Welcome XLibre! "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."
@strlcat @davidgerard not to be pedantic but is it really monopolization when the main developers of X11 have since move on to another project deliberately to replace the old?
Like to my understanding, it isn’t about “competition” in this case, but about moving standards from one system to another and making that work happen. Ie. we use computers in 2025, not 1985, and the way graphics for computers work has changed significantly from then til now, and part of the reason Wayland exists is to be able to modernize graphics on anything that uses it. So it’s a shift in standards vs Competition. Especially when it’s all X11 devs who moved on to Wayland and have generally stopped putting much work into X11 as is.
(And that isn’t even touching on most of the code added to base X11 from the founder of XLibre being reverted out due to breaking changes and weird modifications of licenses retroactively as people started looking over the commits and noticing some issues..)
Idk, I think a lot of the arguing around this issue is stemming from a handful of malignant actors that are deliberately throwing chaff into the wind and getting into everyone’s hair about it while fundamentally misunderstanding what is going on and why we have Wayland to begin with. Arguably deliberately misunderstanding for the sake of arguing and causing drama.
Are there technical issues with Wayland? Yeah! But there’s also a fuckload of technical issues with X11 as well, and the decision was made to focus on Wayland and modernizing graphics on Linux rather than maintaining something who’s primary promise of network transparency stopped being true decades ago.
@dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard
Wayland and systemd are both symptoms of the same behaviour, as was PulseAudio:
And that's the kind of thing that you can only get away with if you're able to act as a monopoly, by employing maintainers at key points across the ecosystem.
The biggest problem with Microsoft was not that their monopoly allowed them to be evil, it was that it allowed them to be stupid. A lot of things in the MS ecosystem are actually bad for Microsoft, but they're pushed out because no one inside MS cares enough to do the right thing and no one outside is able to fix the problems. I, personally, don't want the F/OSS OS ecosystem to end up like that.
@david_chisnall @strlcat @davidgerard
If all the maintainers for Old Thing have moved over to working on New Thing, wouldn't it be incredibly irresponsible of them to not declare Old Thing as deprecated? Is that not the literal definition of Deprecation?
X11 as a fallback option has been supported for well over a decade at this point. The goal being: Push people to the new standard so the new *standard* can be developed more fully and flushed out and fix the majority of the gaps.
*Standards take time to change, with all the presumed growing pains in between*. It's not easy to shift standards, but when the devs have flat out *moved on*, it's not about a competition between the standards. It's that people are moving on to a new Standard to work on.
We did have competing modern display protocols there for a bit. Do you remember Mir? Didn't Mir just flat out lose out in terms of gaining market share and so forth to Wayland?
Suffice to say, framing a standard shift as Monopolization is *really really weird* and fundamentally is at odds at the reality of what the ongoing process actually is. The developers *moved on.* Nobody stood up to take their place and continue developing X11 until recently, and even then the first thing that project did was break from the Standard (lol)
I understand the annoyances and the pain of this process: I've been daily driving Fedora Desktop since Fedora 11. But I also understood, especially in the early days, that Wayland was *heavily* under development and to expect bugs, and I went into it knowing full well that I could revert to X11 Fallback as necessary (which I used a ton in the early days!). We're well into a decade past that at this point and I literally have more issues in X11 than I do with Wayland. It's been like that for about 3 years now, personally.
But again: Calling it a Monopoly when the core maintainers just Moved On is, frankly, weird.
@dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard
I started writing a long reply, but then I got to the point where you literally did the thing I said in my sixth bullet point, and realised that there's absolutely no point in trying to have a discussion.
@david_chisnall @strlcat @davidgerard I wanna be super clear on this: I did not mean to come across as putting down the entirety of what you're saying.
I don't understand the monopolistic framing of the argument is the core of what I meant to get at. I didn't discuss X11 nor it's flaws at any extent, nor did I put down the legitimate issues people have had with it. Again: VERY legitimate issues! Nvidea with Wayland has been, as far as I know, effectively impossible until very recently, and even that is still in it's early stages of implementation.
I just don't understand the framing of it as a monopolistic move on the part of the developers when they've more or less abandoned the original project and decided collectively to move on to establishing a new standard.
I don't mean to come across as disrespectful or argumentative, I just don't understand the core framing device that it's a monopolistic move.
