Switching from Xorg to X11Libre is pure insanity
I have no objections the x11libre stack being packaged for fedora.
My objection for this change is the intention to replace xorg using obsoletes and provides, I would like this to be postponed to until fedora-46/47.
I doubt nvidia will ever support this dodgy xorg fork.
390xx and 470xx are legacy and will never get support for the X11Libre ABI
Why Replacing Xorg with a Recent Fork is Problematic
Replacing the established Xorg server with a recently created forkāespecially one authored by a developer expelled from freedesktop.orgāintroduces multiple risks and maintenance burdens:
Governance and Upstream Trust
The expulsion of the forkās author from freedesktop.org raises serious concerns about project governance, collaboration, and code of conduct. As a maintainer, relying on an upstream with unclear or unstable leadership is a liability, especially for infrastructure as critical as the display server.
Lack of Broad Community or Vendor Backing
The fork does not have consensus support from upstream contributors, hardware vendors, or compositor developers. Without this alignment, you risk shipping code that will diverge from widely tested paths and lack integration with major components like Mesa, DRM/KMS, input drivers, and Wayland/XWayland bridges.
Increased Maintenance Burden
Adopting a fork means assuming responsibility for patch vetting, regression triage, ABI stability, and security updatesāpotentially without the benefit of peer-reviewed upstream infrastructure. The cost to QA and CI pipelines alone can be non-trivial, particularly when coordinating across multiple desktop environments.
Compatibility and Ecosystem Breakage
A forked X server may introduce subtle or untested behavioral changes that break compositors, login managers, or legacy applications. It also risks falling out of sync with Xwayland, input stack changes (e.g., libinput), and driver compatibility (xf86-video-*).
Community Perception and Fragmentation
Deploying a controversial fork may be seen as implicitly endorsing a fractious split in the graphics stack, further fragmenting the ecosystem. This could reduce contributor engagement and erode user trust in your distroās decision-making process.
Recommendation: Unless the fork demonstrates clear, technically superior outcomes with strong multi-stakeholder supportāand a commitment to inclusive governanceāit is safer and more sustainable to continue tracking the existing Xorg upstream, even if in a maintenance-focused mode. Coordination with freedesktop.org and upstream projects remains critical to keeping the Linux graphics stack healthy.
Many Phoronix readers have been asking why I havenāt been covering news of the āX11Libreā fork of the X.Org Server or if I somehow missed itā¦ No, simply a vote of no confidence. Itās highly unlikely to succeed long-term given the very limited experienced developers / resources and none of the major Linux stakeholders (companies) backing
Breaking NVidia support in X11 was one of the reverted changes in XOrg.
And I hope that the Fedora change process is healthy and votes accordingly.
X11 has been dying a slow agonizing death for years, just let it go already. A fork from a single person (with questionable commit history and an unhealthy dose of paranoia and polititcs thrown in) is not going to change that, IMO.
This discussion might be more suited for the watercooler, though, but I do have a question: The callout at the top states āAs part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedbackā (highlight from me).
On the page of the change process, I did not find a way to actually provide feedback. How is this supposed to work?
We havenāt reached the point in the process where the proposed change proposal is formally open for discussion. There are a series of steps taken by the Fedora Program Manager leading up to the formal discussion period.
ref: expected flow
The rest I will leave for the formal discussion process.
Koflerās change proposal should be done. Open Source is all about userās choice. Everything around this topic recently has been someone elseās choice.
If done right, there should be a clear dialog for change this big:
Do you want to switch over Wayland? The following software is known to not to work with it:
o Yes, switch to Wayland
o No, keep using X11 Window System (X11Libre)
And ideally pull that list from a server and keep it up to date.
You clearly havenāt read the change proposal or understand the significance and impact of the change.
It isnāt about wayland, itās about switching from xorg to an untested xorg fork that is likely to last longterm.
And nobody is taking the freedom to get the source and to build it on your machine away from you.
However, I think it is a bad idea to waste resources on packaging one manās fork of what is essentially a dead protocol and make it appear that using it is a good idea.
