The Latest X.Org Server Activity Are A Lot Of Code Reverts
Posted by 6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 192 comments
Posted by 6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 192 comments
Real_Marshal@reddit
Do they not have code reviews or something lol
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
To my knowledge, a lot of his requests were accepted by essentially a single maintainer who assumed in good faith that Enrico was actually testing his stuff and wasn't submitting garbage code, that is until a few months ago when he was put under a lot of scrutiny here.
Equivalent_Bite1980@reddit
lol
ElectricalSloth@reddit
Make X11 Great Again!! definitely the new slogan
IrquiM@reddit
I'd buy the hat
BrakkeBama@reddit
It better not be red.
IrquiM@reddit
Rainbow?
BrakkeBama@reddit
Nah. I'll settle for black or Slackware-blue too even.
IrquiM@reddit
That works too
D3PyroGS@reddit
that was a fun read. it did leave me wondering a bit about the maintainer though. not even doing a compile check before merge is a huge red flag. especially on a project like X11 where the impact is so wide.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
If even a simple "does it compile" check would've caught this, that must mean there was no CI?
bionade24@reddit
A simple "does it compile" check wouldn't have caught anything, the correspondence explicitly states that not every single commit compiles, which is necessary to properly git-bisect to find the commit that caused the regression.
99% of projects only check if the pull/merge requests compiles / passes tests. I'm sure some projects have their CI configured to check if the code compiles and passes tests on every single commit of a pull/merge request, but I haven't seen a single FOSS project doing that yet.
u/D3PyrosGS either misread or misunderstood what has been talked about on the Gitlab. Please don't further spread this wrong claim.
matjoeman@reddit
This is why I prefer squash merges.
bionade24@reddit
Fair point, but once the commit becomes quite large, the power of bisecting is quite limited.
matjoeman@reddit
If the commit is large and really is one interdependent change then it is what it is. Meaning, if taking any part out would break everything, then yeah git bisect won't be able to help you pinpoint a bug within the change.
If the commit is large because it has several independent changes then it should be split up into multiple PRs and merged and checked by CI one-by-one.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
..which is it? Would a "does it compile" check have caught the broken commits and full MRs that don't compile, or would it have not because.. they dont compile. huh? that makes no sense.
The commits not compiling is what would have been caught, and what was desired to be caught, because as the correspondence explictly states Xorg wants every commit to compile exactly for bisect reasons.
Given the total lack of internal consistency in your comment, i assume its LLM nonsense that strung together vaguely plausible words that together make no sense whatsoever.
bionade24@reddit
Afaik, and I've read plenty of the freedesktop.org Gitlab threads, the full MR always compiled, but individual commit revisions didn't. But I don't bother to get a link proving me wrong. Honestly think you don't know what git-bisect is and how it works. Otherwise I have no idea why you think that by compiling the git HEAD of the MR, as often done in CI, it can be ensured that every commit builds.
Please stop accusing other people being an LLM or something to support your argument, that's pathetic.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
there is no "the MR". You keep saying this and its something you entirely made up. The linked issue the discussion takes place on isnt even about a failed compile, its a runtime failure! The discussion talks about multiple times things failed to compile, and as a human and not an LLM I do not know which one you're hallucinating.
I dont know what you think git bisect and how it works has to do with whether CI tests per-commit(something that is entirely possible to do).
Also https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#note_2801147
Like I said, every commit is supposed to run. CI could have caught that. The fact every commit doesnt compile is not "evidence" that "does it compile" checks would not have caught the... not compiling, and only an LLM could string together words resembling the belief of such.
Stop talking like an LLM and then people wont suspect it. Do things LLMs cant, like demonstrate rational thought and internal consistency in your comments.
I'm not going to bother replying to either an obvious LLM slop account, or a human barely equal in intelligence to one on a good day.
robrtsql@reddit
Maybe when you said 'possible' you meant 'it is physically possible to build a CI system that does this' but it doesn't look like GitLab CI does: https://forum.gitlab.com/t/trigger-pipeline-for-all-commits-not-just-the-last-one-pushed/18025/9
CrazyKilla15@reddit
I will admit to not having been familiar with how bad gitlabs CI system is and how much it doesnt support features many projects consider critical like "run CI on a commit".
It should still be possible to do with some workarounds, though they're not replacement for actual native support, even though that person never got an answer. More popular/common CI systems like github actions, or Jenkins, seem to have more answers on how to do it.
Yenorin41@reddit
There is CI and looking at the CI configuration file that has been there for a while. At least for the xorg repo itself. Maybe there is no CI before it is merged or some of the other repos?
bionade24@reddit
No, the PR/MR actually afaik always compiled, but not all commit revisions inside the MR do. See my other comment for more explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1let6dd/the_latest_xorg_server_activity_are_a_lot_of_code/mynozgf/
CrazyKilla15@reddit
There is no "the" PR/MR, that discussion is about, and links to, a dozen other commits and MRs.
