X11 is in its twilight years, with most Linux distributions and desktop environments already moving on to Wayland. Still, there’s a fresh attempt to breathe new life into the project. That said, this revival hasn’t come without its share of drama, and right now, it’s being driven by a single developer. Here’s what it’s all about.
In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,” Weigelt released a statement saying:
This morning, Redhat employees banned me from the freedesktop.org gitlab infrastructure – so censored all my work (not just on Xorg). They killed my account, my git repos, my tickets in Xorg and closed all my merge requests. And then making fun on social media about it.
It’s now clear that freedesktop.org is the Redskirts, and they want to kill X. By the way, the same corporation that tied to proprietarize a lot of FOSS code, including the Linux kernel (and I’ve been one of those who warned them about terminating our license grants them).
Just to be clear, I didn’t want to fork, I tried my best to work together with the Xorg team. But I knew for long time, this day would come. Xorg has been captured by Redhat, in order to get rid of destroy competition. The necessary consequence is a fork, more competition.
Together we’ll make X great again!
In other words, according to Weigelt, the primary cause behind this action seems to be his decision to fork Xorg into a new project named Xlibre—an initiative aimed at revitalizing X11, an older but foundational windowing system for Linux, and making tangible progress where development had stagnated.
Interestingly, Weigelt noted a historical parallel—comparing his experience to Keith Packard, a respected figure in the FOSS community who faced similar exclusion nearly two decades ago. Packard’s departure eventually led to the creation of Xorg, marking the end of its predecessor, XFree86. Weigelt foresees a comparable trajectory for Xlibre.
So, he launched Xlibre’s new GitHub repository and established a mailing list to rally support and community involvement.
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.
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say Red Hat is afraid of X11 making a comeback. But let’s be honest—there’s no denying that some of the big names in the Linux world seem to be pushing their own agendas behind the scenes. And at times, those moves look a little out of step with the spirit of free and open-source software.
However, although it is off-topic, I’d also like to bring up something else related to the developer in question. About four years ago, during the COVID pandemic, Weigelt made a highly controversial comment on the Linux kernel mailing list that many saw as an attempt to politicize the discussion.
This ended up prompting a pretty sharp response from Linus Torvalds. And this isn’t the first time Weigelt has taken a stance that’s stirred up controversy.
Whether Xlibre — the new project aiming to revive X11 — will succeed is still up in the air. We’ll likely get a better sense of that in the coming months. I think it’s going to be incredibly difficult.
X11 is an enormous undertaking—far too much for any developer to handle alone. Without strong backing from the broader community, it’s hard to imagine the project gaining enough momentum to truly take off.
To be honest, I just don’t see it happening. Most of the major players in the Linux world — including leading distros and the big desktop environments — have already dropped X11 or are well on their way, shifting instead toward Wayland, which is widely seen as the better, more modern, and more secure solution.
Anyway, according to Weigelt, the debut version of XLibre Xserver will arrive soon, bringing “lots of code cleanups and enhanced functionality,” as mentioned in the project’s announcement. Once recompiled, most Xorg drivers should function seamlessly with Xlibre, though there are exceptions.
However, those using proprietary NVIDIA drivers may face further complications, as compatibility updates from NVIDIA lag significantly behind the current Xorg master branch. While Xlibre actively seeks workarounds, no guarantees can be offered at this stage.
As always, we will monitor the situation closely and keep you updated on any developments.
Go Xlibre!
https://cdn.nostrcheck.me/f3113d60bc3f0bc4b55854f532bf80f673a1f5c0b37d21ecf6b83365072a7860/91d9f4cb71d32df0f0d47028853c057c5e0d16868033d43226014da6ff019049.webp
Amazing image!
I spiced it up a little bit. 🙂
https://modulate.cc/public/xlibre_screen_logos.jpg
There is a fundamental flaw with people’s understanding of this debate.
From a comment above: “X11 has a ton of security issues and is not safe to use”
This is incorrect. You’re lack of understanding why this is incorrect is why you haven’t grasped why Wayland has perpetually had issues since day one, and doesn’t seem to be maturing… for some reason. Why is that?
