work to tons of legacy code with no direct user-facing benefit without testing his changes properly. From the sentiment of the discussion I gather this isn't the first time either. I think trying to improve the quality of such old code bases is good and "don't touch it in case something breaks" has caused more problems than it solved, but in this case the lack of testing caused X to die when someone runs xrandr. Not exactly a vague use case. Large restructuring work and taking care of tech debt is good, but it should go along with diligent testing. Until all the work is done, I don't think this will be a very stable alternative to X.org. I also don't think many people will follow this guy to the new project because the comments on the MR seems very "this guy versus everyone else". Even if the fork stabilizes, that's just where the journey begins. The X.org system interacts with tons of other systems (the kernel and GPU drivers, among others), so that work need to be kept up with. At the same time, developing all of the new features the dev wants to add will be pretty useless unless applications start making use of them, and they're not going to if the project remains small. If the anti-Wayland people unite behind this project and maintain their own X fork, there may be promise in this fork. But looking at the history, this is more likely to become another X12/Y11, or maybe a Mir if he can get a distro to back him.
- sspiff 1y agoIs there any discussion about him being removed from the project on a mailing list or some other channel? I can't find a "why" in the handful of PRs I opened.
- ck45 1y agoThere’s some drama in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797
- cwillu 1y agoWow: “xrandr doesn't work anymore on xorg-git” “I do not think this should be specifically on you, it is not unreasonable to expect that the author of a change tries their change before even submitting it upstream.” does not give a warm fuzzy feeling about the author of the at-fault patch leading a fork.
- DarkmSparks 1y agoIt happens. No one writes bug free code. e.g. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/2008 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
- micw 1y agoI think it's not the one to blame who broke this but those who implemented everything all the time without adding any tests. Xorg has quite a large codebase but almost no automated tests.
- cwillu 1y agoSo we agree that the maintainer is at fault: he wanted to change things and not have to thoroughly test his changes by doing the boring work of adding test coverage to the modified area.
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- Tomte 1y agoOh, it’s the vaccines are a "human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race“ guy from LKML!
- cosnenc 1y agoYup. https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccine_smackdown/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccin...
- AHTERIX5000 1y agoThe more I read MR discussions regarding this the less I want to use the forked version. Not that anyone is going to ship it anyway.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ibotty 1y agoWell-known as in notorious, right?
- jubalfh 1y agoprecisely.
- felipec 1y agoWrong. The fork was planned since a long time ago.
- jubalfh 1y agojust to be sure, the “well-known developer enrico weigelt” here means “a well-known bona fide german fascist enrico weigelt”.
- msgodel 1y agoKeep calling normal things people like or need fascism and you'll find yourself surrounded by legitimate fascists.
- jubalfh 1y agowell, some time ago i had a deeper look at his social media activity (including such niche things like devuan mailing lists or facebook), and that's my conclusion; and it's really not just because of the extremely stupid anti-vaxxer views he pushes.
- fithisux 1y ago[flagged]
- ahartmetz 1y agoWhy though? From what I've seen, the X protocol serialization is very simple, so it wouldn't solve any actually existing problem.
- fithisux 1y agoHave you seen this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_(software) They proposed to replace the transport layer with Protocol Buffers.
- account42 1y agoMir is the definition of NIH syndrome, i.e. an example of what not to do.
- ahartmetz 1y agoMir had an important thing going for it: Much faster progress towards replacing X11 on the desktop with all its features. It took several years after the failure of Mir for Wayland to become really practical. That said, I'm not sure if Mir would have been a good thing in the long term, mostly because of Canonical's control over it.
- fithisux 1y agoI agree.
- nikanj 1y agoWhy? Well, the existing protocol is 40+ years old, widely used and seriously battle hardened. The new one would be brand new and therefore infinitely better according to basic open source logic
- naikrovek 1y ago[flagged]
- stuaxo 1y agoIt's that time of decade again.