Most of the discussion isnt about that specific issue its "just the proverbial straw which broke the camel's back", a discussion of a pattern of behavior over time and across many other MRs.
bionade24@reddit
So you don't have a link to where it was written that any MR's git HEAD didn't compile but have acknowledged in your previous comment that there were complaints about not being able to bisect because not every commit compiles?
nightblackdragon@reddit
Single compile check wouldn't catch xrandr breakage as both Xorg and xrandr compiled just fine with those patches. CI servers also usually don't have any GPU so they wouldn't be able to test it as well.
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
I agree, I am also confused that he didn't do a basic check as well.
I guess maybe he knew of Enrico and thought that these changes wouldn't cause issues due to their small scale, but still.
D3PyroGS@reddit
at least the maintainer acknowledged his mistake. having a code review process that doesn't involve testing or even compiling the changes seems like in insanity to me
like surely this isn't standard practice for Xorg 😬
aew3@reddit
To be fair, he says that if he can't assume MRs are tested, he doesn't have time to test them and will not bother to ever merge them.
Seems like he has limited bandwidth to work on xorg repos, and thats not really the maintainers problem or fault really. He should have just properly checked that testing was being done before accepting a huge batch of MRs from a contributor. If MRs can't be merged on a project because contributors won't do their own testing, well, someone else can offer to take over or do testing.
MadeInASnap@reddit
I read the whole thread and they said Enrico was doing testing, but he was doing it in a merge queue style and only tested a later commit on his branch, which changed the broken line to a working line.
JBDBIB_Baerman@reddit
How do you even get through on your link? It just keeps saying invalid response
pantalanaga11@reddit
They most definitely have code reviews. I think a large part of the issue is the xorg team was absolutely overwhelmed with MRs. Each of which tended to compile correctly. Many of the MRs lacked test instructions or test documentation which really would have put a strain on the maintainers and likely led to a bit of review fatigue.
Encursed1@reddit
it seems not, but at least they arent dead at the wheel
tonymurray@reddit
A lot of things were cleanups that didn't do much. They were committed in good faith the submitter would follow up and fix any issues.
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Looks like the XLibre evangelists will be in for a rude awakening soon, lol.
MrPowerGamerBR@reddit
This is why I never had faith in the XLibre project.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that having a properly maintained X11 implementation is important. There are people that still use X11 for one reason or another.
But everyone that was talking about XLibre never said what features and bug fixes XLibre had over the original upstream X11 project. XLibre's README only says that it has "lots of code cleanups and enhanced functionality."... but no examples of the enhanced functionality that it provides.
syldrakitty69@reddit
Xnamespace is kind of a big one.
MrPowerGamerBR@reddit
Xnamespace seems to be interesting, there is explanations about Xnamespace in the PR that was originally made for X11: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/1865
XLibre has Xnamespace, there is a document explaining what is Xnamespace and how to configure it on XLibre's repo.
So at least XLibre doesn't seem to be churning code just for churn and to show "hey we are doing BUSINESS here!!", but let's see if they can keep implementing new features...
SchighSchagh@reddit
Lmao. This is what I've been talking about. Whenever I claim the Wayland folks absolutely could've solved X11's security problems sometime in the past 17 years if they'd bothered to try, I get down voted to hell. But here's a single guy-who's a lousy developer by many accounts--who has a prototype solution up in a couple of months. I'm supposed to accept all the big brains behind Wayland couldn't have hashed out a proper, polished version of this in less than a year?
grem75@reddit
If that was the only problem with X then that argument would make more sense, it is one of many.
How do you fix multi-monitor support without breaking compatibility with drivers and applications?
RoryYamm@reddit
They could have finally made an X12, the way X11 was the successor to X10. Kept it almost compatible while making a few breaking changes. I don't think many people would have minded if some of their code needed to change.
Hell, looking at the way X11 came to be, it seems Wayland tried to do everything the Project Athena team and their collaborators did in turning X10 into X11… but while Project Athena managed to put together an agnostic protocol in about a year, Wayland was bikeshedded for a decade and a half. They also managed to ENCOURAGE Wayland fragmentation instead of trying to find a neutral party to discourage it.
grem75@reddit
I think the time for that was years before Wayland started, realistically before adding the Xinerama extension. Just adding Xinerama meant window managers had to be updated to be able to use it. Then there were different X servers implementing slightly different versions of Xinerama.
If we had "X12" in 1997 a similar move to an "X13" around 2007 we'd probably be in a better place. Instead they kept tacking on extensions to the 1987 protocol and digging the hole deeper.
By 2008 whole new protocol with a compatibility layer for legacy applications seemed to be the sane solution.
SchighSchagh@reddit
Breaking changes happen in software all the time. Consider for example Android and how every version has an updated permissions model/API, or updated notifications model/API. Legacy modes are maintained for an amount of time, and apps are encouraged to update to the newer API. Yes some apps might eventually rot if old version of the API is eventually actually removed, and the apps have no maintainer to target a newer API. But those apps are not used by many people anyway.
