Are You Moving to Xlibre?

[Ryu945]

I was told I should ask Clem this here.

I use several programs that require Xorg. It is not a option for me to use Wayland. It was recently shown that RedHat had been intentionally sabotaging their Xorg branch to try to force people to use Wayland. This is despite the fact that there is software you can only use on Xorg and Wayland equivlents have not been made yet. The primary developer of Xorg was even kicked out of the project for trying to update and fix Xorg since fixing and updating Xorg would delay Linux distributions swap to Wayland. The primary developer forked Xorg and made Xlibre. This is quite viable since the primary developer did most of the work on Xorg anyway.

Since Linux is a long way off from all the problems associated with Wayland swap being fixed, I am wondering if Mint plans on swapping to Xlibre once the first release candidate becomes available. Last I checked, the current versions are not release candidates though I haven't checked in a few days.

Also, I am not sure how much Mint financially supported Xorg and how much the Mint developers worked with the development of the Xorg project but I am wondering if these resources will be swapped to the Xlibre project.

edit: Weird. The top sentence of my post is not showing up.

edit2: Now the top sentence is showing again.

[Fantu]

I haven't investigated the project enough but before evaluating its use it would be a good idea to check its quality (doubted by many from the few things I read at the beginning) and actual usefulness. At the moment on Debian I don't know wanting to eliminate xorg, if there was an initial idea of ​​removing it as maintainer several packages that depend on xorg I would receive a notice well in advance as happens with several abandoned/unmaintainer libraries that need to be removed, xorg is also still maintained although mainly for bugfixes.

[yggdrasil75]

before a year or 2 it is highly unlikely that it will become solid enough to replace xorg (given that they don't just want to do bugfixes), and also is assuming there are enough users using it and above all extensive testing for new versions, it is included in at least some of the main distros and also used by some hardware manufacturers. but manufacturers usually think primarily about profits and will most likely focus only on one between wayland and xorg/xlibre for development (one of the reasons why it took so many years before wayland development and support became big enough) while the secondary with limited resources will choose the more stable and less modified one.

given that the current version is xorg with some minor fixes, it shouldnt break a large userbase for a while. as it diverges more, it will eventually get more bugs that need fixing, but if any major hardware devs that still support xorg switch to xlibre rather than wayland, then it will be able to compete.
my reasoning for not wanting to switch to wayland is that its been in development since 2008 and its still somewhere between "barely competes" and "maybe a little better". I know it takes time, but imagine if those 17 years of making wayland had gone into x. chances are almost all the benefits of wayland would be in x by now, and almost all the detriments of x would be fixed.

[Fantu]

wayland it's something made from scratch and structurally completely different, so obviously its implementation required and requires much more work than continue to support xorg which dates back to the 80s (even if it has had improvements and additions over time). It took many years before enough resources were invested in it and only in the last few years has it received enough to get a good implementation and support on a large scale, there is still work to do but it is starting to have good results. I tested wayland quite a few years ago for work and it can achieve performance and fluidity that with xorg you can't reach, even just trying to get a little closer requires a huge amount of optimization work. During the tests when I was preparing images for thin clients based on Debian 10 and Debian 11 in both cases with wayland I also immediately obtained a greater fluidity of the image and a much lower cpu consumption without optimizations (unlike xorg) but unfortunately there were some bugs and limitations from its poor support in used softwares so I still used xorg for now. In the meantime the support has improved thanks to the fact that in general there is more development and support of wayland, I will try it again after the release of debian 13 as soon as I have enough time and I hope that the problems I had encountered are solved because it would be very useful.
Another case in which I noticed significantly better performances on wayland over xorg is with old or very old desktops/laptops but the DEs that I would like to use do not support wayland or not enough at the moment, in some even the drivers that did not support it or at least not enough which is recently improving.

wayland development has been slow for many years due to poor support and received poor support due to lack of resources to invest in it and most people didn't invest in it because of that but now it's gotten to a point where most are focusing on that and given the limited resources xorg has taken a back seat if not almost non-existent (as it used to be the other way around). Given that and the structural limitations of xorg I doubt people will want to continue investing big amount of resources in xorg or a fork of it. To overcome those limitations it would need to be a major overhaul so in terms of support we would have to start almost from scratch like we did with wayland so I guess it's almost impossible or if it is done it will take 10-20 years to get to the good condition.