I absolutely agree that the processes of adoption could have been much cleaner and handled a lot better. Especially by the Gnome team. I super agree with you on that point.
But the monopolistic angle of it isn't something I'm understanding. It feels like a weird approach to angle and frame the argument that demands a double burden be placed on the maintainers. That very specifically is the part that I intended to get at, while sharing my understanding that the issue is one of Standards changing, not some type of hostile take-over.
Again: I don't meant to be dismissing you outright or to come across as rude. You've developed your opinion for a reason and I'd love to understand it better. But right now it's not making a lot of sense to me and I would very much appreciate more insight into your thoughts on it.
@dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard sure no problem, maybe sometimes I sound like an old chap, that's a known bug of my personality.
I used "monopolization" because there is well known player who pushes the agenda around not a healthy design choices recently (redhat) and no feedback on their design choices is taken. They just do it because they feel free to do it. If, again, Wayland was a grassroots initiative from community that would be great and welcoming. Because you actually CAN ARGUE with a community. Which is a non thing with some company which seeks to gain profits and screw you if you have your own choice. (just use this, you have to, its inevitable etc.)
Maybe am missing something? Surely I guess I do.
@dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard I wonder how BSDs are gonna to solve this. At least I do care about OpenBSD. Is there Wayland on BSDs?
As of monopolization clause, I don't care if this would be a grassroot move of a community. Heck I don't care even now. I don't need KDE nor GNOME, thanks, I'm fvwm2 user. But that recent movement, it is funded by redhat mostly? I do care if my right to choose is forcibly taken away from me !!
You know, Linux on desktop was a long-term failure on its own. (I am active Linux user for last 18 years, since 2007) It is still, because of that poor, weird design choices. When even attempts (good ones! No offense, they tried, I owe them respect even if I dislike how it is done) were utter failure.
Don't touch my working setup and am fine. Just don't touch my working setup and I'm fine.
@strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard
GNOME has given up all pretence of being cross platform at this point and is happy with hard dependencies on systemd.
KDE has not and the KDE Wayland compositor runs on FreeBSD (I haven't actually tried it on unmodified FreeBSD, but it runs nicely on CheriBSD on Morello, completely memory safe including the drivers!). Most of the new Wayland stuff runs on the same DRI drivers as X.org. It looks as if there are around a dozen other Wayland compositors in FreeBSD ports that use wlroots, I'm not sure if there are others that don't.
@LariscusObscurus @david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard Well, can't speak for others, and I need to workshop this thought a bit, but BSDs being dropped is a sign that maybe we're too hyperspecialized: "There's too much code to understand it all, even if you want to. You are relegated to contributing minor changes/features unless you were around when the system was small".
Yes, "we live in a society" and all that, but not a world I want to contribute to.
@cr1901 @LariscusObscurus @david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard
IMO "support" is a kind of confusing word altogether. It treats one side as an irreplaceable & immovable target, which is how it is for e.g. developing for Windows.
What people want when they complain about lack of support is really a kind of mutual compatibility. This isn't a property of either system in isolation really, but certain design choices can make you more or less of a "team player".
@LariscusObscurus @david_chisnall @strlcat @dvandal @davidgerard@circumstances.run Because non-monoculture has intrinsic value. Because it took us decades of hard social effort to achieve consensus about what things you can rely on being common between different platforms, and making sure those things suffice to write programs that do useful things, and that programs that want to do additional things that aren't common between platforms can easily make those things optional with graceful degredation... and some clowns show up and want to throw that all away because they think they know better and monoculture won't be awful again this time.
Same reason making websites for Chrome rather than web standards is an asshole move.
@david_chisnall I know of only 1 BSD developer/user who significantly contributes to GNOME, so it’s no surprise that support for it is being dropped when faced with the feature advantages of integrating more tightly with systemd at the user and session management level.
If you want GNOME to stay on BSD, people are going to have to put the work in to maintain it.
The maintainers of these components in GNOME already maintain many modules each. They don’t even want to be maintaining it on Linux.
@david_chisnall
That is just misrepresenting the facts in bad faith. Gnome has not "given up" on BSD. They wanted to move forward with features which relied on systemd on Linux and reached out to communities like FreeBSD, trying to work out solutions through with BSD could provide similar capabilities. There was close to zero interest especially by the BSD community.
