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Fedora 43 Change Proposal: X11Libre (system-wide) (discussion.fedoraproject.org)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A long time has passed since the last major release of the X.Org X11 Xserver. Even bugfix releases have become rare. Therefore, this Change proposes replacing the nearly unmaintained upstream with a maintained fork, the X11Libre XServer.

The upstream maintainer of X11Libre had been the most active remaining contributor to the X.Org X11 Xserver before the fork. The Change Owner is well aware of the controversies around the X11Libre upstream maintainer (FreeDesktop.org CoC violations, controversial political views, conspiracy theories, rants against Red Hat), but believes that the benefit of shipping maintained software outweighs the potential annoyances when having to deal with upstream.

There is no intent to ever replace the Xwayland implementation, only the standalone Xserver and its subpackages (Xnest, Xvfb, Xephyr), and possibly the driver packages (xorg-x11-drv-*).

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I think this is an effort by Fedora to deprecate X11 without pissing off a large chunk of their userbase by announcing deprication by fiat, as other distributions and projects are.

If XLibre is mostly one guy, who has demonstrated alarming gaps in his understanding of C, and who has a history of pushing regressions, the X on Fedora will become unstable and people will voluntarily switch to Wayland. Between those and people who will switch out of protest because of the maintainer's politics, eventually there'll be so few X users Fedora can say, "see? Nobody's using X, so we're going to deprecate it."

It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it's easier to believe than that Fedora's leadership is choosing to depend on an essentially one-man-fork with QC issues and a maintainer who keeps his controversial politics up front in the project README, before any other technical information.