A long time has passed since the last major release of the X.Org X11 Xserver. Even bugfix releases have become rare. Therefore, this Change proposes replacing the nearly unmaintained upstream with a maintained fork, the X11Libre XServer.
The upstream maintainer of X11Libre had been the most active remaining contributor to the X.Org X11 Xserver before the fork. The Change Owner is well aware of the controversies around the X11Libre upstream maintainer (FreeDesktop.org CoC violations, controversial political views, conspiracy theories, rants against Red Hat), but believes that the benefit of shipping maintained software outweighs the potential annoyances when having to deal with upstream.
There is no intent to ever replace the Xwayland implementation, only the standalone Xserver and its subpackages (Xnest, Xvfb, Xephyr), and possibly the driver packages (xorg-x11-drv-*).
There was a thread about this a few days ago. That guy who did the fork is nuts. A WW2 Nazi apologist.
And as I said then, Xorg is already Libre.
Without some facts to back it up I question phrasing like “most active remaining contributor”. Or “actively maintained” vs what? Just “maintained”? I want to see the stats before I believe this is more than steering the narrative.
This person picked a good time to throw a fit and draw a lot of attention to himself.
People say we should leave politics out of it and concentrate on the software (meritocracy) but I question that. I mean, the way this is going you just can’t leave that guy’s motivations out of the equation.
You can imagine the way the discourse about this proposal is going, but I randomly picked up one comment I wanted to share excerpts of anyhow:
(…) Fedora accepting X11Libre into the project would betray its users and imply that Fedora is fine with the statements made in its readme.
However, even putting that all aside, I see technical concerns. Obviously, there’s the fact that a lot of the commits made to X11 by metux before he forked off were found to ultimately cause regressions and not have been tested properly and have been reverted. The issue with the licensing in headers is minor, but also noteworthy given how critical licensing is to FOSS projects (…) and it is not a good look to mess that up so easily (…). Even more than all of this, however, is something I recently found on X11Libre’s github:
github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Fix incorrect power of two operator
master ← dec05eba:fix-pow2
opened Jun 9, 20252^16 is 2 xor 16 which equals 18, not 2 to the power of 16 which is 65536
metux did not understand that ^ was not the exponent operator in C. That immediately, to me at least, throws some serious doubts on the quality of the commits made by him (and, to an extent, his ability to properly review PRs). To not know such a key feature of the language the project is largely written in is… frightening, at least to me. It does not inspire confidence in the rest of his code for something as large and low-level as an X11 server, compounding on the existing concerns about his prior commits to xorg having to be reverted for causing regressions.
Accepting something this premature into the project would cause stability issues. Even if he was a computing wizard one dev with a day job and conspiracy forms to keep up with is not able to do the maintenance that Xorg needs.
Do you happen to have a link to the thread?
This has bcachefs vibes. I don’t think anyone questions Overstreet’s C competency, but his habit of pushing last minute changes without sufficient testing and ignoring the process to try to sneak in changes outside approved windows displays a similarly cavalier mindset.
Laxity about QC is not a great trait in a project maintainer.
Do note, literally anyone can submit a change proposal to Fedora. This shouldn’t affect your view of the project.
Fair, but the person who submitted this isn’t just a random user, they’re flaired as part of the packaging team
They’ve apparently been involved in Fedora since at least 2007 and the list of packages they maintain includes QT, so sure this isn’t some rando. Still, I doubt the backing of a low level contributor to the project will mean this proposal goes anywhere, especially the idea of replacing X11 outright when downstream packages like KDE (ironic) have indicated they won’t support it.
Fedora is owned by Red Hat which was acquired by IBM
Red Hat: “Time to cash out”
The truth is…thegameproject was rigged from the startMakes sense
I mean, people still defend Rowling’s work, and use Hyprland, so this shouldn’t surprise me, but somehow, it still does…
The grown-ups that run Fedora and the community are overwhelmingly against this very bad proposal, so I don’t think the reich-wing creep’s toy project is going to replace the official XServer implementation any time soon.
Oh no. What’s wrong with Hyprland? 😭
Needless harassment against their own trans community member and overall consistent toxic behavior:
Hyprland BANNED from FreeDesktop: Why.Goddammit, why can’t we have nice things anymore. 😞 Why do people have to be dicks.
But my shiney!!
I don’t use Fedora I use Arch btw, but in all seriousness please don’t.
You’ll become the laughingstock of the century.
I think this is an effort by Fedora to deprecate X11 without pissing off a large chunk of their userbase by announcing deprication by fiat, as other distributions and projects are.
If XLibre is mostly one guy, who has demonstrated alarming gaps in his understanding of C, and who has a history of pushing regressions, the X on Fedora will become unstable and people will voluntarily switch to Wayland. Between those and people who will switch out of protest because of the maintainer’s politics, eventually there’ll be so few X users Fedora can say, “see? Nobody’s using X, so we’re going to deprecate it.”
It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it’s easier to believe than that Fedora’s leadership is choosing to depend on an essentially one-man-fork with QC issues and a maintainer who keeps his controversial politics up front in the project README, before any other technical information.
The XLibre README is calling DEI “discriminatory”, WTF?
Let’s fork XLibre as X-LGTB+BLM and have a furry mascot, then merge the changes from that one.