So the choice was to drop working on these features or drop support for platforms to willing to meet the project half way.
Seems like an obvious choice to me.
@strlcat @dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard
I'm not aware of any BSDs that have made the switch away from X, or their own init and sound systems.
Whether that's stability or eventual obsolescence is not something I'm qualified to say.
@passthejoe @strlcat @dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard
On the contrary, they've all done one switch already, about a decade before systemd came along in the Linux-based world.
#NetBSD pioneered a major switch in rc at the turn of the century, with Mewburn rc, which #FreeBSD followed two years later. #OpenBSD has a similar, but incompatible, system that it switched to.
In further contrast, OpenBSD has run with #Xenocara.
@JdeBP @passthejoe @strlcat @dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard@circumstances.run
Some of the less popular choices are also excellent solutions. For example, sndiod on OpenBSD is the only audio solution that hasn't made me want to rip my hair out.
@dvandal @david_chisnall @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run Yeah, I agree no maintainer should be forced to work on xorg, alsa, or sysvinit, no matter how many users it has. And, yes, when the amount of maintenance effort drops it is good to let users and downstream know -- based on some threshold relative of historical effort available or new work needed coming in.
I say this as someone that still uses Xorg.
I do think monopoly / monsopony can definitely be issues, but the solution to that is having enough producers / consumers so that coopetition is the default, not shaming maintainers.
I think this means improving the experience of being a maintainer, and while compensation is part of that, being given a bit more grace by the community when you choose not to do something (like maintain sysvinit support) is important, too.
@strlcat @david_chisnall @BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal the problem with that is not that the maintainers don’t want to be forced to support sysvinit. The problem is that they actively work against those people who do, even when presented with working patches and an offer of supporting the sysvinit-using users of their package… from a fellow team member, even.
Basically telling users to use the new systemd/fdo/gnome/wayland/pa/pw/whatever thing or get lost and actively working against the mere possibility of supporting it.
@mirabilos @strlcat @david_chisnall @dvandal While I've heard of that happening, I don't see why a "soft" fork is not a suitable solution. Just publish a branch with the "sysvinit support" patches, and kick off the release tarball/build process whenever.
Debian maintains patches on top of upstream sometimes for many, many years. I maintained my own small patches against the kernel to enable a feature that "wasn't ready" but I needed for my hardware for nearly 2 years.
I fully understand a maintainer choosing to reject a patch *for any reason* and I support their rights to do so. If that becomes "censorship", then treat it as "damage and route around" the maintainer. (This does not require attacks, personal or otherwise against said maintainer.)
There are issues around namespace claims, but any resolutions to those issues will be specific to how the namespace is organized (hopefully [but rarely] democratically).
@BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @strlcat @david_chisnall I was speaking of Debian packages.
Incidentally I did soft-fork the tomcat9 package, as ${dayjob[-1]} had need, and it ended up being a hard fork. Still available in my own APT repo, still downloaded by several users even… some even contacted me to say thanks.
Only sad I couldn’t bring the improvement into Debian proper as the primary maintainer veto’d it… for use of adduser of all things… back when sysvinit support was still mandatory (and the package therefore rc-buggy).
@mirabilos @dvandal @strlcat @david_chisnall Never had the pleasure of being a Debian Maintainer myself, but I thought the technical committee was there to "encourage" maintainers to follow approved policy and accept patches for such rc-buggy things.
I do know such things rarely work out as well as they are designed to or even appear to from the outside.
I do know Debian is in a bit of a pickle these days because there are several upstreams that have significantly more "person-hours" available and are very difficult to patch. So, in order to make those package available at all ... "compromises" are made. :(
Thank you for maintaining an APT repo with your patched version! Even if I don't use it, it serve to illustrate the power of "bazaar"-style development.
@BoydStephenSmithJr @strlcat @david_chisnall @dvandal I thought so, too, but evidently nobody in power had any tuits left to care about nōn-systemd at that point after years of debate.
Meanwhile the "modernists" took that power vacuum and started removing cronjobs from core packages such as mdadm in favour of systemd timers (even many systemd people use cron instead). The GR only gave the mandate for init scripts, not cronjobs, but nobody cared. And maintainers who unilaterally remove init scripts don’t even coordinate with the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package maintainers to have a handover that doesn’t break existing users.