[SuperDuperDeou]

wayland development has been slow for many years due to poor support and received poor support due to lack of resources to invest in it and most people didn't invest in it because of that but now it's gotten to a point where most are focusing on that and given the limited resources xorg has taken a back seat if not almost non-existent (as it used to be the other way around). Given that and the structural limitations of xorg I doubt people will want to continue investing big amount of resources in xorg or a fork of it. To overcome those limitations it would need to be a major overhaul so in terms of support we would have to start almost from scratch like we did with wayland so I guess it's almost impossible or if it is done it will take 10-20 years to get to the good condition.

In my benchmark on Cinnamon consisting in a translucent Conky window and opaque Alacritty window, I've seen the same 0-1% CPU on idle, with peaks up to 3-4% when moving the Alacritty window around, both with XLibre and Wayland, and the Wayland session actually looked a bit choppier, probably because Nvidia, and I've also seen zero screen tearing on XLibre. Maybe it's just my system that's fairly high spec and I can't appreciate the difference, but I have a CPU that isn't even from this decade, and it wasn't high end when it was new. Btw, I did the benchmark with Alacritty because the Wayland session crashes as soon as I open my terminal of choice, Kitty.

Lack of applicaiton sandboxing, lack of HDR support, and lack of high end touch support aren't limitations of the protocol, they're limitations of Red Hat wanting to kill X11, in fact XLibre already has application sandboxing, high end touch support is planned, and HDR support is being worked on by a volunteer. Even mixed refresh rate can be probably dealt with with nested servers, by extending Xrandr, or by a new protocol extension.

Since when do we strictly need corporate support? Remember that the Free Software movement was born from RMS getting angry at Xerox, while corporate contributions are nice, we don't need them. The community clearly wants XLibre to be a thing: just look at the repo, it's as active as it gets and already has lots of contributors. There may not be corporate interest in XLibre (yet), so what?

XOrg is dead, it was murdered, and XLibre is here to carry its legacy.

[Fantu]

Conky and Alacritty have very low resource usage.
To notice the difference you need something heavier, it is more noticeable even when you do not have a dedicated or powerful enough gpu, you run videos without hw acceleration etc... Unfortunately the more you go forward the more you tend to make everything heavier (sites, software, video etc..) often uselessly and it is said a lot that you need to get better hw and change it more often (even with fairly basic use). However I think this is a useless waste that could be avoided and/or reduced in many ways. wayland with a direct implementation in the compositor rather than a communication of the graphic part between 2 parts (server and client) done by xorg seems to me to give a significant help to decrease and optimize the use of resources for the graphic part, things that xlibre cannot do unless starting from scratch as wayland did or almost and with the same big obstacles.

[SuperDuperDeou]

I didn't use my eyes to notice the difference, I used a CPU motor, actually two of them: the very conky window, plus htop running in the terminal, and they didn't notice a difference.

Running several software-rendered windows while soft-decoding windows is going to have a suboptimal experience regardless of it being X11 or Wayland, and how many CPU cycles are wasted that way doesn't even depend on the display server, especially with video decoding. Maybe Wayland will fail a little differently? But that's really it. Still, on XLibre, I'm not noting anything breaking even with stacked translucent windows. Maybe should I go to dig a landfill for a 20 years old CPU instead of a 10 years old one? Maybe I should use the iGPU for that 20 years old CPU as well, except it might not even have a Wayland driver.

If you said someone in year 2000 that they can have a 10 years old CPU and everything works fine, with no slowdowns, they'd laugh at you. The thing is, CPUs have gotten so powerful that even human incompetence can't easily catch up to slow them down. Microsoft had to go out of its way to make W11 slow by making AI run in the background 24/7 and having the start menu be a React app that denial of service attacks the system.

[firepower9966]

The way Redhat, Xorg, Gnome are behaving i want nothing to do with Xorg and Wayland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4o1uXe6cVc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5guSWznnA

[Secret-chest]

I think the actual non-corporate Wayland will be wlroots. It has many of the missing protocols.

