Xorg has been Forked!

[Artim]

One of the largest contributors to the Xorg project has decided to fork it! He says the Xorg people are content to let it become obsolete and die. But not everyone is all that fond of Wayland, and a lot of software just isn't "wayland-ready" yet.

The developer of the fork, named XLibre, writes:

XLibre project's fork of the Xorg x-server, with lots of code cleanups and enhanced functionality.

That fork was necessary because toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from certain big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products (classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics).

This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with Big Tech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activist groups, state actors, etc.

Those of us who a little hesitant about Wayland might consider this to be good news: XLibre has a future, so we don't have the "vendor lock-in" that FOSS used to oppose with such passion. What do y'all think? The old reliable x-server will live on! XLibre is to be released sometime this month.

[Adrian]

In my view this is way too complex piece of software that if it doesn't get enough traction (a lot of developers excited or paid to work on it) is best to let it die.
I think wayland is the future.

[DukeComposed]

XLibre has a future, so we don't have the "vendor lock-in" that FOSS used to oppose with such passion. What do y'all think? The old reliable x-server will live on!

I don't know about that. X was already forked once almost 20 years ago by The OpenBSD Project. It's called Xenocara and they still use it for the X11 subsystem. I have yet to see any Linux distros convert to Xenocara the way some adopted a similar OpenBSD fork... of OpenSSL.

[Nokkaelaein]

This project has a very slim chance of succeeding because of how it's being handled, and by whom (pretty much singlehandedly). It's got a strong stench of stay-away-from-this, and even Torvalds basically called the guy insane a few years ago (as the person wrote on the kernel mailing list how vaccines are creating a new humanoid race, lol). Bridges to the Xorg project were burned as the guy submitted tons of untested code that happened to also severely break common functionality, and drama ensued. Also, from the readme of this fork:

"Module ABIs have changed - drivers MUST be recompiled against this Xserver verison [sic], otherwise the Xserver can crash or not even start up correctly", "Proprietary NVidia drivers might break", annnnd so on. Everything I've seen seems to be in the category "oookay, I'll pass" :P

[oops]

... ... Wayland is the future, but not yet the present ;-)

[mxer]

If they brought back TinyX I might be interested, but as others have said, Wayland is the future for Linux, (& maybe BSD).

[Artim]

Wayland probably is the future for most Linux OSes. For me it's about choice, though. We 'nixers and FOSS fans tend to resist vendor lock-in and being told we must use this or that software. Xorg is being deliberately killed in favor of Red Hat's Wayland. But forking any open-source project is neither unusual nor a bad thing.

[Adrian]

But forking any open-source project is neither unusual nor a bad thing.

Nope, it's about making smart decision and not using something so complex like Xorg that has unfixable bugs and is "maintained" by one dude. It is *deliberately* killed because it was never designed properly with security in mind, X11 was released 40 years ago. Do what you please, that's the freedom that open software offers, even including making bad decisions.

[Artim]

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything! from Github

[DeepDayze]

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything! from Github

That screed seems to be almost like Chicken Little-esque but does list things that work great under X11 but are either broken or partially working under Wayland. Hopefully in due time all those issues listed would been fixed under Wayland either on the compositor side or the window manager side.