This fork became necessary, because it’s the expressed wish of the
current Xorg group’s majority (IBM/Redhat) to abandon the project, let
it rot forever, and block any substantial contributions, let alone new
features. The sudden banning and censorship of all my work on freedesktop.org by IBM/Redhat employees, right after first news on a
planned fork came out, should have cleared all doubt about that. They
seem to believe that nobody’s supposed to fork any of “their” projects,
that’s why we’re doing exactly that.
Xlibre is a fork of the Xorg Xserver with lots of code cleanups and enhanced functionality.
This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics.
Right after journalists first began covering the planned fork Xlibre, on June 6th 2025, Redhat employees started a purge on the Xlibre founder’s GitLab account on freedesktop.org: deleted the git repo, tickets, merge requests, etc, and so fired the shot that the whole world heard.
I stopped reading what he had to say when he started ranting about DEI. “DEI” doesn’t even have any meaning when it comes to voluntary contributors; it’s just became a euphemism for people to use when the word they actually want to use is frowned upon.
I’m more worried about what this means for Linux as a whole. So many distros and projects seem to be attempting to cancel this lone dev at the cost of major functionality. Nothing in the Readme or the CoC (which literally is just “404”) are alarming. If you read past the DEI comment on the read me he lists all the things he doesn’t care about when it comes to identity. We should not have to care about your gender or color or whatever to write code. 90 percent of our time working on projects involves NOT paying attention to these trivial non issues that have been arbitrary enforcements in tech for too long and now are come back to bite Open Source in the backside.
The tech is what it is. Wayland is 15 years old and still doesn’t work for most of the stuff I do. My $1600 razer laptop can’t even run Wayland without chugging or crashing or having fits when I plug external monitors in. X11 is smooth and just works.
One thing about Open Source that we all hail is being able to fork abandoned projects and pick up the torch where someone else left off. Support of Legacy hardware when big tech and proprietary hardware becomes disposable and insecure blah blah blah. None of that seems to matter when one guy happens to have an unpopular opinion.
What happens to steam and gaming? What about upcycling legacy PCs and hardware with fresh Linux installs to reduce ewaste? This isn’t just about xlibre, it’s 32bit packages on the chopping block as well. Not for the same reasons but who’s gonna carry that torch?
These are very real implications and questions that need thoughtful discussions. Not around politics. Around real tangible project goals that don’t force external politics around gender, race, and orientation into a conversation that doesn’t require it.
Wayland works perfectly fine for most of the users. If you would have followed the forums, you would have seen that many issues dissapear when users switch from X11 to Wayland. So Wayland IS the solution.
A single guy who has absolutely no clue from what he is doing besides breaking the software stack, can‘t revive a dead and broken piece of software. He only tries to get attention by blaming others for his incompetence and spouting some lies. And you can‘t seperate a guy who is spouting lies and nonsense from a software project if he is the only „maintainer“. If you do it in public, you are responsible for your doing (also if you do it hidden). This is common sense.
If you can‘t behave, ppl will judge you by your doing. No matter what you are doing as your „job“. He should have thought twice before doing hate speech and conspiracy theories.
No problems with Steam and Wayland including Optimus setups here.
The way forward is to submit bug reports to get issues fixed. For most users, Wayland desktop environments do function as required.
Valve, (the company behind Steam), have invested significant effort into improving support for Wayland, particularly in making Proton and Wine function more reliably within Wayland environments. They have funded Vulkan components ( VKD3D and DXVK) to bypass older legacy X11/XWayland layers, and thereby improving the graphical experience for gamers. One of their key contributions is Gamescope, a lightweight, Wayland-native compositor designed specifically for gaming. In short there is a lot of active development going on.
I’ve been looking around, it seems the only thing Wayland is solid for is humdrum normies who use a web browser and play some games. Not power users with CAD design needs and artists with Wacom drawing tablets. KiCAD has an article up that lays it out pretty well. Some of the fundamental functionality X handles well are buggy at best and broken at worst with Wayland. That’s no good when a lot of people are power users who need global key bindings and total control over their system inputs. There’s a pretty big laundry list of stuff that needs to catch up to X11 for Wayland to be ready for wide spread use.