[Ryu945]

When I saw changes made to Fedora (RedHat Creators) and a lack of software support for certain things, I got a feeling I should move away from them. After seeing this, it reminds me of the crazy people that run other open sources projects like Home Assistant, OBS and Mastodon. I am not sure how these type of people get control of these projects but there really does need to be a good alternative. I guess I made a good decesion to not use Fedora anymore. I may have to change a family members computer that already had it installed off this a lot sooner.

[NoVaSpikeXX]

Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum.

Why do you say so? Just curious.

Just to start I am not necessarily talking about the developers. They might be included but I know some are just developing software and staying out of all this drama/politics. It seems like its all the people promoting wayland that are crazy.

So it was big news about a new maintainer of Xorg and all the drama around that. He split off and made XLibre. Cool its open source software it gets forked all the time. Maybe Xorg will get some much needed improvements or it will fizzle out, whatever.

Then the responses to it have been absolutely crazy. As soon as yet another fork in the Linux community happened everyone suddenly went straight to booting Xorg and throwing Wayland in because Xorg/libre is now ran by a fascist nazi evil badman. Community managers and COC members are for some reason throwing DEI talking points and other asylum shit into a discussion about a graphics driver. I see these community managers putting out statements disavowing Xlibre and somehow Lunduke is used as a swear word...??? These people are posting psycho shit then deleting it and claiming they never said it. It's a mess, channels covering Linux are loving it though the content is nonstop for them.

I've just been watching and reading about it over the past week or so and its crazy. This should be all technical discussions and talks about performance or compatibility. It should be boring to everyone but the developers. Somehow people are now torching their reputations and entire projects because someone forked Xorg. Either the fork is ruining some plan or these people are mentally unstable.

I want my software developed by nerds proud of their code not people screaming fascist because they forked a project.

[yggdrasil75]

Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum.

Why do you say so? Just curious.

while I dont think most need to be in the asylum, there are those like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20250624171012/https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/23/the-fascist-maggots/ which should make you think twice about whether the reasons for dropping x have anything at all to do with it being "harder to maintain". makes it seem more like they just didnt feel like it and hate everyone who is willing to.
the response is like if when michael shanks left sg1 for a season, he tried to force everyone to stop watching it. except he didnt. no reason that freedesktop should either.

[steveklett]

... After seeing this, it reminds me of the crazy people that run other open sources projects like Home Assistant, OBS and Mastodon. ...

Only curious: What is some of the crazyness you've seen with Home Assistant? I'm sort of new to it, but so far haven't got a wiff of anything annoying, but sounds like I may be missing something.

[firepower9966]

@LinuxGuy-cyber ask them what they think of Lunduke. did you watch the youtube i linked?

…

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[ghost]

I think a better question is simply "will Xlibre be considered once it proves itself"? A lot of groups like Gnome are outright hostile to the xlibre fork and had announced they would be removing X11 support entirely. However it logically makes sense for Linux Mint to adopt Xlibre as Cinnamon is still primarily using X11 and X11 has proven itself to be stable and with user friendly features. I would think it's best to take a "wait and see" approach where it's likely Xlibre will be adopted once it's proven itself and it's development cycle becomes predictable (unless red flags start tom pop up) - as apposed to outright refusing to consider it but potentially being forced to if Wayland simply cannot keep up. I don't know if Xlibre would be used in Linux Mint 23.0 but i'm pretty confident it will be by 24.0, possibly 23.1

[LinuxGuy-cyber]

Isn't Mint also focusing on Wayland?

[yggdrasil75]

Isn't Mint also focusing on Wayland?

@LinuxGuy-cyber cinnamon is still not fully compatible with wayland. the devs of mint are trying to get it working, but if xlibre can act as a drop in replacement for the majority of users, then its significantly easier on the devs of mint than wayland is. wayland was only being focused on because freedesktop project was intentionally trying to shut down xserver for the last 13 years. if x had stopped being supported entirely, then they would have had to switch to wayland, but since xserver is now being supported again by a different dev, it has a chance.

