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Comment by gf000

3 hours ago

Reviewing PRs and merging them requires great effort, especially in case of a non-trivial behemoth like X. Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value, someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right?

Not having enough maintainers, and some design issues that can't be solved are both reasons why X was left largely unmaintained.

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gf000

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diath  3 hours ago

> Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value

There were a lot of MRs with valuable changes however Red Hat wanted certain features to be exclusive to Wayland to make the alternative more appealing to people so they actively blocked these MRs from progressing.

> someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right?

That's precisely what happened, one of the biggest contributors and maintainers got bullied by Red Hat from the project for trying to make X11 work and decided to create X11Libre (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver) which is now getting all these fancy features that previously were not possible to get into X11 due to Red Hat actively sabotaging the project in their attempt to turn Linux into their own corporate equivalent of Windows/macOS.