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Comment by throwaway1482

8 months ago

Well-known developer Enrico Weigelt just forked the X server from freedesktop.org after getting the boot [0].

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[1] https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/commits/xlibre/prepare/

129 comments

throwaway1482

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chrismorgan  8 months ago

“Getting the boot” is rather vague. Is there any more information anywhere, background, &c.?

My general impression (quite possibly incorrect) was that X.Org Server is largely treated as “done”, making only bugfixes and such these days.

  • JimDabell  8 months ago

    From the readme:

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

    > This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.

    • hello_computer  8 months ago

      > moles from certian big corp are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project

      That's what I've always thought. The "X11 developers" pushing for Wayland weren't original developers so much as RedHat "maintainers," who (understandably) wanted a frontier to explore rather than janitorial work. All I know for certain is that X11 (even as of 15 years ago) mostly worked, while Wayland of 2025 is still full of headaches & breakages.

      52 replies →

  • moron4hire  8 months ago

    I don't understand why the link is to the commit list for a branch and not to the repo home page, unless OP was intentionally trying to have people avoid reading the README.

    The README contains a minor political rant that primarily complains about corporate influence but also takes a shot at DEI. The CoC page was intentionally left up with just the content "404". Reading between the lines, it sounds like toxicity all around.

  • bitwize  8 months ago

    It's abandonware. None of the grown-ups in the Linux graphics space are interested in maintaining it beyond the minimum necessary. I suppose new features could be added to Xorg, but anyone who actually knows something about the graphics pipeline is 100% committed to Wayland, so it won't be done.

    And Enrico's code was apparently so shitty and disruptive he's earned himself a ban from Freedesktop.org. Or is that because he associated himself with Lunduke?

AHTERIX5000  8 months ago

The more I read MR discussions regarding this the less I want to use the forked version. Not that anyone is going to ship it anyway.

mrweasel  8 months ago

That dude had a crazy amount of patches ready to go. I don't have the technical skills to judge if the patches are any good, but that's an impressive amount of work.

I'd be a little concerned that this is just one person doing the work, but we'll see if others join in.

  • ndiddy  8 months ago

    From looking at his Xorg contributions on FDo, his technical work amounts to mostly code style changes and cosmetic-level refactors in an attempt to clean up the codebase. In the course of this, he's broken the master branch on multiple occasions and introduced a large amount of churn in the Xorg ecosystem, all while not fixing any bugs or improving anything user-facing. The reason why he started this fork seems to be that his changes pissed off everyone working on Xorg who could review his MRs, so they started piling up without getting reviewed.

    I think this comment from an Xorg maintainer sums things up (from this issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797 ):

    > Changing calls pScreen->DestroyPixmap to dixDestroyPixmap doesn't meaningfully improve the code or make it easier to reason about. Moving byte-swapping of requests and events from one function to another doesn't make the code more robust. Cosmetic changes to the way length fields are written doesn't help with byte vs. word unit confusion, or keep you from writing the wrong amount of data. You're just moving the complexity from point A to point G, not reducing it.

    > It is possible to reduce the complexity of the code, by delving deep into the interactions between DIX/MI/FB/DDX to flatten the code flow, making some deep structural changes. Or by using structured (de)marshalling through XCB. Doing this would be incredibly risky, but at least have a much higher payoff than just cosmetic shuffling because it is 'cleaner'.

    > The immense value X11 has - that it always had and will have for decades to come - is its backwards compatibility, still being able to run 40-year old apps. You correctly called the codebase 'fragile' - you've been finding this out as your changes repeatedly break things. If you're breaking apps, then what exactly is the value in a codebase which is 'cleaner' to your subjective standard but doesn't actually work?

    • cowboylowrez  8 months ago

      "Proprietary Nvidia drivers might break: they still haven't managed to do do even simple cleanups to catch up with Xorg master for about a year."

      If nobody fixes this then the fork is dead in the water anyways.

  • toenail  8 months ago

    I hope so. I've tried to use wayland more than a decade ago, it was unable to replace xorg. Again last year, same story, and we get told that it's our fault because we need to adapt our workflows to wayland. I chose Linux because I get to choose how I work.

  • jeroenhd  8 months ago

    The MR that caused the drama that caused the fork to happen complained about this author doing tons of work to tons of legacy code with no direct user-facing benefit without testing his changes properly. From the sentiment of the discussion I gather this isn't the first time either.

    I think trying to improve the quality of such old code bases is good and "don't touch it in case something breaks" has caused more problems than it solved, but in this case the lack of testing caused X to die when someone runs xrandr. Not exactly a vague use case. Large restructuring work and taking care of tech debt is good, but it should go along with diligent testing.

    Until all the work is done, I don't think this will be a very stable alternative to X.org. I also don't think many people will follow this guy to the new project because the comments on the MR seems very "this guy versus everyone else".

    Even if the fork stabilizes, that's just where the journey begins. The X.org system interacts with tons of other systems (the kernel and GPU drivers, among others), so that work need to be kept up with. At the same time, developing all of the new features the dev wants to add will be pretty useless unless applications start making use of them, and they're not going to if the project remains small.

    If the anti-Wayland people unite behind this project and maintain their own X fork, there may be promise in this fork. But looking at the history, this is more likely to become another X12/Y11, or maybe a Mir if he can get a distro to back him.

jubalfh  8 months ago

just to be sure, the “well-known developer enrico weigelt” here means “a well-known bona fide german fascist enrico weigelt”.

  • msgodel  8 months ago

    Keep calling normal things people like or need fascism and you'll find yourself surrounded by legitimate fascists.

    • jubalfh  8 months ago

      well, some time ago i had a deeper look at his social media activity (including such niche things like devuan mailing lists or facebook), and that's my conclusion; and it's really not just because of the extremely stupid anti-vaxxer views he pushes.

sspiff  8 months ago

Is there any discussion about him being removed from the project on a mailing list or some other channel?

I can't find a "why" in the handful of PRs I opened.

  • ck45  8 months ago

    There’s some drama in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797

    • cwillu  8 months ago

      Wow: “xrandr doesn't work anymore on xorg-git” “I do not think this should be specifically on you, it is not unreasonable to expect that the author of a change tries their change before even submitting it upstream.” does not give a warm fuzzy feeling about the author of the at-fault patch leading a fork.

      4 replies →

    • chrismorgan  8 months ago

      An excerpt:

      >> I'm a aware that some people from Xorg development team think that @metux changes are not useful enough for various reasons

      > Apologies for being blunt, but I'm afraid it's more like "everyone except you" by now. He's managed to fall out with pretty much every other active project member.

      >> Xorg is dead anyway

      > That's not a reason for me though. I actually feel bad for Xorg users, Enrico's churn is causing pain for them for no clear benefit.

      There are evidently both technical and social issues at play.

      Later in that thread, Encrico/metux offers a defence, an explanation with detail that this is part of a mission to “make X11 great again”. Don’t read too much into the comparison (please don’t!), but one similarity with the American politician who has been using a similar phrase for the last dedcade is that they don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In both cases, some think the broken eggs are acceptable collateral damage toward a worthy goal, and others don’t. In this case, other X11 maintainers aren’t interested in making X11 great again, but would prefer to let it rest obsolete and minimally maintained; and so, taking the best interpretations I can imagine, it’s necessary for this Enrico to fork the project and go it alone. But he’s going to be swimming upstream against a raging torrent. And he seems to be making various mistakes in some changes that weren’t supposed to change behaviour, due to inadequate testing (he offers explanations that at least some consider reasonable; so the errors may not indicate a broader pattern).