[firepower9966]

Wayand Is experimental, they still supporting xorg in the future releases. They leaving there options open to see how thing evolve. They also have LMDE Linux Mint Debian Editions just incase Ubuntu is no longer a viable option. So much opensource software is being replaced by software with less feature and stability just so it can be new licenced and put behind community standards for political or agenda control by big tech. Xlibre has put a spot light on the corruption of long held open source ideals. Nows its not about code but control.

[Heavygrass]

This pretty technical video analyzes Xorg commits in which Xorg is NOT looking good at all.
E.g. there was anti-screen tearing commits YEARS ago (and lots of others).

[Sunderland93]

It is not a option for me to use Wayland

Xwayland is not an option? Also, there is a project that have way more chances to widely supported by desktop's that want to continue be on X11 - Wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

[Sunderland93]

There is no "cold war", everyone is busy with their own business. Also don't forget about wlroots devs, thanks to which Wayland is rapidly developing and improving in all aspects

[Heavygrass]

Plus there's a cold war brewing between GNOME and KDE over wayland compositors

@Betonhaus
Could you tell us more?

[ghost]

Plus there's a cold war brewing between GNOME and KDE over wayland compositors

@Betonhaus Could you tell us more?

https://absurdlysuspicious.github.io/wayland-protocols-table/
This should help point it out, but without delving through irc logs and such the base matter is that Wayland is very slow to adopt protocols that wasn't in their original vision, and KDE and GNOME are refusing to support each other's protocols. Already stuff like screen capture tools are rarely cross compatible, but as these protocols get adopted there will be more and more software thay will only work under a specific DE and will not work at all on certain other ones.

[Sunderland93]

screen capture tools are rarely cross compatible

PipeWire + portals is a solution for cross compatible screen capture. And software like OBS Studio works on all major Wayland compositors this days. But I agree that adoption of new protocols is slow

[Sunderland93]

Also please note that not all Wayland protocols are mandatory. Some of them are optional, e.g. there is no need for xdg-activation in Gamescope, since activating windows is not part of its responsibilities, or xdg-toplevel-drag

[firepower9966]

Installed xlibre on linux mint Zara.
https://github.com/xlibre-deb/ubuntu
Only one issue , errors with xrandr changing screen refresh on startup using ~/.profile
had to use ~/.xprofile instead.

[firepower9966]

Dont notice any changes in use, have no had time to test everything, it just works. It just a supported and bugfixed version of xorg versus official version thats been orphaned and abandoned and killed off in favor of wayland.

[Heavygrass]

Ubuntu has more or less officially announced, citing Ubuntu dev's post "Xorg support has been retired"
Citing:
"Won't Fix" for future Ubuntu because Xorg support has been retired.

Is it time to retire Ubuntu? (especially given its move to immature and incomplete Rust utils in 25.10 instead of battle-tested for decades GNU tools).

[Ryu945]

If there was someone that did what Linux Mint does in making an OS that is easy to install, easy to use and picks defaults for you but did this for the Arch base, that would be rather useful. Essentially, make a newbie OS of Linux but with an Arch Base. People like to use OSes that just work. The more up to date programs would have better compatibility.

Also, I swapped to Xlibre on Linux Mint Cinnamon several months ago and it has worked great. I have not ran into any problems yet. I have also noticed the Xlibre project has now grown to have over 530 contributors so the project seems well supported. This is over 100 more contributors from when I looked a few months ago.

[Fantu]

xorg is being abandoned by several DEs and distros, furthermore the producers continue to demonstrate that they do not want to support 2 systems, they have demonstrated this for many years by not supporting wayland (which was initially born as an "alternative" and not a replacement) and they are demonstrating it even now that they are moving towards wayland and do not want to support changes to xorg, as was demonstrated even before xlibre, many use xorg development git but they only want bugfixes and not "waste" time for new things and try to avoid regressions, if there were regressions they push xorg developers to remove
so in the long run anyone who tries to continue using xorg or fork will run into more difficulties

Regarding Arch, as a rolling release, it has the advantage of updated software but also more bugs and regressions. It can be good for average and expert users but not beginners. It is also better for specialized uses. For general and mass use for beginners would need more contributors to quickly fix regressions. Or a derivative that, even if based on Arch, is "semi-rolling" to bring software that has already been tested a little and try to avoid at least 80/90% of regressions.