(Meanwhile o-s-s shipped a buggy tomcat9 init script that could never have worked because all versions of tomcat9 actually in Debian for which the package could have come into effect were uninstallable due to a hard Depends on systemd for its adduser thing, so all it ever did was to break mine, and it took months to get it removed.)
Communication. So important.
@wyatt @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @mirabilos Wasn't there there a Devuan (or smth) that was supposed to be Debian minus systemd? Did it die?
(Personally, I prefer systemd over sysvinit, so I didn't try it.)
@david_chisnall @dvandal @BoydStephenSmithJr @strlcat @wyatt it attracted the same sort of people X"Libre" did, so it’s not an option.
I also doubt their technical and manpower to keep anything working that is actively desupported in Debian.
I’d rather go with the security-supported option.
@wyatt @BoydStephenSmithJr @david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat weird, I have very few… mostly a package that just Provides: logind aptly called logind-considered-harmful (after having a look at elogind, which changes the system state in unpredictable ways, like lid closing crashes the system as it tries to suspend) and don’t use GNOME, so…
… ah, yes, and prevent-systemd-{installed,running,completely} install apt pinning to enforce it stays off.
All available from the wtf extrepo thanks to @wouter
@BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @david_chisnall @strlcat
This reasoning is based upon a fallacious dichotomy. In the real history, Upstart existed and had a strong competing maintainership, to the level that the #Debian TC itself was nearly split down the middle on #RedHat/#Canonical lines, and the choice was *never* between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd.
It was between #Upstart and #systemd, the latter indeed being a reaction to the former, with #OpenRC as a late entrant.
@BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @david_chisnall @strlcat yeah, the actual answer to continued X11 development is for someone to pay for X11 developers
if nobody is doing that, then that's your problem
if all you have is obnoxious nazis who can't code, your project is somewhere past dead
@davidgerard @BoydStephenSmithJr @dvandal @strlcat
You’re buying into the false dichotomy that the people pushing these things love. The solution space is not old thing with problems vs new thing with overlapping set of problems. Things like Arcan exist and actually solve the problems with X11. It even had a Wayland bridge that let you run Wayland things (though Wayland is such a mess of incompatible extensions because the core protocol didn’t solve most of the problems end users actually have that they gave up trying to support it) which even handles graceful reconnect if the display server dies, and has an X11 compatibility interface (still maintained) that even lets unmodified X11 WMs manage windows with a security model on top. Pretending that the choice is X11 or Wayland is exactly how people push Wayland. Something must be done, this is something, we must do it.
@dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard BTW don't get me wrong, am sick of long-term linux-on-desktop problems. Poor and buggy graphics driver support, X11 on its own is utterly complex thing, lack of integration, desktop environments fragmentation, poor design choices (hey dbus). Yeah, mostly because of us, its users, expectation that we can choose components freely.
At least X11 can work in the very end. It works fine and still serves me good when it comes even to online gaming. I don't like it, but it never failed me.
@strlcat @david_chisnall @davidgerard This is completely anecdotal on my part, but what you're describing is about what the process was like for me between 2014-2017 or so.
Around 2018 or so, I started mostly main-ing Wayland without having many issues with it.
I think a lot of this experience is likely from me explicitly not using NVidea graphics in general due to their overall lackluster support compared to AMD or Intel. I did very specifically pick my devices all the way through to avoid NVidea, and I think Wayland only recently-ish really came to NVidea. (Which I think is gonna mean a few years of lackluster support til that's really solidified, but it's gonna take some work to iron out that between different GPUs and so forth)
@strlcat @david_chisnall @davidgerard Yeah, super wanna be clear, I didn't meant to come across at all as disregarding your experiences at all, just sharing anecdotally what the process has been like for me :)
I think RISC-V support in general for lots of stuff is still a long ways off. I do want to see a lot more progress on RISC-V for stuff though, I'm really hopeful for seeing that architecture take off in a big way.
This is an aside, I haven't messed with tiling window managers outside of X11, but have you played around with any that do work with Wayland perchance? If you have, how was it/how do they compare to fvwm?
@dvandal @david_chisnall @davidgerard not much. Why shall I when I did all that hard work in past and settled with smth that just works? (Old sysadmin's rule 😸)
Tried tilings in like 2010~12, not my type of animal tbh. Tried Wayland enabled ones, missing high customization. I need to mangle my environment the way I want, possibly this is my inner past still prolific in me when I modified source code when I felt with smth not okay. Today am just lazy tho.