- spacial 1y ago[flagged]
- downrightmike 1y agostart x
- firesteelrain 1y agoNever coded, made a change or updated X11. It always just works. But reading this thread that spawned some of the feelings around the ‘fragile’ codebase sounds like it is really hard to work on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797
- fp64 1y agoThis is hilarious, can totally understand the fork and will take a look
- firesteelrain 1y agoEnrico seems like a prolific maintainer but also a frustrated one.
- const_cast 1y agoFrom what I've seen he hasn't actually addressed any bugs or features in xorg... ever. I'm not sure if that even grants the title of "maintainer". Shuffling code around is fun and easy, but not necessarily productive.
- firesteelrain 1y agoHe is regarded as “most active Xorg developer” https://youtu.be/iwaaSatk0pI?si=imqGgETnkou_uZUz https://youtu.be/iwaaSatk0pI?si=imqGgETnkou_uZUz
- const_cast 1y agoYeah dumping a bunch of commits that do nothing might be considered "active" by some people. I wouldn't consider it active.
- firesteelrain 1y ago
- bluGill 1y agoHave fun - there is a reason everone on freedesktop.org went to wayland more than a decade ago though.
- e844dbe8fb 1y agoBecause they're paid by Red Hat to make the Linux desktop unusable? We know.
- GabrielTFS 1y agoCan someone explain what's the big idea with that ? I keep seeing conspiracy theories about how Red Hat is sabotaging the Linux desktop on purpose, but I would quite honestly like to see an explanation as to *why* Red Hat would do that.
- bmacho 1y agoUbuntu was winning on Desktop and they had to come up with something. And they did. They are following the EEE strategy, are actively trying to replace and undermine everything with tightly-coupled, in-house, break often technology. (In the meantime Canonical gave up, so there is no real need to destroy the desktop experience further further.) (edit: of course Canonical was trying to control Debian in the meantime, so it's not like they are the Champion of Open Source here, just the underdog)
- voxadam 1y agoForgive me, I'm not an expert when it comes to windowing systems but wasn't Wayland started by basically all the then current head devs of xorg? Isn't that a tacit admission my the people that know best that the project they'd dedicated years if not decades of their lives to had reached a point where further development was untenable? Beyond the above mentioned tacit admissions, didn't nearly every major active dev on the xorg team state explicitly via various emails, blog posts, and conference talks that they saw no reasonable way forward as a matter of tech when it came to the now 21 year old xorg source, now 34 year old XFree86 source, and 41+ year old protocol model that is X11? All that said, I wish the best of luck to the X11Libre team on their endeavors.
- homebrewer 1y agoThere is no team, it's a one man show, and the split is caused by personality conflict between the author and the rest of the xorg team that doesn't feel that simply shuffling code around without putting actual hard work justifies frequent ABI breakage that leaves users with a broken graphics system. Read this for more info: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760#note_2631460 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760#no... https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 I'll pass.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- davidgerard 1y agothose are amazing, thank you
- phendrenad2 1y agoYeah reading those links, this should have been a fork to begin with. Too many people rely on unstable XOrg. We're all used to the Linux model where HEAD is inherently unstable and breaks constantly (ask me how many times people broke the framebuffer driver in the last 5 years). But apparently XOrg does it differently.
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- bowsamic 1y agoI read through some of the context and his commits and the guy seems like an absolute liability. I’m more careful making such changes on our internal greenfield prototype…
- alex_duf 1y agook, why? any grand plan? what's the background and why would anyone bet on X.org when wayland has been ok for a decade now?
- DaSHacka 1y ago> when wayland has been ok for a decade now? Looks like developers from Valve that were tasked on working on Wayland don't agree[0]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41640420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41640420
- LexiMax 1y agoAm I missing something? I don't see where it's mentioned that Valve is exhuming the corpse of X.Org.