[Ryu945]

@Fantu I was thinking something more stable then a rolling release. Maybe quarter, semi-annual or yearly releases and the release candidates would be tested for awhile. It wouldn`t be brand new but it would be newer then Ubuntu based distros. Maybe even have some type of LTS but with software not as old. If I remember correctly, Ubuntu is several years old before it gets released.

A official release done up to a certain point and on regular release cycles would be the best way to do it for newbies. I would never do rolling release for a newbie OS.

[Fantu]

Unfortunately, there aren't enough contributors at the moment to even keep all the forked software updated and well-maintained, and unfortunately, the necessary forks seem to continue to increase.
Ubuntu is getting worse in some ways, such as wanting to use snaps even in some core components. So much so that with my latest workstation installation (in recent months), instead of using Ubuntu 24.04, starting with a minimal installation to avoid using snaps and then adding cinnamon and the necessary components, I used Mint 22.2 (fewer changes to make).
Replacing the current LTS Ubuntu base every two years with one that changes more frequently would add more work, and I fear it would lower quality and increase the risk of burnout for the Mint team, especially Clem and MtWebster, who are the only two who manage most of the work.

[Ryu945]

Thankyou for the details of the work schedule. Perhaps updating to the latest Arch every 2 years would be the best way to do what I am suggesting. It would give massive updates in two your increments. Another way of putting it is a rolling release in 2 year increments.

[cplittlfield]

I use several programs that require Xorg. It is not a option for me to use Wayland.

Have you tried Cinnamon on Wayland? Granted, it's still a work in progress, but Xwayland provides a layer for X applications to be able to speak to the Wayland compositor, which is Muffin, in the case of Cinnamon.

The XLibre people have a long way to go. Implementing the X11 protocol from scratch is a serious challenge. There's a reason, after all, that the X.org server has been the only implementation of the X11 protocol for all these years. And there's a lot of the protocol that was not designed for today's hardware. A lot has changed in the past 40 years.

The X11 server, by all accounts is a nightmare of bloated and dead code that no one wants to touch. And that's why the X developers started developing Wayland.

I'm not sure why the Mint team is turning Muffin into a Wayland compositor, instead of using someone else's compositor, but there are enough Wayland compositors out there now to show that implementing the Wayland protocol is a hell of a lot easier than implementing X11. But in any case, Cinnamon on Wayland has come a long way in the past 12 months, and I look forward to the future improvements.

Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum.

And it was working on X11 that made them that way! 😀 🤣

[Fantu]

Regarding the one made from scratch, he probably confused it with Phoenix, which has just started and is made from scratch. However, with manufacturers seemingly only wanting to support a single system, Xorg its forks or remakes, I suppose they have no chance in the long term. The manufacturers' decision to invest in only one was clearly seen with Wayland, which, despite starting in 2008, only began to receive full support from all manufacturers in 2022, which finally contributed to its massive development with good results from 2024 onwards. Further confirmation of the desire to no longer support the development of Xorg was seen last year before Xlibre pushed to remove any new features, even minor ones, from the Xorg master if they caused regressions, rather than investing resources. For Xorg, they will still maintain minimal support to keep it working well with new drivers and cards as long as there is a large user base. Perhaps in part also as long as there is some professional software that only runs on Xorg or that currently uses Xorg primarily.
Also seems that several distros and DEs want to remove xorg support to save resources so xorg and the like seem destined to be a niche even in the best of cases

[cplittlfield]

Why would XLibre people need to start "Implementing the X11 protocol from scratch"?

Am I wrong to think that XLibre is trying to rewrite the X.org server? I know I read an article that claimed that was their goal. Perhaps my source got it mixed up?

At any rate, Keith Packard seems to feel that the Xlibre people have a pretty tough road ahead. He states the X.org devs gave up on the X11 server, precisely because continued development has become too difficult.

I don't mean to disparage the XLibre people. Perhaps a fresh team can overcome some of the obstacles. After all, people like Keith Packard were there back in the early days, when the X Consortium was a commercial venture, long before it became open-sourced. That's a long time to be involved in the same project. But by all accounts, the XLibre people have set themselves a difficult task.