But don't worry, I'll be fine, ik that Linux on desktop is/was not a good idea from the very beginning. I will workaround it as I can, or will just migrate to serenityos when it will be mature enough.
(Evil voices already whisper that RISC-V can emulate x86 without much performance penalty, its just not there still, but soon will be. They do big breakthroughs, faster than ARM did. Who knows how my tomorrow desktop will look like)
@strlcat @david_chisnall @davidgerard Totally understand :)
I stopped distrohopping for similar reasons, haha.
Here's to a RISC-V future! 🍻
@strlcat mind, you're either very particular with regard to what you mean, or you don't know systemd architecture at all.
sure, systemd does more than sysvinit, but the main daemon is not tasked with more duties than other modern inits.
the main convenience of the systemd daemon suite comes from integration of the distinct moving parts, not from running in the same address space.
@dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard @david_chisnall oh, this is about Wayland initially (only read the OP (edit: wasn’t the OP but the top of the subthread I could see) now).
Wayland may be nice for some, but several (multiple, plural) ways in which I use computers are inimical to Wayland (i.e. Wayland was designed specifically to make these uses impossible), so I’ll rather not.
(But, since I recently read about a Wayland-only UI toolkit for Linux: is there a way to run single Wayland applications under XFree86/X.org including xrdp/xorgxrdp, with normal X11 WMs and all?)
@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run Wayland at least makes some sense: modern hardware now has process separation, and programs can operate in isolation without context switches until it's time to send the output to the display.
The same can be done in X11, as an extension, so that isn't even too much of a step -- it mostly switches the default to "hardware assisted separation".
That's definitely useful, what is wrong though is fixing more than one problem at the same time: they *also* want to start from a clean slate with the other protocols.
My feeling is that the people doing the GPU work and the people doing the protocol gatekeeping are different groups, so this could be solvable, it's just a lot of tedious, thankless work that has already been done for X11 by some greybeards who understand how software works.
@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard
All of that code is produced by Freedesktop[.]org, and it's the sole reason my GNU/Linux machines now crash. I switched to *BSD.
Consider Pulse Audio. It can only be used by _one_ user. And that user *must* be logged in. Thanks for turning my multiuser/multiprogramming OS back into DOS.
Udisks2 ignores /etc/fstab.
Systemd is completely inappropriate for use on servers. And it's impossible to debug boot failures.
@david_chisnall @dvandal @strlcat @davidgerard@circumstances.run I have poured most hours of my last 10 years of life into listening to users and pushing things forward on Wayland even if I personally wouldn't need the feature. I really saddens me that someone would think that Wayland developers don't care.
We do care, but we only have a finite amount of time in our volunteer life. Yes, we don't copy-paste solutions from X11: we try to fully understand the problem space and do better. This does mean that coming to us with technical solutions rather than use-cases tends to be met with "please, explain why you need to do this?".
I don't really know what you mean when you say that we silence criticism. I've read enough in the past years to guarantee that it's not silenced. I appreciate constructive criticism better than rants, rants tend to demoralize me.
I am also saddened about the conspiracy that big corp deprecates X11 against the community's will. There is no single company with a monopoly here, please take a bit of time to look at Wayland developers' employers. Personally, I'm ex-SourceHut and now just a volunteer (my day job is unrelated: SNCF Réseau).
I've never said that X11 was deprecated, and I always tell people to use whatever works best for them. The only reason why X11 has less activity nowadays is because X11 lacks volunteers. (We severely lack volunteers on the Wayland side too.)
People, distros, communities move away from X11 if/when they collectively decide that they should. Nobody's pulling the strings here.
David Gerard
Andrey Rys 🇨🇿
Demi Marie Obenour
Daniel V.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
LariscusObscurus
William D. Jones
Dan 
Cassandrich
Umbrella
Philip Withnall
flashfox
Steven Rosenberg
JdeBP
Russ Sharek
Boyd Stephen Smith Jr.
mirabilos
wyatt
fraggle
gunstick
Leeloo
HTTP 1.1/418 Teapot
Eckes 
flere-imsaho 🇺🇦
Leonard Ritter
Simon Richter
Steven R. Baker
Simon Ser
DrYak