This is a really interesting development. It’s been well known and widely reported for some time that X11 development had essentially come to an end, receiving only minimal maintenance. The focus has been entirely on pushing ahead with Wayland.
This has been one of the key reasons argued, for the switch to Wayland.
Lunduke posted details today of a key Xorg developer, who’s efforts to continue to develop X11 have been undermined and frustrated by project leadership. That developer has now stepped away to create a fork of Xorg: XLibre. His aim is to welcome continued interest and development in Xorg, not just to maintain it, but to continue to advance it.
I find this really interesting! It presents the prospect of ongoing X11 advancement for people, desktop environments and distros that are interested. It’s potentially a viable ongoing alternative.
I will note, I did try to find the actual XLibre repository or website, but those have not yet been made public, so my apologies for having to share via Lunduke videos. I would prefer he just gave the news and eased up on the waffle, but that’s his way.
If its the same Weigelt and Xlibre as referenced in other places like here:
Then it is hardly new.
But in any case I still cant find any actual project/source/etc.
Maybe its hidden on purpose. Maybe to be shown off later, maybe in some purposefully hidden effort like was the case some decades back;
I dont know and theres not really a lot to go off of.
Not saying theres nothing here, though lunduke has certainly just made shit up before, but until such a time as there is actual code to discuss then theres nothing technical to consider or debate.
With nothing technical we are left only with the context and politically charged diatribes on offer … given that .. I might be inclined to think that the contributor in question was acting in some sort of anti-social capacity - like having a meltdown over some other contributor celebrating queer pride. These things would be besides/beyond any technical aspects, but as we have none and the context has been presented in the way that it has .. I might guess that last hypothetical is not very far off, or is at least not unlikely.
is fascinating if it pans out. I predicted when Rhel walked away from X11 there might be a legion willing to maintain it..but right now one developer has stepped up.
Rhel was a nation-state (figuratively) that developed X11.
This is just one guy so far. Would need a lot of dough/donations to keep X11/XLibre a viable alternative. This would depend on any pushback from forced Wayland implementations.
Feels like popcorn time.
As I see it, anyway.
Thanks for posting this development.
Technically speaking .. my understanding has been that X11 (or X12, or Xlibre, or any other variant) is fundamentally flawed in such a way that it cannot be fixed. From a security standpoint there is no patch or update that can change that. The only thing that could change it would be an entire re-write; something that would arguably invalidate any need/reason for ‘forking’, and seemingly not something that is even suggested this project is doing or going to do.
So this effort would have to do even bigger things, even bigger than it would appear at first glance, to be viable IMHO.
His 7 month old issue (issue #1757), “Simple merge requests asking for attention :)”, has been deleted, which allegedly contained details of hundreds of pull requests he’d made.
His efforts were allegedly dismissed, and he was told he was “delusional” if he believed he could get X11 back on track again.
I think those details point to effort, and absent appreciation for it. To have so much effort for so long largely ignored, I can understand why anyone would want to walk away and put their effort where it will make a difference.
If you are involved with any public enough project long enough you get all types.
From the slightly arrogant, to the sadly confused, to the absolutely insane.
At a coffee shop long ago we were once discussing satire in general and the Swift example of “A Modest Proposal” in particular. One participant was struggling with the concept of satire itself. They wanted to keep asserting their perspective that eating babies was wrong and that the text was “not funny”. As if the entire thing was simply an exercise in absurdist comedy. At some point the group had to give up attempting to explain what satire is, and indeed eventually had to discontinue including that individual in the discussion as to continue their inclusion was to not really have the discussion at all.
“Development” can happen in a similar way, again with highly variable degrees of similarity to the above story.
To then wrap up their effort in “Non-DEI” hints at other things as well…
“It doesn’t matter which country you’re coming from, your political views, your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether you’re furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just a boring average person. Anybody’s welcome, who’s interested in bringing X forward.”
It’s also because X has been around since the 80s, and has had so much stuff grafted on to it as technology has changed that it’s basically Frankencode that not only can’t be made secure, but also can’t easily by updated. So a rewrite is indeed necessary, but that has already been thought of hence Wayland. As @drunkenvicar noted, even ignoring political stuff and the credibility of Lunduke a large team and funding (and a large amount of time) would be needed to do this and they would be up against the fact that all the major DEs have committed to a migration to Wayland and they’re not going to change their minds due to the appearance of what can currently only be called vaporware.
I mean it is also not that in october 2025 all support for Xorg stops.
And true wayland is not the holy grale.
But we should go forward, would be more exciting if someone start from scratch creating something really simply as a replacement
An Xorg replacement in a single binary 2000 lines of code.
Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately X11 is still blocking that sort of path, because of ‘compatability’ and ‘feature parity’. That’s why Wayland has taken so long.
