I work in a Linux heavy environment with my coworkers. Wayland is not an option, we develop games and do 3D stuff, it’s just not compatible with both software (crash) and hardware we use (a known problem in the space).
So our only alternative are X11 and Xlibre :
X11 has been unmaintained for years
Xlibre is very well maintained, they have been doing an amazing job making our life easier.
My question is: when will CachyOS catchup ? We have one obvious winner here and that would be great to have it as default option on i3, XFCE…
both should be available at least, there already exists an official xlibre arch repo with everything precompiled, I have no idea why they aren’t official arch packages.
But this is something the devs of arch decided, not cachy, cachy’s only decision was to not going out of their way to add it into the cachyos repos. (But I agree that they should).
They aren’t official Arch packages because Arch is about moving forwards not backwards.
and with GNOME/KDE dropping X11 entirely it makes little sense for the devs to cater to that Especially when 90 percent of the cachy user base is on wayland anyways.
only way i can see this happening is if Xlibre gets a lot more feature parity (unlikely because enrico has proven quite well he’s incompetent and it’s gonna take a lot more than one deranged maintainer to bring x11 up to snuff with wayland features) and 2 there would have to be capable X11 supporting, RELIABLE Forks of said desktop enviroments for it to even be worth considering. and both of those at minimum are years away, if they in fact materialize at all
Last i checked there are AUR packagies for Xlibre i imagine those will have to suffice,
Ah xlibre .. a politicized fork that claims it is not political.*
From their README:
Yeah, totally neutral..
Anyways this other quote (from a phoronix observer) seems pretty technically accurate:
* - And it definitely had nothing to do with bad behavior at the original Xorg. Beyond poor etiquette and the like. Trying to push changes that broke basic operability for users. Not testing changes before submitting. Throwing a tantrum when other contributors began to recognize a (lack of) standard of code quality coming from that submitter.
Yup .. it was ‘big tech’ trying to silence them and force the death of X11 for .. reasons ..
Impossilbe is not a term that exists for a real programmer. It was not impossible to make x11 support anything, it was just a lot of work that nobody wanted to do.
Until Xlibre it seems.
Whether or not you believe it’s political or not or that they can do it or not is besides the point, the real fact of the matter is it’s software that people want.
As the OP eloquently put:
X11 has been unmaintained for years
Xlibre is very well maintained, they have been doing an amazing job making our life easier.
That’s all the reasoning needed.
You’re the one getting political about it, not them.
Their Readme literally contains language alluding to being anti DEI they made their project political from the jump.
this is a fact and can be easily seen on their github.
and further supported by other things like the maintainer going on anti vax rants on the kernel mailing list until he was finally told to shut the hell up by linus himself.
Xlibre was always a politically charged project and pointing that out in and of itself isn’t political it’s simply a fact
The vast majority of distros aren’t touching xlibre with a 10 foot pole and for good reason,
The point was that its not an neutral or apolitical project.
I also believe the genesis and general PR wash they have attempted are not without their value in discussing.
And does it have what the users crave?
We have one post from a single user who joined a few days back .. for all we know its a sock puppet account for the expressed purpose of xlibre shilling. I dont know. Its not a huge sample size though.
What I do know is that the code was in a poor state when I did review it months ago and the sectarian situation at xlibre meant that between owning the libs, PR, and the set of folks willing/eager to work on that project meant that serious security concerns were present as well as common breakage of things like wacom .. or run away display server resource use .. etc.
They have the most lgbt ass screenshot I’ve ever seen right there, and the overall message here is “You’re welcome” and “Everyone who treats others nicely is welcome”.
They are as inclusive as it can get. They’re just not political about their inclusivity, when they say everyone they actually mean it.
If you have a problem with them after this clear message, then it’s clear that you know what DEI is really about, and that it’s not actual inclusivity but discrimination, and you have a problem with xlibre not being discriminatory in accordance with DEI policies.