- DaSHacka 1y agoThe quoted text, and what I was responding to, was: "when wayland has been okay for a decade now"
- LexiMax 1y agoI am aware. The complete rhetorical question was: > "why would anyone bet on X.org when wayland has been ok for a decade now?" Valve saw problems with the Wayland protocol evolution process. Their solution was to build on top of Wayland, not exhume the corpse of X.org.
- creatonez 1y agoThere is no grand plan. It's just more garbage piled on top of garbage.
- DaSHacka 1y agoBut enough about Wayland
- jmclnx 1y agoI hope this succeeds plus I hope they are open to allow patches from OpenBSD. IIRC, Xorg would not accept patches from them, them, thus we have xenodm. Also I hope NetBSD, FreeBSD and DrogonFlyBSD jumps on, this way the BSDs do not have to jump through loops for Wayland and they are not being forced to follow Linux. And network transparency rules :)
- DarkmSparks 1y agoseconded, and yes I guess all that is back on the agenda.
- cosnenc 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- M95D 1y agoI'm surprised they set up Telegram and Matrix, but not IRC for chat... you know, for those situations when X isn't working...
- jeroenhd 1y agoBoth Telegram and Matrix have TUI clients! Not exactly officially supported or anything, but https://github.com/FedericoBruzzone/tgt https://github.com/FedericoBruzzone/tgt and https://github.com/gomuks/gomuks https://github.com/gomuks/gomuks will work more than well enough until you can get your X server working again.
- suesse 1y ago#XLibre has existed on Libera since the time of your comment
- DarkmSparks 1y agothe fork looks like it is backed by nvidia, but it will be a few months until an actual new release is ready. Best linux news all year.
- ibotty 1y agoI am pretty sure you are wrong. They even tell in the README https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver that nvidia is going to be a problem.
- jeroenhd 1y agoWhile I doubt Nvidia will back this fork over the real X.org, their open source drivers should be less problematic. Unfortunately, whether or not you can use their open source drivers depends on what year you bought your GPU, and anything not labeled RTX or GTX-16* will never get a fully functional open source Nvidia driver.
- krautsauce 1y ago[flagged]
- logicziller 1y agoI've often wondered why there are so many people who want X to just die and will dismiss any criticism against Wayland. They sure do like shifting the blame elsewhere instead of acknowledging that some users do have issues running their applications. Just yesterday I checked again if anything's changed, but nope. Jitsi Meet flickers, gr-fospher flickers and doesn't even render the plot, Emacs Application Framework doesn't work, etc. All these work perfectly fine with X.
- abenga 1y agoHere is an excellent opportunity for those who believe in the continued development of X to pick up maintenance and push it forward. Time will tell at the end.
- e844dbe8fb 1y ago[dead]
- wmf 1y agoThe only way to make Wayland work is to burn the boats. It sucks but that's the truth.
- bnolsen 1y agoYou could almost swap systemd and sysvinit out here. the biggest difference is that X and Wayland is a true dichotomy here.
- vermaden 1y agoI run out of mental capacity for the Wayland bullshit - I am really looking forward to this X11 fork!
- grahamjperrin 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20210202134702/https://drewdevault.com/2021/02/02/Anti-Wayland-horseshit.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210202134702/https://drewdevau... https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/layh7k/im_tired_of_this_antiwayland_horseshit/?sort=confidence https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/layh7k/im_tired_of_t...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- coopcoop1 1y ago[flagged]
- e844dbe8fb 1y agoFantastic news. Glad that someone is continuing to support functioning graphics on Unix and Unix-like operational systems. Wayland is a joke toy with no future.
- ChoHag 1y ago[dead]
- garlandkey 1y agoWhy was this flagged? I'm not even sure what that mean or that I've ever seen it before.
- paxcoder 1y ago[dead]
- robotnikman 1y agoMeans it was deemed inappropriate for discussion on HN, spam, or low effort content. I agree, I am not sure why exactly this was flagged.