[Heavygrass]

Also seems that several distros and DEs want to remove xorg support to save resources so xorg and the like seem destined to be a niche even in the best of cases

Per my research its rather a push from Redhat, which is not going well.
Wayland still missing a number of protocols/features (e.g. absolute coordinates) that X11 has.
There's a youtube video that shows wayland not usable with Gnome at least. I would post a link, but this is not appreciated by administration.
Wayland doesn't even support features that CAD soft needs. One can read ?KiCAD? page on Wayland e.g.

[Fantu]

When I first tested Wayland thoroughly (for heavy use on thin clients at work), despite more than a decade of development, it still lacked essential features. Unfortunately, until around 2022, development seemed to be slow due to poor support, particularly from manufacturers.
When Nvidia finally decided to support it properly, I think that was the point at which the significant increase in resources and support began, something I almost feared would never happen at the beginning.
And then other protocols that were difficult to implement, given how Wayland is designed (for some necessary things, to have a basis for security and privacy), were done. For example, for screen capture and sharing. Pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal also helped with screen sharing, which was the main thing that prevented me from using Wayland.
There are still things missing and some that are difficult to implement, such as the absolute cursor position you mentioned, again for privacy and security reasons, but I suppose that now that there is enough support, it will only be a matter of time before they do those too.
One thing that still slows down support a bit is in some programs such as CAD, and this will perhaps help xorg and its forks to still have life and enough support for a few more years.
But as for the new features on xorg and similar that will require support from manufacturers, I suppose they will be as problematic as they were for Wayland.
However, in theory, I will soon have to test Wayland thoroughly enough to create a new image for thin clients at work based on Debian 13, so I should see if there are still relevant issues that would make it better to continue using Xorg. For the moment, it does not seem so (based on initial quick tests), unlike when I prepared those based on Debian 10 and 11.

[Heavygrass]

such as the absolute cursor position you mentioned, again for privacy and security reasons, but I suppose that now that there is enough support, it will only be a matter of time before they do those too.

I've seen comments saying that its not implemented intentionally in wayland, thus possibly will never be. Have not verified this info personally.

[Heavygrass]

Xorg just trashed 2 years of X11 code improvements.

One can find more details on Lunduke's channel.

[fosslover306]

I watched that video, and I'm stunned that anyone thought setting the xorg codebase back 2 years over a snit with the one guy doing all the work for daring to support something they abondoned and "gasps" forked it to actually fix things as is his right, would fix their problems or look good in anyway.

As wayland is maintained by the same people I no longer have any faith in either project, if for no other reason a project run by bratty toddlers is not long for this world, the fact that they refuse to make any progress in any reasonable time frame was already bad enough.

That means that xlibre is the most up to date codebase now, and is api stable, which makes it the best choice going forward.

I have to congradulate the xorg foundation for making wayland a bigger meme then it already was, and proving the doubters right.

I never cared either way but now I do, and the 2 year back track was to protect and drive devs and users to wayland.

[steveklett]

I never cared either way but now I do

Exactly this. The way these projects conduct themselves, the slurs and name calling, cancelling, banning, etc. is repulsive. As a Linux newb I'm so disappointed and irritated by the distracting and ridiculous drama. I went into this thinking Linux was a serious environment with serious people, but I'm realizing it is significantly infected with mentally disturbed lunatics. Then there is this ominous sense of a corporate conspiracy to steer the Linux ecosystem in a certain direction. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

I'm very happy with Mint. It does just what I need and I hope I can keep using it. I hope they keep support for Xserver and make sane, mature and serious decisions about what's important for the project and it's future. Everyone needs to check all their personal, social, political bullshit at the door! Come on!!

[Axel-Erfurt]

The Lunduke Journal is the last bastion of truly independent Tech Journalism.

Rarely laughed so much.
The only thing the man is interested in is making money with stupid followers.
And unfortunately there are many of them.

[yggdrasil75]

The Lunduke Journal is the last bastion of truly independent Tech Journalism.

Rarely laughed so much. The only thing the man is interested in is making money with stupid followers. And unfortunately there are many of them.

isnt it illegal for you to call people "stupid" because your country is anti-free speech?
maybe check yourself before trying to call anyone out. especially when those you are calling stupid are complaining about a project removing 2 years of updates because of a personal quarrel.