That is because they don’t understand security abstractions. The endless attempt at integration of a security layer is the sole issue, the whole time. Trying to shoe-horn application privileges and isolation into a compositor is ridiculous and doomed from the beginning.
Which bring us to X11. Wayland user’s famous last words are, “X11 has security problems”.
In order for something to have problems with it, it would have to exist first. X11 doesn’t have security AT ALL, and it’s not an accident either!
What the Wayland team has continually tried to do, relentlessly, is the equivalent of trying to create an abstraction for SSL and trying to integrate it into HTTP. That’s weird, incorrect, and the entire reason that Wayland barely stable and has never achieved compatibility.
I created these .md files (technical breakdowns) to help explain the entirety of what’s going on.
Xorg vs. Wayland: Debate on Security and Flexibility
https://modulate.cc/public/Wayland_vs_Xorg_History.md
A Fork in the Road: The Emergence of XLibre
https://modulate.cc/public/Wayland_vs_XLibre.md
—Jason R. Cravens
(Cross-Platform Systems, Network Admin/Security, Web Dev, Software Debugging. 23 years. Bash, Python, JavaScript, PHP/AJAX, NodeJS) 🇺🇸
So, in your view, how can you achieve the per-app permissions in X-land ? Similarly to what Wayland tries to do, but actually working ?
Now, that’s the proper way of thinking. Kudos. Because that is what Wayland is over-killing with individually isolated applications AND blocking shared memory access (that’s the crazy part, honestly).
“XACE is a set of generic “hooks” that can be used by other X extensions to perform access checks. The goal of XACE is to prevent clutter in the core dix/os code by providing a common mechanism for doing these sorts of checks. The concept is identical to the Linux Security Module (LSM) in the Linux Kernel.”
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/security/XACE-Spec.html
“AppArmor is MAC style security extension for the Linux kernel. It implements a task centered policy, with task “profiles” being created and loaded from user space. Tasks on the system that do not have a profile defined for them run in an unconfined state which is equivalent to standard Linux DAC permissions.”
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/LSM/apparmor.html
Cross-application security should have been a primary focus of theirs 8 years ago.
Now you got me thinking even farther in. This might be actual malevolence…
LSM, what XACE was modeled after (not integrated into, just conceptually), has always been available for leveraging. They are insisting on implementing app security at system level, have nothing but complaints about inter-application operations, yet they never considered LSM? This idea of a kernel-cooperative IPC system is something that you’d think would be the natural evolution of the development. They had to have tripped over it ten times. That could actually enhance security while allowing communication between applications.
This is what I was saying last night about Sway. Just the fact a compositor has become so popular sort of points to a BIG GAP in the original Wayland design.
I don’t think they are bad developers, is my point. Something’s going on.
there is better ways to handle it from X.Org Foundation, out right banning him not one of them
anyway death to x11 and wayland is getting better every year from my testing
peace.
I wouldn’t say wayland is better as is controlled by E-Corp. an better explanation would be from this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwTo6wvX768
I find it laughable that people are bringing up “anti-vax” as if this guy’s a kook. But that’s another matter, given the new revelations about mRNA. Linus was dead wrong then, and if he holds the same views now that the actual evidence is out, he is kookier than this dude.
He has PLENTY of commits, and is a prolific XOrg contributor. The fact that you don’t like his politics shouldn’t matter a whit when it comes to OSS. DEI is a cancer, and so is woke ideologs pressing Wayland because they perceive the ‘new shiny’ as somehow better.
If his project fails, fine let it fail on its merits… not some political agenda and veiled “right wing” crap. I’m frankly tired of the OSS community being overrun with fascists who think anyone who isn’t to the left of Mao is a Nazi. National Socialism is as bad as regular socialism.
Stop politicizing things that don’t need it. RedHat DID kill Xorg. Just like it wants to kill the GPL. RedHat is IBM. IBM is RedHat… and software patents are their game. Make no mistake, black boxes and binary blobs are what they crave.
