While I haven’t looked at that code…remembering FB devices way back when…I suspect it’s more direct than the abstraction layers we use now typically. So greater efficiency, maybe more work on developers of graphical toolsets?
Limitations
- No Hardware Acceleration
The framebuffer interface is software-only. No GPU acceleration, so performance will be poor for anything graphical. - No Modern DEs
GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc., need a display server (X11/Wayland), GPU acceleration, and a compositor. These cannot run on framebuffer alone.
Oh yeah, that would be bad in today’s hardware environment where everything depends on hardware acceleration 
X11 is on its deathbead. Just let it die.
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I hate all this political crap (In both sides of the coin) 
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I mean .. at this point how would we not consider the topic project as at least partially political in nature? Even if they claim otherwise. Which is an oddly common tactic of certain actors.
They use specifically charged language, use specific outlets, and have gripes with .. things they dont want to fully outline in detail but that apparently include buzz words in common trade among a specific political base.
By the way, found more substantive examples of the original conflict..
Or just everything in here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797
In sum: a combination of anti-social behavior and ‘man yells at clouds’ continues to seem rather accurate. We now have the added context that apparently the code quality is also quite poor.
For myself: I find it funny that something trying to be ‘Free of [input X]’ migrated to Github of all places.. something owned by M$oft. Which either speaks to the shallowness of those claims or indicates a certain amount of ineptitude.
But I still support the project!
Why?
Because if its a place bigots want to go, and stop congesting the ‘regular’ development channels then I am all for it. Bonus points if it means their systems suck more and are less secure. They are welcome to it. 
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Not going away soon. It all depends on how soon applications will be migrated to wayland protocol. After some many years, xwayland is still needed to make a wayland system usable.
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That thread is an interesting read, I think it does offer some context.
Difference of opinions and methodologies among developers is nothing new. A lot of what’s in that thread is commonplace developer wrestling. It is important though, that on any given project, everyone is onboard with the goals of the project.
What seems to be apparent, is that @metux’s goals of cleaning up and advancing X11, and those of FreeDesktop which is to lay X11 to rest, don’t align.
Introducing code churn is undesirable in a project which has the goal of quietly and peacefully being laid to rest (maintenance mode only).
So yeah, tension and conflict ensues. Either one has to relinquish their goal (and I don’t think it’d be reasonable to expect FreeDesktop to do that), or a parting of ways is probably healthy, in this case resulting in the fork.
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Our buddy Brodie covers this nicely, in a really balanced way:
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What’s the alternative? Because Wayland with all it’s issues and the developers refusing to change anything due to popular request is not it. An improved X11 that is XLibre is currently the absolute best option for most.
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I’ve had no issues in nearly 2 years with Wayland on 2 different PCs and 2 laptops running EOS, CachyOS, Arch, and Nobara (all KDE Plasma) utilizing both Intel integrated and Nvidia GPUs.
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This is simply my opinion, but I think Xorg was out-of-date already over ten years ago. When I started with Ubuntu, one of my gripes with Linux was that some apps controlling it and configuring it through configs was… Bad. If I remember correctly I bricked my system when following instructions to set something up.
But that of course be simply because I was young and stupid. 
the xorg configuration files were so complicated and arcane
Corporate fascists are triggered by FOSS culture and forks - GOOD!!!
Bro that always happens after sellout to corporations like IBM, Google, Microsoft…
People never learn, too much for licking them tasty corpo boots!!!
PEACE YO!
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Why is this Lunduke guy so happy about eh Xorg fork? Is this so sensational? And why should we care?
It has been announced by ubuntu and redhat that they will abandon X11 with the next release(s). Fedora and OpenSuSE already have wayland as the default. It is just the logical next step for them to abandon X11 also. Gnome will remove X11 support. Etc. etc. X11 will not play any role in Linux in 2-3 years. And xlibre will not change that.
I do not get the enthusiasm about this fork. It is dead on arrival.
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2-3 years sounds realistic for most distros to be on board for a product (OS) for personal PC use.
