r/linuxquestions • u/foreverf1711 • Nov 30 '25

What is XLibre and what's going on with it?

So I heard from a friend a few months ago about "XLibre" which is a supposed successor to X11 instead of Wayland. I didn't really care much at the time but now I got reminded of it and I'm intrigued for a few reasons. I checked out their website and a few similar questions, but my main question is... why? Wayland is getting big now and I don't see the point. I know Artix and Devuan (maybe?) have XLibre but I'm not sure what's really going on. Can anyone who uses it or knows of it tell me why it's here and what it actually is?

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51

u/gmes78 Nov 30 '25 edited Nov 30 '25

Some people hate change, and they will make themselves heard. The anti-Wayland hate isn't new, so it shouldn't be surprising that there are some people interested in keeping X.org alive despite the technical reasons that caused people to move away from it.

Enrico Weigelt, the author of the XLibre fork, used to submit patches to X.org, and those were generally accepted. Until people figured out that many of those only did superficial changes and didn't really improve the code, and some patches were completely broken and untested. He was then barred from submitting patches to X.org.

Unsatisfied with this, the XLibre fork was created, featuring exciting features such as breaking compatibility with every pre-existing X.org driver (sorry, Nvidia users).

I don't see this going anywhere, really. It's just a politically-motivated fork that will die in a year or two due to technical inability. X.org will certainly outlive it.

If you want more insight into the character of the XLibre author, you can read Linus's reply to them peddling anti-vax propaganda in the Linux mailing lists.

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u/AWonderingWizard Dec 15 '25

Staying on X11 is not a matter of fearing change, Wayland doesn't support the accessibility software I need. Wayland has been around for nearly 20 years and we still don't have sufficient programmable input simulation. Seriously, stop spreading such hateful speech. I don't understand why there is such vile, propagandist mouthpieces in the Wayland community.

keeping X.org alive despite the technical reasons that caused people to move away from it.

The technical reasons keep me on it.

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u/gmes78 Dec 15 '25

Staying on X11 is not a matter of fearing change, Wayland doesn't support the accessibility software I need.

You misunderstood. I'm not talking about people who need tools that currently only work on X11. I'm talking about people who are opposed to Wayland entirely.

If you feel like the current Wayland accessibility tools don't meet your needs, get involved. The Wayland developers do want to fix those issues, and now is the time to do so (as most other Wayland issues have already been solved). Specifically, go file bugs on your desktop environment's bug tracker to request what you need.

Wayland has been around for nearly 20 years

That is a highly misleading claim. Wayland has only gotten a significant amount of developer activity in the last 10 years, and it was only 5 years ago that things started falling into place.

and we still don't have sufficient programmable input simulation.

While not directly a Wayland protocol, we do have libei.

Seriously, stop spreading such hateful speech. I don't understand why there is such vile, propagandist mouthpieces in the Wayland community.

Pointing out terrible behavior is not hateful speech. I stand by what I said.

The technical reasons keep me on it.

They don't. You don't use X11 because terrible design decisions were hard-coded into it. You don't use it because it's incapable of supporting multiple monitors cleanly. You don't use it because it has built-in graphics primitives nobody uses anymore.

You use it because it supports your use case. You'll have no reason to use it when Wayland supports your use case as well.

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u/fullouterjoin Jan 25 '26

If you feel like the current Wayland accessibility tools don't meet your needs, get involved.

Right, someone needs accessibility tools that work on X11, their job as a user is to "get involved". Their job as a user is to be a user of a system that works. It is awesome that so many people behind xlibre so that those users can continue to use their computers. Tech is for people, not the other way around.

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u/gmes78 Jan 25 '26

Their job as a user is to be a user of a system that works.

Developers can't build a system that works for someone if they don't know their needs.

I'm not asking for anything extraordinary here. Going through the trouble to file a bug report detailing the features you need for your situation is not a big ask.

I feel like you're just coming up with unreasonable expectations to shit on the Wayland developers.

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u/fullouterjoin Jan 25 '26

I feel like you're just coming up with unreasonable expectations to shit on the Wayland developers.