Oh, and we can also look at Python 2/Python 3. 3 made a number of breaking changes, and both 2 and 3 were officially supported for a long time. Quickly a set of tools became available to allow a codebase to easily work with either version of python; also for automatically converting Python 2 code into Python 3 code. But despite the braking changes, Pyhton 3 is still fundamentally the same as 2, (unlike X11 and Wayland).
CrazyKilla15@reddit
Python 2/3 notoriously caused problems, support was extended for years specifically because most major projects didn't move, it took years for the ecosystem to start recovering, and many updates to python 3 to make it more compatible with python 2. And even today there are still major applications that only support python 2, despite it being EOL.
Python 2/3 is not a model of breaking changes that went well, that projects migrated through, or an example to follow. Its insane to even mention it as an argument in favor of breakage.
SchighSchagh@reddit
Context matters. The context here is X11/Wayland breakage. Python 2/3 breakage is nothing compared to that. All Python did was replace some stuff like
printstatement with aprint()function, tweaked the range() function, tweaked integer division, tweaked unicode encoding, and some other things like that. But nothing was outright removed. Just a couple of things got new syntax, or tweaked semantics, and you could still get a Python 3 program to do everything the same was as in Python 2 with just some minor code tweaks. OK yeah for large code bases, the minor code tweaks added up, so adoption was slow. But the key thing is that nothing from Python 2 was outright missing in Python.Whereas many things in X11 are outright missing in Wayland, by design.
So while Python 3 migration was annoying and in some cases prohibitive in terms of effort, Wayland migration is still, after 17 years, downright impossible in some cases.
So while Python 3 rollout was a mess, it was much much much better than the Wayland mess.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
Wayland, by design, is a description of protocols with support for extensions. Strictly speaking nothing is missing or "impossible" because it is always an option to use a custom protocol to do anything, and this is perfectly standards compliant wayland.
The issue is getting everyone else to agree on supporting your protocol
erraticnods@reddit
you're literally complaining about the way android does things (rework major system parts often, break APIs whenever you want) while praising android for doing that lol
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
What is xwayland
grem75@reddit
Android was most likely designed with that in mind, being from this millennium with plenty of hindsight and a goal of long term support.
There was no foresight for things like that in X11 and attempting it would just make a bigger mess.
MrPowerGamerBR@reddit
I've always wondered an "what if" situation of what would happen if devs kept working on X11 instead of creating a new solution from scratch (Wayland).
Don't get me wrong, Wayland is amazing... but we can't deny that Wayland took a loooong time to actually get adopted by everyone, time that maybe could've been invested working on X11.
Of course, I don't know if Xnamespace does solve the "security problems", if I understood correctly what Xnamespace does is that it isolates X11 clients and, if I'm not mistaken, that would only be useful if you are connecting to a remote X11 session. This won't isolate two applications running on the same session, like if you had two applications open on your desktop.
But still, I want XLibre to succeed because I want to see how X11 could be improved, but I can't deny that the way that the maintainer acts does give me a bad taste in my mouth (The README spends so much time talking about how DEI is bad instead of explaining why XLibre is better than X11 that makes me be like "bleh")
bionade24@reddit
Absolutely, but it would still have caused at least ABI breakage on multiple interfacings, maybe even API breakage at one or 2. Instead of Xwayland, we then would all have to run Xephyr with the old X11 in it to get shit to work and Nvidia users would probably have to stick on the unreworked X11 for a long time.
Most of the same users that currently complain would be frustrated, too.
Yenorin41@reddit
It was already a much smaller issue to begin with, since Xorg already had a restricted mode that was even used by default if one used X11 forwarding over SSH. Keyloggers and many other attacks already didn't work with Xorg if using it via SSH.
And that works for individual applications/windows and not just complete sessions.
Personally I don't think XLibre will go anywhere for exactly the reason you mention.
SchighSchagh@reddit
100% agree
And you're right that Xnamespaces only scratches the surface of security in its current form, and doesn't really solve the problem. But it's very easy to see it as a foundation for adding even more granular control. The current version is just one namespace per magic cookie. But once that works, no reason you'd be limited to one cookie per user.
_mr_crew@reddit
Things usually get redesigned if they’re harder to maintain and it is harder to add support for newer features. Years of cruft and hacks accumulate and what you expect to be a simple feature in a legacy system starts breaking things unexpectedly and becomes hard to debug (that’s why his changes keep breaking X). Someone out there probably even relies on buggy behavior in your software.
Writing code isn’t the hardest part of developing software - and typically when you gain more experience in engineering software, the amount of code you write gets reduced significantly.
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Tbf Enrico is (AFAIK) by his own admission currently not working on new features but is "tidying up" the codebase, and he did talk about what he wants to add to it (xnamespaces, HDR support, multi-monitor support, better scaling, etc.)
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
I questioned him on hdr/10bpc support and he basically admitted he has no idea what he's talking about, we have yet to see xnamespaces in production, and I have no idea how he would fix multi monitor.
The only goal that's possible is making scaling better
LvS@reddit
The core X11 protocol defines pixels as unsigned long (the red/green/blue mask). Unsigned long is 32bit.
You can do 10bpc with 32bit if you don't use alpha compositing (which is why monitors are fine with it), but applications on Wayland use 64bit for HDR.