Kicad has some lame excuses why they slept the last 15 years and don’t want to support modern solutions. Some of the points which they use as excuse are already solved…
But whatever. There are always ppl which are stuck in the past. They pick on the last few glitches of Wayland and try to ignore that X11 is rotten to the core.
Graeme Gill, the developer of Argyll CMS tried to engage with Wayland developers as long ago as 2013 and was effectively told to piss off. There are now the beginnings of an API to enable colour management in Wayland, but it remains to be seen if they will work.
If the development of wayland is being led by ideology rather than design principles, there will be flaws. By design principles I mean respecting the needs and workflows of users so that they can transition without it impacting on their work - this is the basic requirement of any design process be it a kettle or a wooden spoon. People will switch if it can be shown that a new product improves or at least maintains, their quality of life.
Writing people off as boring old farts because Wayland lacks the features that make it possible to switch is bad design (and bad manners)
I’m hoping that, KDE Plasma 6 and Wayland will properly handle a 140 dpi screen …
When I looked yesterday, KDE Plasma 5 and Wayland doesn’t render fonts such as OpenType “Source Code Pro” properly …
Here is what I expect – with X11 –
Let me express my gut feelings here please: Xlibre is dead on arrival. The future is Wayland. Like we’re not going back to sysVinit, lilo and so on. FULL STOP HERE.
That’s why it’s a dogwhistle. The open source community is already agnostic to demographic information like this and absolutely anyone can contribute, so the complaint as it is literally written is completely nonsensical. His assertion that diveristy is racism is a statement that may as well be a 1984 quote. To complain about DEI in open source communities is to complain about the demographics of people who choose to contribute.
On the subject of diversity, anyone old enough to remember the time Microsoft launched Kinect and it just could not track Black people will be aware of the fact that diversity in tech is actually important regardless. Anyone tracking the current discourse about accessibility in Linux, including the effectiveness of screen readers and braille and how utterly unusable systems are to people with disabilities when these systems fail or are overlooked (eg buttons simply being labelled “button” for screen readers) should be aware of the importance of diversity in tech. This stuff does actually matter, and to complain about representation of groups actually impacted by tech having a role in creating that tech is short-sighted at absolute best.
It seems to me that most of this thread relates to applications and desktop environment, nothing to do with Wayland?
In all fairness, to be running linux you always seem to need two similar machines, one for test (alas I have a lot more than that), one for use.
@skrappjaw If I had a spare $1,600 to drop on a Laptop it would be a MacBook M4…
With my current setups, no issues with Wayland, all the stuff I need works, both hardware/software wise, but I started the transition here probably a year ago to figure out what worked and didn’t etc.
Edit: don’t loose sight of the QT5 → QT6 transition happening either…
I have a MacBook Air M3 – it’s nice – really, quite nice – provided that, you’re careful when setting up your Apple account …
I use a German ISP with an e-Mail account with a German domain, associated with my mobile telephone number [also provided by the ISP] …
When it comes to amateur photography with a basic equipment cost of > 1.000 €, the Mac is actually indispensable – especially with the new features of macOS Photos …
And, my camera’s RAW processing is only available for either macOS or Windows – guess what outperforms the Redmond offering …
Yes, yes, my main photography archive is stored in directories managed by digiKam on Leap but, for some items in a photography work-flow the Mac does a better job.
And now you know why I’m champing at the bit for Leap 16 and, hopefully, Wayland and Plasma 6 will handle photographic images with the same image quality as that of the MacBook …
That seems to have changed. I have Leap 16 running in a VM with 32-bit efi. Initially, I had to use Tumbleweed to boot it. But I have since been able to install grub2-i386-efi. Perhaps the installer doesn’t support this, but I upgraded Leap 15.6 to Leap 16.0 to get there.