This fork is a repudiation of that. And to think otherwise and label someone a kook because they are skeptical of government is laughable and anti-OSS
“given the new revelations about mRNA. Linus was dead wrong then”
I’m sorry, what ?? You can’t just make such a bold statement and not elaborate.
The dude was talking about a new species of humans spreading the spike protein all over. Are you saying there is now scientific evidence of that ? Are you positive you’re not a kook yourself ?
Ultimately, this is completely irrelevant to the XLibre topic, but it does make the developer look a bit odd.
You’re unaware of the reverse transcription process that can occur in the liver as soon as within 6 hours of taking the vaccine?
https://www.mdpi.com/1467-3045/44/3/73
if only you had any idea what that paper says. I bet you didn’t read it. I bet if you did, you had no idea what most of it meant. I could educate you, but it’s so much easier to ignore foolish anti vaccine nuts. They’re kind of irrelevant anyway now, considering we can see the results of the vaccine. You know, no mass deaths, we don’t have to wear masks anymore, or stay apart from each other.
But you don’t care what actual experts think. You only care about the lies you’ve been fed, and are now shitting out to the world. Like a child writing on the wall with feces.
These are great. McKernan cite’s every paper throughout the video, and the Dr. Martin video’s description is excellent. It cites the patents being referred to in chronological order, and is really more of a transcript.
Kevin McKernan Vs. Paul Offit
https://modulate.us.to/jsonurl/index.php?alias=mckvoft
Dr. Martin Patent Findings
https://modulate.us.to/jsonurl/index.php?alias=cfc60
Dr. Mikolaj Raszek is excellent, as well.
https://www.youtube.com/@Merogenomics
X11 has a ton of security issues and is not safe to use. This project wants to ensure your system will remain vulnerable to security issues that can basically not be fixed with how x11 does things.
If X11 has a ton of security issues, where are those vulnerability reports and exploits of those security issues? Given that X11 is still is widespread use, we should see people and companies using X11 being hacked every day. But we don’t. Think about that.
You’re already cooked if a hacker can execute arbitrary code on your system – whether you’re using X11 or Wayland.
Fine, show me a single malware in the wild that exploits X. Just one. You can’t? That’s because any of the so-called “security issues” are purely theoretical and require the threat actor to execute code on the target machine. At which point you can just bypass the GUI (any GUI, be it Wayland, X11, or even raw framebuffer) entirely and just drop any info you want out of the target.
All one has to do, is search up x11 exploits. Or x11 security. Or x11 cve. They’re most certainly not theoretical. And have, can, and will be used in the future…
But sure, tell me more about your degree in computer science.
I never have issues with wayland on ubuntu and have been using it for years. This entire project is a waste of time and will only cater to a small group of people who complain constantly that also use old outdated pc equipment that should have been replaced years ago.
It’s not your call to make when people have to buy new pc hardware. It’s not the job of any OS developer to make that call either. it’s not the job of Wayland to decide which GUIs I’m allowed to run or to develop.
Going this route will lead to users being allowed to use only Wayland approved hardware and Wayland approved apps … and Wayland blocking software of other vendors … leading to a Wayland universe with other vendors locked out.
The nightly ritual of Pinky and the Brain, with Brain always asking, “What are we going to do tonight, Pinky?” and Pinky replying, “The same thing we do every night, Brain! Try to take over the world”.
PC—Personal Computing—accounts for 1% of 1% of Linux installs. Linux is not designed for this though it can cater for this limited type of computing that normie consumers and receptionists like.
Wayland partially works in this environment. It is great for turning a general purpose computer into a video game console. Or on the secure front, a secure browsing kiosk (despite breaking encrypted keystrokes).
For the rest of Linux (i.e. clusters, thin computing, terminal application servers, broadcast/editing suites, home labs, keystroke encryption, distributed computing) Wayland is not usable, and won’t ever be without breaking changes.