But not only does Wayland use 64bit - it uses 16bit float. I don't think X11 even has the concept of floating point Visuals, so that's another thing you cannot do.
So if you wanted to do HDR, not only would you have to invent entirely new X concepts, you' also have to be very liberal with the interpretation of the core protocol (read: break it and hope to get away with it).
And once you've one that, you'd need to port all the important users (read: Qt, GTK, ...) to this new concept. Because if it's new, applications won't have support for it.
Max-P@reddit
I had an interaction with the developer and question, and the moment XLibre was announced I knew it's dead on arrival.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux4noobs/comments/1k736xc/comment/mvi2l9p/
Basically, he doesn't give a fuck about any of the big DEs, so it's definitely not going to fix any problems around multi monitor vsync, VRR, or any of the "fancy" modern graphics everyone expects. You know, the reasons we're replacing Xorg for Wayland.
Given his changes also break NVIDIA drivers, that also makes XLibre is utterly useless for legacy NVIDIA users stuck on 340xx and 390xx, because he doesn't care about ABI breakages.
So really unless you're a dwm/awesome/i3/CDE forever fanboy, XLibre clearly won't benefit you anyway.
It's code churn for the sake of code churn.
FrazzledHack@reddit
I have to admit, that's very funny.
DioEgizio@reddit
It's funny because like. Nvidia 340xx/390xx/470xx is the only reason why you should use x11 still
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Oddly enough, isn't he a KDE contributor (I remember reading that somewhere while reading up on the newest drama)?
ppp7032@reddit
let me give you an example. imagine i make a merge request to rust-coreutils having never coded rust before, without having tested my submission at all. then imagine some devs raise concerns about the MR breaking some programs, yet maintainers mindlessly merge it anyway.
who would be at fault there? what about if i had coded rust before but made a shitty MR without having tested it anyway?
it's the mainterners, not the dev. it shows X.org maintainers have woefully inadequate automatic testing and simply ignore people raising concerns about MRs.
KnowZeroX@reddit
You have a code base that goes back to the 1980s riddled with all kinds of hacks, some of which is difficult to even test without proper hardware.
You can't compare that to a modern codebase based on rust with modern tooling, safety guard rails from the compiler, enforced error handling and much easier to test that is far less hardware dependent.
ppp7032@reddit
my guy no one even tried to build some of the MRs.
there were representatives of nvidia saying changes break drivers in a part of the ABI that's meanr to be stable and they were ignored by maintainers.
none of what you said is relevant to that.
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
That is false, the MR build successfully, just not every commit inside it, which makes bisecting an issue hard.
void4@reddit
openssl code base goes back to 90s. And yet, its developers defined, stabilized and properly documented the public api, as well as the comprehensive test suite. I see decades-old perl tests running on github ci on every commit.
The fact that xserver maintainers did nothing like that is not Enrico Weigelt's fault. It's those maintainers' fault, and anyone trying to claim something else is, let's just say, not right.
iAmHidingHere@reddit
That's pretty recent. If you go back 5-ish years, the documentation was poor and sometimes non-existent.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
Its both. He should've done even bare minimum "does it compile" tests on his own changes, and more broadly there absolutely should've been even basic "does it compile" CI that would've prevented this whole mess from even getting this far, especially as XWayland uses and is branching off of xorg git
masterin the near future.If there had just been CI, likely none of this would be happening because the trivially broken changes would never have gotten merged
turdas@reddit
OpenSSL is a completely different project from X11.
void4@reddit
For one, I'd advice you not to talk about something you have no idea about
turdas@reddit
It should be easy to correct me if I were actually wrong. Having some support for hardware crypto features is completely different from the kind of thing you have to deal with when interacting with graphics hardware and real-time user input.
void4@reddit
why I should spend my time on idiots who don't know how to test software but have their own expert opinions?
And for the record, many wayland projects like wlroots officially declared not supporting proprietary graphical drivers (i.e. nvidia), with no controversy at all, meanwhile this is being demanded from Weigelt
turdas@reddit
Many parts of X11 are functionally impossible to test automatically and changing this would take years of development effort.
I don't recall saying anything about proprietary graphics drivers. Wlroots is dead by the way.
grem75@reddit
There were issues with Nvidia not supporting GBM and wlroots being uninterested in supporting EGLStreams just for Nvidia.
When Nvidia did finally support GBM it was a bit broken for a while and possibly still is. The wlroots developers can't effectively troubleshoot Nvidia specific issues due to the lack of driver source code.
Also, wlroots is not dead.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
Sure, but in this specific case some of the MRs didnt even compile, and others changed randr code and broke it without even the bare minimum
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
As I said in another comment, his MRs were AFAIK mostly approved by a single maintainer, and Enrico is not a no-name in the Linux community.
Also, I am confused about what your point even is as my comment did not talk about who is strictly at fault for these bad commits but was instead commenting on Enrico's poor X.Org code quality (who do you think is approving his commits on his own project?).