In the world of commercial applications, .gov business, corporate etc I’m not sure 3-4 will be the range–especially for Linux front ends. Windows’ Subsystem is now accommodating both platforms at the same time (it looks messy) and may indefinitely. But how big a necessity this is to Windows is unclear to me.
I’m positive I haven’t thought this thru enough, however.
Because he went a little bit loony and now serves a specific audience. Since usually reality is not on their side they celebrate every breadcrumb that fits their narrative.
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Redhat or Ubuntu and other distros support their LTS versions for many more years. They will have to support X11 on these systems for that long too. But this is only bugfixing. And they will certainly not migrate those systems to xlibre. I predict a very small user community for xlibre. This is only for enthusiasts.
In most commercial/gov/corporate scenarios linux is a headless server OS anyways.
PS
This topic reminds me of systemd replacing system-v-init. Enthusiasts keep system-v-init alive. But this is only for a very small community.
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I think to some degree, you’ve actually provided an answer to this here:
In a general sense when an entity, corporate or otherwise, is forcing an open source project in a particular direction, but key developers for that project are unhappy with that direction, a fork occurs. This is one of open source’s great strengths!
It’s because of this important characteristic of open source we have:
- Xorg - came about because of numerous disagreements within the XFree86 project.
- MATE desktop environment - came about because of dissatisfaction with Gnome 3.
- Cinnamon desktop environment - came about because of dissatisfaction with Gnome 3.
- Unity desktop environment - came about because of dissatisfaction with Gnome 3.
- LXQt desktop environment - came about because of dissatisfaction with GTK3.
- LibreOffice - came about because of Oracle’s control of OpenOffice (and its history with OpenSolaris).
- Inkscape - came about because of differences in project objectives in the Sodipodi project (itself a fork from Gill).
- MariaDB - came about from similar concerns with Oracle’s involvement.
- Organic Maps - came about because of source/binary inconsistencies in
Maps.me. - CoMaps - came about because of governance concerns with Organic Maps.
- OPNsense - came about because of security, code quality and source availability concerns in pfSense (itself a fork of m0n0wall).
- BetterBird - (a soft fork) came about to address shortfalls in Thunderbird that weren’t being addressed by Mozilla.
- LibreWorlf - (a soft fork) came about to provide greater privacy and security to Firefox.
- KeePassXC - came about because of declining updates (and eventual discontinuation) to KeePassX.
- NextCloud - came about because of the business orientated approach within ownCloud management.
- OpenSSL - came about because of discontinuation of SSLeay.
- LibreSSL (OpenBSD) - came about because of security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL.
- GraphicsMagick - came about because of developer disagreements in the ImageMagick project.
- Matroska container format - came about because of developer disagreements in the MCF (Multimedia Container Format) project.
- Gittyup - came about because GitAhead was abandoned.
And I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg, just things that have crossed my path. The open source world is based on forks. This vector image of Linux distribution history is pretty telling, and the same applies in the Unix/BSD world.
I’m interested in this, because forks are what have propelled the open source world for decades.
The thing that I find curious about the XLibre case, is not why it was forked, because open source history is full of similar scenarios, but why Xorg is being so actively crushed by those who have been its caretakers?
To quote you @mbod, why should we (or they) care? Why not be happy for it to be forked, maintained and advanced, if there is a community willing and able to do so? Clearly the current Xorg management aren’t.
It really makes no difference if Fedora or Debian derivatives will or won’t support it. It only takes a small interested team of people to make a new distro happen, and if it has what people are looking for, it’ll get attention.
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agree
I’ve always wondered that myself–the elephant in the room no one ever talks about. I’m glad someone else sees it. All I hear are repeated lines of X11 full of vulnerabilities and bugs. But I’ve been humming along several years with few complaints…
It does, I mentioned this in another thread about common linux polarities. see: curated vs. immutable. linux will always have camps since it will never (?) achieve a unifies market desktop.
I agree with @Bink who also has no horse in this race like me. Personally I will migrate to Wayland when it opens up for Budgie and Cinnamon. The arguments for killing Xorg seem paper thin and without much merit and that in itself is weird as hell.