For a huge server farm where i work that is being used by people from all the around the world for many purposes x11 is not needed and has not been for awhile. X11 is dying regardless of what this person does or most people think especially when the people like the ones I work for just use whatever the major linux distros offer that we use for the backbone of what we actually do. People like the ones I work for do not really care about this debate and they just use whatever is being pushed and supported and works when migrating to newer os and software and I basically have little say over it and just do whatever they want which seems to work anyways. At home I also use linux for many purposes and x11 is also not needed for anything I do and I have not had any issues with wayland for years.
They really need to stop all the drama involved with X11. It opensource software meaning it’s free as freedom. If they need to charge a fee to keep the project going so a few developers have a steady job or to help with the support in Ukraine to keep it free like democracy. As a suggestion, they should just make the X11 server pluggable so they can accept both protocols via plug-in or add-on.
You left out the paragraph after it:
> It doesn’t matter which country you’re coming from, your political 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.
This is the key difference between a sane person that by definition rejects DEI, and an insane person that just prefers DEI with the polarity reversed (aka right-wingers).
it is about that DEI is also just hateful prejudiced discrimination, and in no way better than e.g. MAGA. It just reversed the enforced mouth corner orientation, that’s about it.
Well said, people who push DEI want to make it seem as if the only alternative to DEI is another form of exclusion. They create a false choice to try and position their ideology as the only good one, when in fact it demands conformity of views and actively pushes the community it takes over towards political engagement on behalf of others, often derailing the project and excising non-cult members in the process.
as he sits anon behind his keyboard. “waaa waaa, I don’t like consequences for my actions, waaaaa”
He should name is XOutlaw.
XLibre just has no soul, no fire.
Embrace the rejection of the woke and corrupt.
“are you sure you want to platform him?”
Always better to know what people are cooking up (bad,good, or nutty fruitcake) unless you believe in the IngSoc slogan
“Ignorance is Strength!”
I finally tried Wayland on two different computers and had nothing but stability problems and crashes. X11 has been rock solid for me for years. Wayland still has a ways to go. For me, X11 works and Ashland doesn’t (running Plasma Desktop).
It will never “go” anywhere.
I realized this recently: Wayland is _not_ about the software. It is about the *deity!* About choosing Wayland as your Jesus.
The infinite state of unfinishedness is the point. You must love it no matter what! It will *never* be finished.* Otherwise it could not be a test of your love!
Anyway, I’m coding my own thing now. Neither X nor Wayland. Took me literally one evening to get something up and running in Haskell, using SDL2 and its kmsdrm driver. Next step: 9P2000 integration of the GL and render surface interface… aaand we’re done!
(* Just like the Soviet Union conveniently forever stayed in a “transitioning to communism” limbo with the convenient transitioning government ruling forever. [Communism by definition has no central government, and is actually very compatible with libertarianism. Just with such human things as empathy instead of lizard-thinking.])
P.S.: My nick has nothing to do with New Jersey or Russian war btw. Just because I noticed it might be misunderstood by Muricans.
Communism doesn’t really work with Libertarianism except on small scales where the contradictions don’t surface, because Libertarians are allowed to think, act and own property as suits them so long as it doesn’t violate NAPs. Communism on the other hand requires moral/ethical and intellectual conformity – it requires its participants to have undergone socialist transformation to think and act collectively to the point that a ‘semi-state’ (the USSR, CCP, DPRK) in no longer required to impose and organize the people within. This never happens because it is counter to human nature and the semi-state simply carries on as a quasi-fascist dictatorship until it collapses or transitions away from socialism.
The problem is that for all the talk of how great wayland will be, we are still waiting. It’s fractured (by design) and fickle, though it does generally work pretty well these days with kde. Mostly, most of the time. Maybe wayland will eventually get there.
In the meantime, X still works. It’s been all but killed off, but it’s still as good or better than Wayland in all but a few cases, and where it is lacking, there is no technical reason it can’t be improved.
If gnome or kde drop support for X, then it will be game over.
GNOME, Ubuntu, and Fedora announced they were dropping it, just in the last few days.
“Ubuntu 25.10 will no longer support the X11 display server for its GNOME desktop, transitioning exclusively to Wayland.”