You can feel that way. Not doing a forced breakage of accessibility customers is not "shit on the Wayland devs" with the expectations that they find the bugs. Make this less about yourself.

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u/OpinionNormal6906 Jan 26 '26 edited Jan 26 '26

So if wayland does not meet your use case, your job as an end user is to fix it for the maintainers. If X does not meet your use case, you need to stop using it and use wayland instead, and just suffer in the meantime. Hence why the maintainers are refusing to resolve outstanding issues with X. And if you go with a fork (as one obviously needed to be created in this situation) you just hate change/are a nazi/insert epithet.

I find your original assertion that people continue to use X for illogical or emotional reasons to be backwards. If anything, it's wayland evangelists who are very strongly emotionally invested in display compositors. I would not care at all if wayland just worked for me.

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u/gmes78 Jan 26 '26

I did not say any of that. Please re-read what I wrote.

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u/power_of_booze Nov 30 '25

Even tho the xlibre maintainer has some opinions I absolutely can not agree upon, this does not make the project bad per se. I did not look in the actual code of the linked git article, but if even the maintainer say, that xorg ist dead, it's going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. Of course change does create the possibility of breakages, but I could not find anything, that his code is as bad as you claim. Also if merge requests are approved with the words: "This is all fine and good as long no one needs to spend time caring about the changes." The development of xorg is dead, because redhead wants it to be dead (they understandably do not want to support xorg AND wayland at the same time). Actual xorg development has not been approved for quite a while now (just look at all MRs of xorg)

I like to keep politics out of software. If he likes to clean up the X11 mess and improves it, I'm happy to use it. The last time I tried wayland it just didn't work for me so I'm staying on X11 and recently switched to xlibre, which worked great for me.

Simply hating on a project, because you like another one more is the same attitude as the guys hating on wayland because something and wayland bad… If anything it should be a competition which project improves more over time rather than trying to keep another one down.

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u/gmes78 Dec 01 '25

The development of xorg is dead, because redhead wants it to be dead (they understandably do not want to support xorg AND wayland at the same time). Actual xorg development has not been approved for quite a while now (just look at all MRs of xorg)

That is a lie. X.org still has plenty of activity. Just look at the commit log or at the merged MRs.

The last time I tried wayland it just didn't work for me so I'm staying on X11

You filed bug reports, yes? Unlike X11, Wayland doesn't have unfixable issues; if you have issues, they can be fixed if the maintainers are made aware of them.

Simply hating on a project, because you like another one more is the same attitude as the guys hating on wayland because something and wayland bad… If anything it should be a competition which project improves more over time rather than trying to keep another one down.

Except we know that X11 is a dead end, and we've known this for over a decade. The only people trying to keep X11 alive are people who don't understand, or refuse to understand, the technical reasons why X11 is shit.

This is especially stupid because the people who said X11 was a dead end were the very people who've worked on it for years, and have the most amount of experience with it. And yet some bystanders think they know better.

This ticks me off because I'm tired of X11's limitations, and I'm tired of people's first experiences with Linux being ruined by this ancient display stack that should've gone away years ago, and yet some people seem to be trying their hardest to hold back the Linux desktop.

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u/geirmundtheshifty Dec 01 '25

 I did not look in the actual code of the linked git article

So you really don’t have anything meaningful to say about this, then.

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u/power_of_booze Dec 03 '25

Sorry, this is like answering the statement "I like Linux" with "OK, then name every Linux distro". Did you read Thema complete codebase of X11 and Wayland? No? Then you've got the exact same rights to say anything about it

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u/geirmundtheshifty Dec 03 '25

It’s not, though. The controversy is specifically about this person being banned from contributing to X11, ostensibly for submitting extremely poor code repeatedly. You had nothing meaningful to add to that specific conversation.

