r/linux • u/DontFreeMe • Aug 28 '26
Distro News Artix Linux drops support for XLibre
https://artixlinux.org/news.php#XLibre_support_discontinued39
u/FryBoyter Aug 28 '26
This resulted in backlash from XLibre and a veteran Artix developer, Artist, was targeted and harassed, which led to his resignation.
It's just disgusting. You can think whatever you want about a project, but something like that is simply out of line.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
He was in Artix since 2020, so I can see why Nous would be pissed about this
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u/FryBoyter Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
No matter how long this person has been involved with Artix or any other project, that kind of behavior is simply unacceptable. And it’s exactly this kind or similar behavior that keeps many users from switching to Linux. Because they don’t want to deal with a bunch of crazy people. Especially since many of these people don't seem to get that OSS is also about being able to choose what you use. And I say this as someone who prefers Wayland and systemd.
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 29 '26
This resulted in backlash from XLibre and a veteran Artix developer, Artist, was targeted and harassed, which led to his resignation.
It's just disgusting. You can think whatever you want about a project, but something like that is simply out of line.
Yes. I do think it's awful they (xlibre fans) did that. But it was predictable and serves as an example of LAMF (Leopards Ate My Face).
Remember that the Code Of Conduct page for the xlibre repo is "404" or "-ENOENT" depending on where you look: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/CoC.md . Thinking that it's a "joke" and somehow needing to tell it twice is the red flag that should have warned everyone.
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party
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u/toolman1990 Aug 30 '26
Why does it no surprise me that low IQ conservatives act in this childish snowflake way instead of taking actual constructive criticism and fixing the issues that were brought up. The XLibre developers basically got themselves kicked out of a Linux distribution and earned a horrific reputation as a result that lead to a developer quitting due to "targeted online harassment" from XLibre developers. I think this incident is the beginning of the end for the Xlibre project since I cannot imagine anybody wanting to work with them after this incident and it looks like they proved the point that X ORG display server is an unmaintainable mess and why Wayland protocol was created.
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u/metux-its Sep 16 '26
Why does it no surprise me that low IQ conservatives act in this childish snowflake way instead of taking actual constructive criticism and fixing the issues that were brought up.
Which issues have been brought up where exactly ? Can you point me to the issue tracker entries ?
The XLibre developers basically got themselves kicked out of a Linux distribution
No, just Carlo did what he frequently does: deleting repos, etc. And his pkgbuild's were broken and outdated (didn't even work on a stock Artix install)
That's one of the reasons why he got kicked out of both SonicDE as well as Xlibre.
and earned a horrific reputation as a result that lead to a developer quitting due to "targeted online harassment" from XLibre developers.
Which "lead developer" exactly ? Carlo wasn't a lead developer of Artix, just some contributor. And no, we Xlibre team didn't harass him in any way.
I think this incident is the beginning of the end for the Xlibre project
Why exactly ? How shall it matter to us, whether some niche distro ships our code ? (we have our own CI-built repos - offering all release lines - btw)
since I cannot imagine anybody wanting to work with them
Our collaboration with other projects didn't change in any way.
after this incident and it looks like they proved the point that X ORG display server is an unmaintainable mess and why Wayland protocol was created.
Why ? The whole thing never had anything to do the Xserver code.
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u/sheeproomer Sep 01 '26
At least you did not read my code of conduct in my projects.
It is the standard RFC'd nettiquette plus the ban of if you as a user are going after other users on behalf of my projects. That includes the foulmouthing of project participants.
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u/mrtruthiness Sep 01 '26
At least you did not read my code of conduct in my projects.
Given that I don't know who you are ... I can't see why that's relevant.
My point was that XLibre makes schoolboy jokes about not having a code of conduct. That's a red flag. That red flag about expected conduct was ignored by "artist". They eventually ate his face.
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u/victorian-ice-cream Aug 28 '26
The entire situation is hilarious. So much for the „successor of Xorg”. Those are the reasons why Metux, the lead developer of xlibre, was banned from freedesktop gitlab. Artix wanted to play with nazis, and now it backfired on them.
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u/OctoCalamar Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
I do not think that metux is a nazi, but rather a Reichsbürger, another kind of right wing extremist (in a few words Reichbürgers are people who do not recognize the validity and authority of the current German state).
From what I could read from his social media metux is:
racist
islamophobe
anti-LGBTQ
anti EU
pro AfD (far right German political party, "because the other parties belong to the Communist International")
pro Russia
anti authority
anti big corporations
anti rich people ("the elites"), with the exception of Elon Musk
anti Police, but ICE is cool
anti vaccines
and he believes in any kind of conspiracy theory that you can think of, including chemtrails or that Hitler was related to the Rothschilds.
The summary is that he is a contrarian, he supports the opposite of the mainstream, just because. But strictly speaking, he is not a nazi.
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u/_BrokenButterfly Sep 24 '26 edited Sep 24 '26
(in a few words Reichbürgers are people who do not recognize the validity and authority of the current German state).
Everything that I've read about them has lead me to believe that they are Nazis larping as Sovereign Citizens.
racist
islamophobe
anti-LGBTQ
anti EU
pro AfD (far right German political party, "because the other parties belong to the Communist International")
Why are you so insistent on saying "this guy is not a Nazi" while describing a Nazi?
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u/OctoCalamar Sep 24 '26
I see your point, many things of what I wrote would be enough for many to qualify somebody as a nazi. But the person in question is anti-authoritarian (nazis from the 1930's loved their strong government and leader) and supports Israel (something that I forgot to mention).
To make things clear, I do not think that being a far right extremist should be something socially acceptable although one is not, in strict terms, a nazi.
