On 2025-10-04 at 19:46, Philipp Kern wrote:
On 10/4/25 8:32 PM, Aaron Johnson wrote:
From a technical perspective, XLibre appears to offer several
contributions:
- Long-term support for X server as legacy X implementations lose
maintenance
- Continued security patches for X11-dependent environments
- Maintained compatibility for proprietary drivers where Wayland
support remains incomplete
Can we stop the charade? None of this is true. The maintainer got
their privileges from X11 removed because they were... not a good
maintainer and randomly broke interfaces that existing software
relied upon. And even introduced security issues with some of their
patches. And XLibre broke compatibility with the one proprietary
driver that actually matters here.
I would be interested in references for this. I do not doubt that it is
true, but the only reference I've seen thus far which might have gone
into detail about technical inadequacies of the XLibre maintainer(s)
goes through a Website which blocks access from the browser I use on my
primary computer (for site-security reasons, because that browser is
severely outdated - it's a long story, I'm working towards changing that
but it won't be soon).
Which leaves:
- Support for users who rely on remote X applications, specific
window managers, or accessibility workflows that aren't fully
addressed by Wayland
No-one is currently arguing for an X11 removal. I don't see how
that'd require XLibre of all things.
I parse the idea as being something like "because Xorg has been
declared unmaintained or similar upstream, it will inevitably bitrot and
become more and more broken over time, so it will cease to be a viable
option; in order for X to continue to be viable, it will be necessary
for distributions to switch to a new upstream; the only current
candidate for an alternative X upstream which has enough contributor
interest to seem potentially viable is XLibre". Thus the "as legacy X
implementations lose maintenance" bullet point, above.
There are probably multiple unacknowledged assumptions in that, and I
don't know how many of them I could even pull out and make explicit, let
alone how many of them have any validity. I do, however, think that
that's the argument.
To be clear: from what I do know about it at my remove, I am not in
favor of XLibre, do not intend to touch it with a ten-foot pole (despite
being wedded to a window manager which will never get Wayland support,
and to at least one X feature which Wayland AFAIK explicitly does not
support), and would prefer for Debian to not be involved with it either.
I do not, however, even pretend to have any say or sway in that last.