I took the opportunity to transition exclusively away from GNOME
I would remind everyone here that X11 remains needed, and Linux is not the only UNIX-style OS out there; far from it. The BSD’s continue to make frequent use of X11, and for good reason. Additionally, X11 is how Cygwin runs traditionally UNIX GUI programs on Microsoft Windows machines. Therefore, should someone choose to keep X11 going, then I consider that a good thing.
X11 is going to continue to be used less and less even with this project even cinnamon will have full wayland support before long.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200000
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760#note_2631460
https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/linus_torvalds_vaccine_smackdown/
RH did an alike trick with spacewalk. Anyone could take over spacewalk. However it was denied to SUSE.
Hence the fork uyuni.
also wayland is still shoddy to me.
Given his documented history of routinely submitting merge requests that borked the Xorg code (because he didn’t bother testing the changes beforehand), I doubt this project is even going to be usable, let alone adopted by any distros in the future.
If you have actually documented yourself, you’ll find that the merge requests that borked X11 were not meant for release. Having normal releases is also something that the other Xorg members denied
What do you mean “normal releases”? You don’t push garbage to main.
You should not have let his quote stand by itself, the CoC team is composed of multiple members. You can assume that this was not a decision made by Karol alone and you can assume that Red Hat was not involved in it. On top of that, the while the CoC team doesn’t publish any findings, you can assume that they even contacted him prior to the account deletion. I would bet that there is more to this story than pure Red Hat doesn’t want him to make X great again.
These are the members of the CoC team and unless I missed that Red Hat bought the SNCF, SFC, Valve, and System 76, you should not have blindley quote his statement that Ret Hat banned him. On top of that the X.Org board can overrule decisions by the CoC team, and since there is no statement from the board so far, that means that they likely agree on the decision.
Lyude Paul (Red Hat)
Karol Herbst (Red Hat)
Simon Ser (SNCF Réseau)
Daniel Pono Takamori (SFC)
Antonino Maniscalco (Valve)
Victoria Brekenfeld (System76)
Ah, Lyude Paul, the unsympathetic individual who canceled Vaxry (Vaxry was just occasionally adding code to Freedesktop for Hyprland) for something one of Vaxry’s Discord mods has done several years ago and which lead to moderation policy changes in order to improve the Discord community.
It was funny to see the hateful stuff Paul was hosting on his/her social media accounts. CoC people never stick to their own rules.
> while the CoC team doesn’t publish any findings, you can assume…
“Look, sure, there’s no documentation available to back up any of my assertions, but you should totally just assume everything is fine”.
Lol.
I wish them well but I don’t expect much. Red Hat didn’t kill X11… in fact they kept it alive long after it was in hospice.
They sabotaged the project. If you want to go by the historical record, Wayland is not going to come through this, especially now, and despite being primarily the software’s fault that we are even talking about this. It now takes second place.
They better hold on to every decent dev they have with dear life. Everyone just watched RedHat sabotage half of the entire Linux community. They doubled and tripled down. If you are a developer watching what RedHat is doing to X11, how comfortable would you be with joining one of their projects after seeing what they will unreservedly do to their contributors?
It’s the world’s biggest backfire, in awhile.
The framework was gong to eventually kill it anyway. It had enough time to show maturity, twice over. Now they have fostered serious developer skepticism in their decisions.
They have, quite literally, nefariously attempted to force the entire Linux community to use software that is not truly production ready. There was no reason to refuse to merge thousands of updates from over two years. They quietly tried to let it rot, in hopes it would start failing people.
How many updates has Wayland had over the last two years?
There hasn’t been a single code change allowed to X11 in two years and it’s still destroying Wayland. Think about that. There is a fundamental reason why that is too.
Let me learn ya something, kid.
https://modulate.cc/public/Wayland_vs_Xorg_History.md
lol
Another slop drama article
Bobby every time he sees a undefended schizo: gotta write an article about him
Linus called out this cookoo person years ago.
A dev who keeps breaking stuff for the sake of it https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#note_2801234
are you sure you want to platform him?
https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20181010.191925.ee1331b6.en.html
Do you want to make a case for what you actually take issue with in that discussion? Or is this just an attempt to deplatform someone you already hate.
Based