Iksf@reddit
first ive ever heard of it tbh and I thought i follow stuff
Damaniel2@reddit
The comments on that thread are certainly...something.
lelddit97@reddit
all the unhinged hyper-toxic losers who get banned everywhere else wind up on phoronix. even literal nazis don't get banned there lol
ObjectiveJelIyfish36@reddit
Free speech scares you that much, huh?
rxorw@reddit
Not the bad free speech, only the good one. It can certainly accuse people of being Nazis, God forbid someone express an opinion he does not agree with.
ObjectiveJelIyfish36@reddit
Whether a speech is bad or not is completely subjective, and thank $deity it's not the weird people in this subreddit who decide that.
It's also ironically sad to see people on a Linux subreddit having that mentality about free speech. Allow me to remind you that Linux is a project that uses a license that is FREE as in FREE SPEECH, which means it doesn't impose restrictions based on people's subjective views of "good" and "bad".
lelddit97@reddit
you totally don't understand free speech. Free speech is that the government is not allowed to regulate your speech (more or less). Free speech is NOT that people or organizations have to tolerate your speech. I am allowed to walk out of them room when you're shouting your racist insults. I'm also allowed to ban you from my forums when you're shouting racist insults. I'm also allowed to leave forums when people who are shouting racist conspiracy theories amongst immense toxicity are not banned.
ObjectiveJelIyfish36@reddit
The only thing preventing the average Joe (like you and others in this subreddit) from censoring others on a larger scale, is merely the lack of the same power a state has.
And thank $deity you're all too incompetent to possess such power, because if you had it, you'd DEFINITELY censor others. Sad.
lelddit97@reddit
and since you've never read it:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
kinda_guilty@reddit
You can say whatever you want. We just don't want to listen to you.
ObjectiveJelIyfish36@reddit
You definitely don't believe that.
Jegahan@reddit
And I declare that you believe we should kill all the kittens. There's no need to hide it.
Did I win the argument? Is that you it now works, you just say the other person believes something bad and dismiss them when they disagree.
ObjectiveJelIyfish36@reddit
Again with the subjectivity. You clearly don't learn.
rxorw@reddit
Calling a random person who we dislike or don't agree with a "Nazi" is plain stupidity, when doing so you are diminishing the horrors the Nazi party did to Jews, special needs people, homosexuals and other minorities. Words exist for a reason we should be careful with them. When this fad of virtual signalling comes to an end, and the new one who replaces it becomes the new norm, you don't know on which side you will stand, perhaps wielding a pitchfork, or be chased by the pitchford mob, I don't know what is in your closet.
lelddit97@reddit
i am referring to a literal nazi, someone who has many times posted antisemitic conspiracy theories
the last i checked they weren't banned and they hadn't been banned from many months. maybe he's since been banned idk.
qaridarium if you know the name
Barrions@reddit
I feel sorry for you. It must be hard to live life with zero reading comprehension.
aew3@reddit
Perhaps if you can read in the context of the comment properly, the comment is suggesting that even people espousing outright neo nazi views are not even banned. It is sued to demonstrate the sheer lack of moderation that stuff that is obviously not good faith discussion or disagreement is not moderated.
loewenheim@reddit
Interesting how upset some people get when you say bad things about nazis
Puuurpleee@reddit
Yeah, someone said “Stalinist purge”?????
wineT_@reddit
I should've listened to you. I opened this thread and on the first page it looked like a typical opennet.ru thread (a lot of toxicity and lack of intelligence). But when I jumped to the last page, I was greeted with fun topics like the USA in Syria and vaccine conspiracy theories
bubblegumpuma@reddit
Phoronix is the containment cage for all the toxic CHUDs
IvanDSM_@reddit
Phoronix comments come from the same place as the green stuff in the barrels in Doom. You can count good Phoronix commenters in one hand, and I say that even though I can only think of one good commenter right now (pinguinpc).
3X0karibu@reddit
Well, we will have to see what xlibre will offer beyond being “dei free”
IAmTheFishiestFish@reddit
And the stated goal, at the end of their description page, that it will "make X great again" is yet another politically charged homage to MAGA. US politics should not factor into an open source project's mission statement
LuceusXylian@reddit
It is even more embarrassing the fact that the XLibre group founder is german.
mrtruthiness@reddit
It makes sense when you see that he's a Nazi apologist.
DynoMenace@reddit
IMO this should have been enough of a dogwhistle for the entire community to ignore it.
3X0karibu@reddit
Oh if only 🙃
DuendeInexistente@reddit
Wew, if that's how it was advertising itself that... Sure is an impression.
3X0karibu@reddit
yep. look here, fourth paragaph
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
voxadam@reddit
Wow, that's a whole lot of self-important nonsense.
