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Fedora 43 Change Proposal: X11Libre (system-wide) (discussion.fedoraproject.org)

submitted 1 month ago by DollyDuller@programming.dev to c/linux@programming.dev

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A long time has passed since the last major release of the X.Org X11 Xserver. Even bugfix releases have become rare. Therefore, this Change proposes replacing the nearly unmaintained upstream with a maintained fork, the X11Libre XServer.

The upstream maintainer of X11Libre had been the most active remaining contributor to the X.Org X11 Xserver before the fork. The Change Owner is well aware of the controversies around the X11Libre upstream maintainer (FreeDesktop.org CoC violations, controversial political views, conspiracy theories, rants against Red Hat), but believes that the benefit of shipping maintained software outweighs the potential annoyances when having to deal with upstream.

There is no intent to ever replace the Xwayland implementation, only the standalone Xserver and its subpackages (Xnest, Xvfb, Xephyr), and possibly the driver packages (xorg-x11-drv-*).

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[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 20 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

There was a thread about this a few days ago. That guy who did the fork is nuts. A WW2 Nazi apologist.

And as I said then, Xorg is already Libre.

Without some facts to back it up I question phrasing like "most active remaining contributor". Or "actively maintained" vs what? Just "maintained"? I want to see the stats before I believe this is more than steering the narrative.

This person picked a good time to throw a fit and draw a lot of attention to himself.

People say we should leave politics out of it and concentrate on the software (meritocracy) but I question that. I mean, the way this is going you just can't leave that guy's motivations out of the equation.

You can imagine the way the discourse about this proposal is going, but I randomly picked up one comment I wanted to share excerpts of anyhow:

(...) Fedora accepting X11Libre into the project would betray its users and imply that Fedora is fine with the statements made in its readme.

However, even putting that all aside, I see technical concerns. Obviously, there’s the fact that a lot of the commits made to X11 by metux before he forked off were found to ultimately cause regressions and not have been tested properly and have been reverted. The issue with the licensing in headers is minor, but also noteworthy given how critical licensing is to FOSS projects (...) and it is not a good look to mess that up so easily (...). Even more than all of this, however, is something I recently found on X11Libre’s github:

github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Fix incorrect power of two operator
master ← dec05eba:fix-pow2
opened Jun 9, 2025

2^16 is 2 xor 16 which equals 18, not 2 to the power of 16 which is 65536

metux did not understand that ^ was not the exponent operator in C. That immediately, to me at least, throws some serious doubts on the quality of the commits made by him (and, to an extent, his ability to properly review PRs). To not know such a key feature of the language the project is largely written in is… frightening, at least to me. It does not inspire confidence in the rest of his code for something as large and low-level as an X11 server, compounding on the existing concerns about his prior commits to xorg having to be reverted for causing regressions.

[–] tazeycrazy@feddit.uk 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Accepting something this premature into the project would cause stability issues. Even if he was a computing wizard one dev with a day job and conspiracy forms to keep up with is not able to do the maintenance that Xorg needs.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 points 1 month ago

The proposal has been scrapped already.

I think maybe the person who proposed it did it to get the whole topic out of the way - from now on they can point every belligerent to the decision made.

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