Hoorah! Hopefully big distros will at least offer an optional upgrade to this.
I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
Hoorah! Hopefully big distros will at least offer an optional upgrade to this.
I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
Xorg isn't neglected for "ideological reasons", it's neglected because development is work - and most of the people with knowledge of the problem domain decided they didn't want to work on Xorg anymore, and most of the companies that were paying for it decided they didn't want to pay for it anymore (apart from baseline maintenance, Xwayland and security fixes). And the people who want Xorg support maintained in perpetuity rarely seem interested in maintaining Xorg themselves, at least not properly (see this history of Xlibre introducing bugs and LLM slop).
You are free to spend your own time and resources doing the work, but you don't get to dictate how other people spend theirs.
Modesetting work was done in 2022, but for some reason no one had released a new stable release of the Xserver with this patch included since then. This was one of the reasons Xlibre was created, there was all these improvements to Xorg sitting ready for release but never being released.
Exactly. Just think about how much work it was to move from X to Wayland, how Nvidia didn't want to play ball, how different the architectures are, in a world where ossification is very much a thing. AND STILL there was enough momentum to get all the major players on board. I have never done any X programming but it must have been bad when people would so readily jump ship and put all that work in. Same for systemd.
Wayland was simpler because it was just a compositor. It meant people interested in graphics acceleration could focus on just that, iterating faster without the friction of the rest of the stack. But now that the Wayland ecosystem has to reinvent everything else, it's clearly at least as much work, if not more so. The initial switch moved the tightly knit rendering developers to a better local optimum, at the expense of a worse global optimum.
It forces some kind of modularity. Maybe that is a good thing. We don't have all features of X11 in Wayland but we also have features in Wayland that are missing in X11. I have been on Wayland for a while now and I can't say I am really suffering. There are some tings I'd like improved further but the protocol is evolving all the time. I think we'll get there. Also the decision is already made by the big distros anyways. They seem to be mostly happy.
> It forces some kind of modularity.
Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland put an end to such initiatives.)
The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
Luckily there is XLibre if the xorg developers can't develop X any more.
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I don't care about either X, but that guy's name is in this release, and judging purely by the number of commits (since I lack X expertise to judge any other way), he seems to be the top contributor.
Looks like there's no way you can avoid "conspiracy theorists" if you want to use X, including Xwayland, eh?
Metux (Enrico Weigelt) was banned from the Xorg project because his patches kept breaking things, often in ways which demonstrated he didn't even do the bare minimum before pushing commits. Like, adding code which didn't even compile. It's fascinating to look through the huge pile of commits they had to revert after banning him, to see how bad a lot of it is. I picked a few at random, and ... wow.
So he started his own fork.
The ban didn't seem to have any relation to politics or personal behavior. However, he was widely known for being ... how to put it in a way which is acceptable here ... uh, difficult to deal with. Like, after Linus Torvalds made a vow to be nicer, he made an exception just one time... for metux. He was the only person obnoxious enough to get Linus to break his vow. Which, if I recall correctly, was how he ended up focusing on the Xorg project. After getting booted from Linux, he picked a different project.
That's who is in charge of XLibre.
Things didn't get political until he announced the fork. Because, although politics had nothing to do with him getting banned (either time), he framed it as if he was being targeted for political reasons, and used inflammatory political language in the project's documentation. This gained a lot of attention and caused a lot of controversy, and also had the effect of ensuring the contributors all had mostly the same political views.
Anyway, the number of commits doesn't tell much of the story. The content of the commits (especially the reverted ones at Xorg) are far more enlightening.
It looks like it's under more active development currently, however I don't see them adding many big new features at this point.