DuendeInexistente@reddit
There's an issue about it and it's about what you'd expect. Snowflakey grand statements about how they're keeping THE BAD ONES out with it and how they took over X11, and claiming "Not everything revolves around US politics you know" while just wanking about US politics
DuendeInexistente@reddit
Welp. Not touching anything that touches any of xlibre.
jakiki624@reddit
XLibre feels a lot like the Godot fork because Godot was "too woke"
Helmic@reddit
oh god, i searched this and it really is just that. garbage revenge fork because some youtube grifter called game engines woke lmfao.
jakiki624@reddit
they have a commitment against "DEI" in their mission statement and someone opened an issue to ask for clarification and that turrned a bit ugly imo
Helmic@reddit
you can't just say shit like that and not share
syklemil@reddit
It's been linked above, but here's the readme:
Weigelt also got a well-deserved reaction from Torvalds after claiming that vaccines create a "new humanoid race".
Based on the actual Xorg code he doesn't seem to have the skills to become another Terry Davis. If he doesn't get help, I'd expect him to have more of a downward spiral into generic youtube conspiracy grifter.
picastchio@reddit
And stating that [Britain was responsible for WWII and the atrocities of Hitler were not proven in court[(https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20181010.191925.ee1331b6.en.html)
taicy5623@reddit
They all wanna be him, its so fucking funny.
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
You could just go to it's GitHub and read the README and the issues.
MGThePro@reddit
Well at least the person who forked xorg is adding his own changes to the codebase. Regardless of if these are good or bad.
Last time I checked the godot fork they just kept pulling new changes from upstream godot and changed the donation links so money flows their way. I couldn't find any real code changes from that fork
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
kalzEOS@reddit
So the gentleman at Phoronix thinks open source won't succeed if there isn't a corporation that backs it?
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
Not if there is one developer, who happens to be a conspiracy nutjob, and also does not happen to be known for code quality. The majority of these reverts were his "code cleanups" that ended up breaking things elsewhere because Xorgs codebase is very brittle and convoluted. People didn't stop adding new features to it for no reason.
kalzEOS@reddit
Everyone is beating around the bush that is my point. Oh well. Personal attacks won't take us anywhere.
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
This is not a personal attack. He got shut down by Linus himself because he started ranting about how the Covid vaccine was a "generic [sic] human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race" on the LKML. In the project README he is ranting about how "BigTech" is trying to destroy Xorg to eliminate "competition to their products".
He's bonkers and Xlibre is never going to be adopted by any non-niche distro, because no sane person will ever want to rely on an upstream "community" like that for something as critical as a display server.
grem75@reddit
Really wonder which "well known distros" have signed up. Also wonder what constitutes signing up.
HyperMisawa@reddit
OpenMandriva did, but how relevant they are is a good question.
grem75@reddit
I'm a bit surprised development is active enough to jump on it so soon.
Some distros I've looked at that might be interested have more of a "wait and see" attitude. Not going to expend developer resources on something uncertain.
HyperMisawa@reddit
It seems like it's purely a political decision for them tbh
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
Never heard of them. After a quick google search and a look at their forum... yikes. They and Xlibre are perfect for each other.
HyperMisawa@reddit
It's an older distro that forked off from Mandrake.
https://www.freelists.org/post/xlibre/possible-X11Libre-community-goals,1
the_abortionat0r@reddit
You literally aren't even responding to what was said.
What personal attacks? How is anybody beating around the bush?
The literal take is a guy who can't produce functional code is the only one on the project so yes it will fail.
JohnJamesGutib@reddit
You know what - I'll say what everyone else seems to be unwilling to admit to - yeah absofuckinglutely, your open source shit doesn't succeed if there's no corpo money or backing behind it. (success being defined as mainstream usage and acceptance - i.e. Linux or Blender)
In 2025, it seems pretty clear that the original free software dream of communities banding together to solve software problems, hand in hand, singing kumbaya, as the world works together to make beautiful software, was a hippie fantasy, much like Star Trek.
We live in a capitalist world, people don't just want to eat and pay bills - they want the nice stuff too. And quite frankly, who can blame them. Cyberpunk was a much better predictor of the future than Star Trek ever was.
And the best work and talent in software, necessitates money. Lots and lots of money - the kind you can only get from corpos. Hobbyists and drive-by contributors can only get you so far. Linus gets to work on Linux thanks to corpo funding - without it, he'd be working on SAAS slop same as the rest of us, poking at his toy kernel in his spare time.
kalzEOS@reddit
I hard disagree, and I think that this is untrue and a very bad attitude/way of thinking, but I appreciate you having the guts to say that.
2FalseSteps@reddit
I don't know what you're beating, but I don't think it's ever been bush.
MichaelTunnell@reddit
There X project is so enormous and complicated that it is not possible to maintain and develop it as just one person, this is the opinion of many people. The problem is this new fork is only one person right now, maybe others will join but for now the task it’s too daunting for one person regardless of how intelligent the one person is because the X project is a monster of a code base
kalzEOS@reddit
That means nothing. So, you are agreeing that open source won't succeed without corporations? That is very defeatist of you
the_abortionat0r@reddit
You're literally just making things up dude.
MichaelTunnell@reddit
So you are arbitrarily distorting my words into something you can argue with even though that has nothing to do with what I said? That’s very strawmanist of you
kalzEOS@reddit
YOU didn't speak of the subject of which I was speaking. You went straight to something else. I asked if the article writer is saying that open source won't succeed without corporations, and you just brushed that off and went on talking about some other things.
the_abortionat0r@reddit
Not what anybody said.