This thread says that it has been dead for long time and untested - if you had followed Lunduke, you would know why, they ignored it and finally killed it when he exercised his right to freedom:
the person doing the fork is the core developer who tested it and fixed it, but got banned and canceled because of that.
The Fedora community includes thousands of individuals with different views and approaches, but together we share some common values. We call these the āFour Foundationsā: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First.Fedoraās Mission and Foundations :: Fedora Docs.
Go ahead and take those core values Freedom and Features away. You need to live by them in order to use them.
Correct. I myself use this argument often, kind of - in the context of should something be packaged to RPM. Linux distribution is all about the finished product. If you donāt agree, world is full of tar.gz files, go ahead and install them to empty hard drive.
Here youāre correct, itās proper argument to analyze if itās reasonable use of time and pain to package it.
But denying to someone else to do it on their time is another matter, itās politics and in this case dirty politics.
Fedora is full of packages and software which donāt work or do that they are supposed to. If you claim that it should be denied based of its quality or functionality, a lot of packages should go then.
Last time I did this was in the early 2000s. A great learning experience but also a great waste of time.
I both agree and disagree with you on this one. I cannot tell people what to do with their free time (thatās why we have a bazillion one-man show Linux distros out there). Thatās fine, itās their time.
However, you actually said that a Linux distro is about the product, the sum of its parts. So if Fedora were to ship X11Libre, it puts a stamp of approval on it that IMHO is undeserved.
And arguing for choice is fine but the problem I see is that most people donāt have the knowledge to excercise this choice. I often see recommendations along the lines of ājust switch to X11, it will work thenā. I have never seen anybody add āoh, BTW, if you do use X11, every X11 application you launch can then become a keylogger on your system, just so you have all the factsā.
Yes, they should, if one cares about the quality of the distribution with all its bits and pieces. If it is only about comparing which distro offers the largest number of packages for users to choose from, without actually caring if these packages are even remotely useful, then for me that isnāt a particularly good definition of a distro.
My grandparents are dead. Is there a useful argument hiding in there?
Thatās happening all the time, everywhere. Distros make sensible choices about what they support and what they donāt, because most users do not have the knowledge to make these choices themselves and/or do not want to invest the time to research every little detail.
Fedora ships systemd, not OpenRC or runit or ā¦ Why is that? Would be nice to have the choice, wouldnāt it?
Judging from a thread on FreeBSD forums, a lot of the code wasnāt very good. Not knowing enough about coding to judge, in cases like this, I tend to go with the opinions of those who seem to know what theyāre talking about.
In addition, they seem to have somewhat politicized it, which tends to make one sceptical.
I believe the guy behind the fork was chewed out on the Linux kernel mailing list by Linus for spouting anti-vax rhetoric (on multiple occasions) on said mailing list back in 2021. And then the following is literally in their GitHub repo Readmeā¦
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. Itās explicitly free of any āDEIā or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody whoās treating others nicely is welcomed.
See Wikipedia page about Sarcasm, it has pretty good help.
this thread is part of that make choices
most users donāt have - see my suggestion above about the dialog
you think your most users are average people which doesnāt match the reality. In contrary, over the 32 years my friends using Linux has moved over to Windows.
People using Linux desktop are professional developers, geek hobbyists or their parents, not normal people. I thought everyone knew that already.
There is a similar misperception about the target audience at server side, a lot of effort is done to produce a EL-distribution that has packages and versions that are useless with web that they typically serve. Take php for example.
Move from sh-scripts to compiled initscript replacement was resonable. How it was done and how systemd turned out, was a usual story like everything from that direction, many of us donāt like it. And since Iām not writing a replacement, Iām not running around complaining about it.
You seem to have the impression that personal attacks on me somehow make your statements more credible. They do not. Please stop and come back when you have actual arguments.
Thatās not my personal attack. Iām one of those mentioned myself. Above I was politely answering your questions. Nor donāt tell me what to do, Iām responsible of my own comments like everyone else.