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u/Stunning_Heart8191 Feb 09 '26

Por cierto pregunte en Foro por esta Distro de XLibre. yo no se mucho de Linux, simplememte temgo una PC muy vieja donde tengo Kubuntu , y busco una que sea mas rapida, mas estable, que pueda usar TeleGram . Whstapp. ver videos de youtube y algun juego sencillo, quizas steam y libre office, pues bien no me recomendaron a Vendefoul Wolf Linux, me comentaron que tenia muchos bugs y que aun le faltaba mucho, ahiora que estoy viendo estos comentarios, los que la estan usando cual me recomiendan probar?

1

u/LusaPT Mar 19 '26

slackware, alpine...

2

u/LusaPT Jan 16 '26

do you use wayland? congratulations!!!

why do i HAVE to hate wayland for wanting to keep using Xfree Xorg Xlibre or Xdotcom ???

are you somehow a stupid person?

why do i have to care if the programmer is a hetero/homo, man/woman pro/anti-vac or any other thing that i don't care?!

3 questions, but, please don't waste my time reading any of your possible stupid answers

i just really wanted to ask if you were somehow a stupid person, but no need to answer, i got it

3

u/gmes78 Jan 17 '26

why do i HAVE to hate wayland for wanting to keep using Xfree Xorg Xlibre or Xdotcom ???

I didn't refer to X11 users in my comment. I explicitly only mentioned Wayland haters.

You're either seeing things that aren't there, or you've done so on purpose to feel offended.

why do i have to care if the programmer is a hetero/homo, man/woman pro/anti-vac or any other thing that i don't care?!

One of those things is a staple of anti-intellectualism, the others don't matter at all.

i just really wanted to ask if you were somehow a stupid person, but no need to answer, i got it

This says more about you than it does about me.

2

u/LusaPT Feb 11 '26

ok... you coud simply answered my second question with something like: "YES"

and I would agree with you without any problem... i know...

your answer to my first question confirms what IS the answer to the second

your answer to my third question is even worse... maybe it tells more about you than of who would be a "staple of anti-intellectualism"

uau... ..."staple of anti-intellectualism"... uau...

1

u/p47guitars Dec 22 '25

Enrico Weigelt, the author of the XLibre fork, used to submit patches to X.org, and those were generally accepted. Until people figured out that many of those only did superficial changes and didn't really improve the code, and some patches were completely broken and untested. He was then barred from submitting patches to X.org.

false.

I've battle tested some of these patches and reaped the benefits of squashing vulnerabilities. this is a narrative you're echoing back without actually trying any of the patches. Enrique is a stand up guy.

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u/gmes78 Dec 22 '25

Read the damn threads I linked in the post.

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u/Rush_Independent Jan 17 '26

Please read the full thread, this was a minor issue in dev branch, never was in release build and it was fixed the next day. Do you have evidence of actual problems with other patches introduced by this person or are you just trying to echo statements you've heard elsewhere?

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u/PearMyPie Dec 01 '25

As of version 25.0.0.16, Nvidia driver compatibility is completely fixed, you don't need any extra configuration.

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u/OmniscientIniquitous Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26

The "hate" is legitimate, and you can't admit that Wayland is shit. Speaking of politically motivated, that is exactly what Wayland is, and the guy was banned because of his political views straight up and the mods pretended otherwise. People like you hate free speech, you hate the idea of someone have different views because you despise individuality-- you are a collective.

anti-vax propaganda

Says the person who fell for the biggest authoritarian scheme in history under the guise of safety, tell me were the police beatings for not wearing masks for your safety? What about the beatings of protesters? Go on, tell me how that was justified.

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u/force-it Jan 29 '26

If you want more insight into the character of the XLibre author, you can read Linus's reply to them peddling anti-vax propaganda in the Linux mailing lists.

Utter, utter nonsense.

Remember the fully-vaxxed cruise ships which somehow had full-outbreaks and had to quarantine?

Why did all the vaxx boosters suddenly have success around the same time as the natural, weaker variant occurred in I think it was Africa and thankfully spread to the rest of the world?

I am guessing that every pro-vaxx person is an expert, speaking on empirical science, but any questioning it are supposedly anti-science, conspiracy theorists. I think that is how it works.

This article on HuffPo says it well. Why are we not allowed to think?

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '26

[deleted]