What is said is a project supported by next to nobody is doomed
Jegahan@reddit
This, my friends is called a strawman argument. The article never claimed "open source won't succeed if there isn't a corporation that backs it", it just cited the lake of baking from "the major Linux stakeholders (companies)" as one of the reason why they didn't think the project was going to be successful long term.
kalzEOS@reddit
Did you even read the article?
Jegahan@reddit
Are you being serious? This is the quote:
As I said, the lake of corporate backing is only one of the reason the give with lake of experienced devs and lake of resources being the others. The article could have gone further, as there are many other reasons why the X11Libre project is likely to fail, but this is what phoronix wrote.
If you want to contradict me, please point me to where the article claims "open source won't succeed if there isn't a corporation that backs it"
kalzEOS@reddit
Literally the part you quoted. At this point, it's obvious that it is a matter of tribalism and pure politics,too. Y'all hate him because of his DEI stance, that's all. Everyone and their mother is panicking because he said "no DEI". Projects are forked ALL the time and no one bats an eye. I don't know why this fork is so special that everyone is trying so hard to make it fail. Let it be. He's not hurting anymore, unless words hurt, then I don't know. Y'all keep going, though. Good look for the open source community. A bunch of children freaking out over nothing. Then we wonder why no one brings their software to us.
Hollowplanet@reddit
Your links aren't working for me.
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
Ah my bad, I missed a brace. Should be fixed now.
barfightbob@reddit
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but all the activity from Xorg (and GNOME?) seems to be done out of spite and low key best attempts at sabotaging XLibre. It's funny to see them freak out. I know the moment I didn't see Phoronix cover this story he's against the fork. Just waiting for the first bit of "bad" news.
Hopefully everyone involved acts maturely and we all benefit from the attention xserver is getting. FOSS benefits everyone despite whatever ideologies one might hold.
the_abortionat0r@reddit
If you could read you wouldn't be thinking this way.
6e1a08c8047143c6869@reddit (OP)
...why would they do that though? What do they stand to gain from it?
barfightbob@reddit
Wayland for whatever reason has done a poor job at implementing the features people expect and/or need when it comes to display/window management. Let's be real, given any other real competition they'd be blown away. They've done a poor job responding to the needs of the community.
I think at this point it's a matter of ego. They don't want some upstart waltzing in and showing them how incompetently they've ran the whole Wayland endeavour.
Hopefully this lights a fire under their butts and inspires them to do more. When projects compete, everybody wins. At the end of the day, let them stand upon their own merits.
lelddit97@reddit
thats pretty strange, i dont seem to be lacking in features; quite the opposite. I've only seen a handful of complaints about it not supporting some hyper-obscure use-case that often abuses design gaps and bugs in the name of a "feature". So the proper way to do something takes time and debate to do it right.
No-Bison-5397@reddit
I mean the sub-par accessibility features are oft bemoaned. I wouldn’t call them obscure.
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
I guess they were referencing KiCad devs complaining that they can't control the positioning of sub-windows.
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
I do not want dancing windows on my wayland session so this is a good thing
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Giving random software (there is nothing requiring KiCad to even use sub-windows) full control over where your windows (even if not all of them) are position is a security risk and has little actual utility.
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
not really a security risk I just don't want apps doing it
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Wait, I don't understand, are you in favour or against apps being able to control that?
JohnJamesGutib@reddit
he's literally on your side and you're too dense and argumentative to see it
wayland bros built different bruh lmao
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
Should be obvious
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
It isn't, both your comments are up for interpretation.
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
they really aren't at all
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Dancing windows can mean a) the WM itself determining window placement; b) applications moving your windows around.
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
I have never seen people describe tiling as dancing windows
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
Well, looks like you didn't see the KiCad thread where people were complaining that applications can't determine window placement instead of (Wayland) WMs :p
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
That is literally the topic of discussion
ThatOneShotBruh@reddit
??
Anyway, I won't respond further as I have no idea what you actually want to say as your comments appear pretty vague to me (and seem contradictory).
Have a nice day.
AyimaPetalFlower@reddit
I promise it's just you
Krunch007@reddit
There was, and in some ways there still is competition to Wayland, like Arcan. Others like Mir simply changed to be a Wayland composer. Why do you not consider it to be real competition?
I'll tell you why, because Wayland has the technical expertise and the backing behind it. Xorg devs went on to become Wayland devs. Trying to say that Wayland is somehow an inferior product because a vocal minority of people don't like it is mad shit talk. Because for the majority of people Wayland's been working fine for a while. I switched over almost 4 years ago and I honestly haven't had much reason to keep an xorg session around, especially since on my hardware it's inferior, the colors are washed in the xorg session for some reason on any DE.
And it's not a matter of ego. Shellshocked as they were from the pain of developing Xorg into a monster that simply does way too much without any hope of coherently pulling it all together, they now merge things into Wayland protocols at a snail's pace. The glacial pace of Wayland development is simply an overabundance of caution to not turn it into what xorg became, an unmaintainable nightmare that breaks with the slightest changes. We can criticize them for it for sure, but I understand the caution.