[Heavygrass]

The only thing the man is interested in is making money with stupid followers.

When one has ZERO arguments, the only thing left to do is to attack a personality.

[cplittlfield]

Just for the record, from what I've seen, I don't trust Bryan Lunduke's take on anything.

The problems with the X11 protocol are real. They need to be addressed. The people who developed it feel that Wayland is now the way forward. Whether Xlibre will be able to make progress is a question, and I sincerely wish them luck. If they can overcome the obstacles the X developers ran into, more power to them.

The Wayland protocol is different, and making blanket statements about what works and doesn't work under Wayland is complicated, because what we are mostly critiquing is how a given compositor handles the protocol. There was only ever one X11 server, because the X11 protocol is complicated and extremely difficult to implement. Wayland is much easier to implement, so there are now a number of Wayland compositors available.

Furthermore, as has already been mentioned, some of the differences between the Wayland and X11 protocols are changes that make Wayland more secure than X11. The X protocol was based on a hardware and security situation that obtained forty years ago, before the UNIX wars; both hardware and the threat landscape have changed significantly since then.

I understand people's reluctance to change from a familiar element of the system to something new; however, I consider the mockery and sarcasm unproductive. I believe both the Xlibre initiative and Wayland are Good Things for the FOSS world. It is always good to have alternatives; they stimulate creativity. So I salute the X developers for moving on to Wayland, and I salute the Xlibre devs for taking on what is by all accounts a very difficult task. My only concern is about how much longer it will take for Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce to be able to fully support the Wayland protocol.

[yggdrasil75]

a lot of the supposed security issues of x11 do have fixes, and have for decades. its just that due to the complexity they are disabled by default, wayland requires them by default instead, and they may be mildly less complicated, but still requires extra code.
x11 has SECURITY and XACE extensions which should be included in any app that requires additional security but arent. wayland didnt need to be used to add security, x11 just needed the ui dev to actually just turn the security feature on.

[fosslover306]

Wayland is not the focas here, x11 and xlibre is and due to the 2 year backtrack the original x11 project is truely dead.

Wayland is a huge improvment but it still is not complete or properly supported, and throwing a tantrum to push users and devs to wayland is a very bad aproach.

The fact that the tantrum was triggerd by someone forking a project they admit was abondoned is the point of contention here, no bryan lunduke twist was needed.

All they had to due was say "we have moved on to a new codebase to create a new improved one, if you want to use modern versions of x11 please use xlibre because he has been the largest contributer for the last 2 years" left it at that, and kept working on wayland untill it is fully able to compete and this entire disscussion would not have started, gotten so much attenion, or effect existing users.

Those two years of work they reversed were bug and security fixes, feature enhancements, and security enhancements.

Xlibre not only is more up to date and secure then x11 because it actually has the pre-exsisting patches but because the thousands of change requests they have deleted, are now in the Xlibre codebase resulting in:

1. Better program isolation.
2. Some form of permission management.
3. Modern features devs have requested for the last 6 years.
4. Code optimization.
5. HDR support.
6. Display refresh rate handling improvements.
7. Still being easyier the swich to then wayland, requiring no major work, and for the most part it's a drop in replacment.

Xorg was so confident they could win the race fairly that they felt they had to kneecap x11, and slander xlibre just to win.

That's the raw facts, and we all must deal with that.

My opion is that xorg made x11 so good, and wayland devopment is so slow, frustrating and badly handled that x11 had to be taken out of the race so wayland would look better, and when xlibre showed up and started catching up, in order to save their plans they had to pull out all the puches to cripple xlibre even tho they were probably going to win anyway, and now they are mad and confused at why they are being boooed and hit wirh tomatoes.

They might have won this race, but lost a lot of support, and galvinized people against wayland in the process.

Interesting stratigy, we'll see how that works out for them.

[fosslover306]

Forgot to meantion, with the x11 codebase rollback some tweaks will need to be made to get some applicatons working correctly on x11, so why not switch to xlibre then? Afterall xlibre is now more api compatible then x11, and actually has a future.