My opinion is the world has moved on, X11 has not. X11 is not even on life support anymore, nor is any fork more than a vanity project.
Oh, and I was there when X (not 11, just X) was new and shiny. It was a long time ago. It wasn’t designed to be what we need today.
“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.”
Rerferring to DEI as discriminatory practices is textbook bigot tactics try again
i’m sure this pride screenshot if it is affiliated with the project at all is just some feeble attempt at backpedaling on this rhetoric
Yeah they put that one up after all the anti-queer memes being traded in the github issues that have now been made private.
Actually thats probably why they are explicitly using that kind of phrasing “is wayland gay?”
Basic misdirect with obvious dogwhistle language .. is obvious.
And none of that changes the fact that it is crap code, attempting to prolong a crap code base, that was done explicitly because they couldnt get on with it in a reasonable way over at Xorg. You can choose to believe that was because they were conspiring to hold it back on purpose ‘for reasons’ .. but I do not and see it as at least in part due to the quality of code (as well as behavior).
Maybe its even got more eyes on it now and has improved since then.
But I have about 0 microjules of measurable faith in this project and would not suggest it to anyone I even remotely care about.
It doesn’t matter which country you’re coming from, your politicial views, your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether you’re furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just an boring average person. Anybody’s welcomed, who’s interested in bringing X forward.
The pride screenshot is in their current readme man…
Actually thats probably why they are explicitly using that kind of phrasing “is wayland gay?”
It’s some stupid meme, also read the answer, not just the question lol, I dare you.
But I have about 0 microjules of measurable faith in this project and would not suggest it to anyone I even remotely care about.
That’s fine, but again, back to the point, there’s a lot of people who want this, that’s all the reason needed.
You guys are failing quite seriously with your arguments about xlibre being political btw, like wth man? Why are you so stuck on that?
It uses political language and does low-effort bad-faith spectacles like the image you tried to use as an example of inclusivity earlier.
I think thats telling.
And you dont think ‘make X great again’ is political then ..
I am beginning to have some doubts as to whether such confusion is at all earnest. Either that or some local propagandists have a very easy job.
Back to the technical - I still believe that it is inherently unsecure. Even if we assume all the memory leak, doesnt work on AMD, and similar such problems that xlibre introduced have been fixed.
And back to the ‘should it be in the repos’ - call me when there is more than a few people who want it. Preferably when it is in a state that you would be comfortable having your family use out of the box. But its also not up to me.
You can believe whatever the hell you want, it has nothing to do with the subject though, does it?
About 50% of linux users are still using X. No idea how it’s divided between xorg and xlibre, but as op said, the original xorg is unmaintained and hasn’t been updated in years. This is what creates the demand for xlibre and whether or not you personally like it or trust it is completely irrelevant.
Edit: Also I’d rather trust the majority of the 500+ xlibre contributors know what they’re doing than your take.
Not a dev, but the devs probably wouldn’t support XLibre due to its political leaning (being that they’re neutral in the grand scheme of things, and those dissing it don’t want neutrality).
I actually sent a tip to a tech news reporter about what I said about XLibre and the flak I got from it (because XLibre aims to be neutral), and it didn’t get reported (I sent them evidence of how people were bashing my take on XLibre being as good, if not better, than what X11 was, and that Wayland was a broken mess that was too complex to fix unless X11 got forked and Wayland was made that way).
I would love to share your opinion. Thing is, in the specific case of game dev and a few other heavy software we use XFCE has been the less buggy DE of all. Even Tiling/Stacking WM are buggy as hell (i3, hyperland, etc…).
Game dev on Linux with same tools used to develop AAA titles was a PITA a decade ago (Nvidia ). I think we’ve been through enough pain and we won’t make a move before having a more viable solution
Exactly. I think we should focus our discussion on how code depot of those projects is evolving. The real question is which one of Xlibre or X11 offers highest quality to CachyOS users and thus be adopted
). I think we’ve been through enough pain and we won’t make a move before having a more viable solution