It's super ironic to hear you say there's no competition because Wayland bred more competition than ever. Being just a protocol, every implementation is basically a competing project. Gnome's Mutter, KDE's Kwin, wlroots, Smithy, etc they're all competing Wayland compositors, some of which aren't even written in the same language. They're not reusing the same monopolistic display server than xorg was for all their display needs, they're simply implementing Wayland protocols. I don't understand all these arguments, they make no sense no matter how you look at them.
CardboardGristle@reddit
Xlibre is barely a real project for anyone to spend the time and resources to try to sabotage it.
DynoMenace@reddit
Phoronix is right for not covering all the Xlibre nonsense, because it's just that. If one person says it's raining, and another says it's not, it isn't the journalist's job to report both sides. Their job is to look out the fucking window before publishing.
lelddit97@reddit
im stealing this analogy
DynoMenace@reddit
Please do (I stole it from somewhere too)
0riginal-Syn@reddit
If you actually knew anything about the projects and how they are ran you would know better. Also these were plans made a long time back.
nightblackdragon@reddit
GNOME started planning deprecation of Xorg at least in 2023, merge request that disabled X11 session for GDM was merged before Xlibre was forked. So what exactly GNOME is doing out of spite?
Xorg, GNOME, Red Hat and others are not afraid of Xlibre and there is not a single good reason why should they or why should they even care about it at all. Any claim like "They are doing that because of Xlibre" is more or less conspiracy theory.
Traditional_Hat3506@reddit
GNOME has been planning on removing X11 for years. Their plans got postponed but reignited again a month ago which can be proven by https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-support-ubuntu-impact which was published in May. Xlibre wasn't a thing then.
The people feeding you these conspiracy theories have reasons to want you angry, your engagement pays their rent.
Krunch007@reddit
You do sound like a conspiracy theorist because had you been following this for a while you would have seen the writing on the wall. It's been every xorg maintainer but one complaining about the guy doing these commits for almost a year now. But even here you get people defending him with stuff like "ABI breakage doesn't matter actually and the other maintainers are wrong".
I think the maintainers wrongfully assumed these changes would go somewhere positive and that it wouldn't hurt to have someone working on improving xorg on their own free time, and because of that have been willing to look over quite a bit of breakage in trees that aren't upstream of XWayland in good faith. It's just that the quality of the changes has been consistently lacking and eventually they got fed up by constant regressions. And that's about the long and short of it.
The guy's been moving code around in the idea that it will clean up the codebase and that was about it. And now the maintainers are reverting some of those changes because Enrico isn't around anymore and his vision wasn't gonna be worked towards by anyone but him.
There will be no benefit to the attention the xserver is getting. Xorg is dead. Everyone who actually works on this stuff knows it. If you want to continue developing Xorg you need to rewrite it, because otherwise the codebase is simply too fragile - as Enrico found out a few weeks into his effort. And frankly nobody is really up to that task. That's about the long and short of it. I wish people stopped huffing all this xorg copium once and for all.
MatchboxHoldenUte@reddit
😭
kocsis1david@reddit
The issues mentioned doesn't sound like it is bad code, rather untested and not reviewed.
studentoo925@reddit
Often enough it was unnecessary code, or code that didn't account other parts of codebase using the part that was getting changed or causing regressions
Why fix things that worked before, when you can just revert back?
MatchingTurret@reddit
Obviously censorship and retaliation by the deep state to hide the truth.
Jegahan@reddit
It makes me sad that now days, you can't be sure whether this os sarcasm or not
LvS@reddit
It wasn't.
Ok_Instruction_3789@reddit
Wonder how many still use X. With fedora and Ubuntu both dropping not counting spins that's probably over 75% the market
omniuni@reddit
This seems odd. Rolling branches often have breaks when there is new work being done. That's why you have a code reviewer; to help identify and fix problems.
journaljemmy@reddit
I'm happy that Wayland works so I can avoid the effects of this drama on my system.
Fresh_Raspberry2364@reddit
as if wayland doesn’t often have its own drama
BemusedBengal@reddit
The Wayland committee bickers without ever doing anything while the Xorg developers do things without ever bickering.
0riginal-Syn@reddit
You may want to read up on who is actually developing Wayland. It is the former Xorg developers. The maintenance on Xorg is primarily being done by the same people.
Richard_Masterson@reddit
That's largely a lie. Current Wayland devs are not long term Xorg devs.
0riginal-Syn@reddit
It really isn't as most long term devs left. The active devs continued and eventually moved to Wayland dev. I worked with many of them.
turdas@reddit
This sadly affects XWayland too.
ABotelho23@reddit
What a mess.
lonelyroom-eklaghor@reddit
Interesting. Peculiarly interesting.
Atleast X.Org is being handled properly by the developers.
lonelyroom-eklaghor@reddit
Interesting. Peculiarly interesting.
Atleast X.Org is being handled properly.