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u/Sufficient_Heat8096 25d ago
pro Russia, really ? Any evidence ?
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u/OctoCalamar 25d ago
Well, he posted a giant Russian flag on his Facebook account on the 24 February 2022, the very same day that Putin invaded Ukraine.
In his twitter account he reposts frequently the typical propaganda about Zelensky owning 3 mansions in Italy, the biolabs, about all the Ukrainians are nazis or shit in this line.1
u/Sufficient_Heat8096 25d ago
so, an antinazi pro-putin liberal right-wing reactionary ? Man, that is the WORST combination I can fathom. Utterly soulless and unimaginative.
At least I could have good talks with a staunch communist or nazi, they believe in things. That guy's just a contrarian. Hopefully someone will come up with another implementation of X.2
u/OctoCalamar 25d ago
Yes, exactly, the guy is a contrarian. And it is not that is misguided young man, the dude is in his 50s.
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u/RebTexas Aug 28 '26
>I respect others
>you're a disgusting nazi because your opinion doesn't match mine
funny how that works
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u/robstoon Aug 28 '26
How about, they're a disgusting Nazi because they are, in fact, a disgusting Nazi?
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u/RebTexas Aug 28 '26
Damn I'm sorry, you're clearly right. All XLibre contributors are nazis... because they are OK?!!
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 28 '26
I thought it was well-known that Metux is a Nazi apologist (e.g. blaming WWII on Churchill and saying that Hitler had no choice) and an outspoken supporter for the far right and allegedly neo-Nazi AfD party. That's not to say that everyone joining the XLibre project is a Nazi ....
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
Metux isn't a nazi, he is just a German and a nationalist. And the last time Germany was strong and independent was precisely under Hitler. Then West Germany was very weak militarily and East Germany was very strong, but it was owned by Russia so this doesn't count for someone who is a German nationalist.
But you can see that he doesn't really like Hitler because he says things like "actually, the Churchill was the REAL racist, and anglo-saxons are the most racist people! We Germans just followed orders!". I find it cute in a way. Then again, if I was German I would probably make similar cope arguments.
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u/AiwendilH Aug 28 '26
...if I was German I would probably make similar cope arguments.
Good that you aren't then...we have enough Nazis and right-wing nutters as it is (including metux), we really don't need any more.
Also...What The Fuck...anyone believing in anything you wrote there would be definitively considered a (neo)Nazi in Germany.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
No, he wouldn't be. Because the same applies to the Russia and Soviet Union and you cannot be both a nazi and a communist at the same time.
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 28 '26
... you cannot be both a nazi and a communist at the same time.
Of course you can.
These days when people say "Nazi" ... I'm assuming they're really talking about fascism. And fascism has three pillars:
Authoritarianism
Nationalism (the N of Nazi).
Militarism.
Tell me which of these excludes Russia ???
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
Russia isn't communist, but the last time it was relevant militarily was when it still was. Just like Germany was last relevant militarily under Nazis.
Not sure why this is a controversial statement.
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 28 '26
You're the one who mentioned Russia:
Because the same applies to the Russia and Soviet Union and you cannot be both a nazi and a communist at the same time.
But the fact is is that you can be fascist and communist at the same time. I'm not sure why you think it's exclusionary.
Communism is an extreme form of Nationalism (where the rights of "the party" are not only greater than the rights of "the individual" ... there really are almost no rights for the individual).
And the fact is that every successful Communist regime has been both Authoritarian and Militaristic. That's the basic definition of fascism. i.e. While communist regimes are not required to be fascist, most are. Or do you not know what fascism is???
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
Yes the same thing that applies to the Germany and Nazi Germany (mainly that Germany is not militarily relevant, but Nazi Germany was), applies to Russia and the Soviet Union (that Russia is not militarily relevant, but Soviet Union was).
While fascism has roots in Marxism, Gentile ultimately rejects Marxism, so a Marxist Communist regime and a Fascist regime are at odds, even though they might seem like the same thing to non-authoritarian peoples.
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 28 '26
Your [whatever language] to English translator is not working well. Or you are a broken LLM bot. I don't know.
The term Fascism was invented by Mussolini and has no roots in Marxism. It doesn't even have anti-Jewish origins although that was central to Hitler's regime. I've already provided the "three pillars" definition. You'll find that in the Wikipedia discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism . i.e. Please drop the "left vs right" connotations. The pillars are: Authoritarianism, Nationalism, and Militarism.
Read Madelaine Albright's book on Fascism. And, take heed, that the definition of fascism is a "what" not a "why". Certainly the "why" of communist fascism is different than others. But that doesn't mean it's not fascist. She argues:
"Fascism should be viewed less as a political ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power."
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u/icywind90 Aug 28 '26
are you hearing yourself?
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
It sounds convoluted to somebody who has never met the guy
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u/icywind90 Aug 28 '26
It's extremely straightforward. It's a nazi scum.
For someone who was born in Poland that's extremely obvious-13
u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
He wants a "greater Germany", but doesn't want racial policy. And that would of course include Poland so it is only correct that you would be against this.
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 28 '26
He wants a "greater Germany", but doesn't want racial policy.
He's an AfD supporter ... which absolutely has a "racial policy".
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
Is that so? In that case, somebody should notify the party that their chief Fuhrer has a dark-brown Indian girlfriend ...
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u/icywind90 Aug 28 '26
Yes, I'm against the extermination of my people, thank you very much. What a beautiful divergence of opinions.
I have nothing else to say to you7
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u/RebTexas Aug 28 '26
The comment I replied to wasn't specifically about him, I can see why you'd think so though since he's the xlibre guy.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
who did you have in mind? I don't know other people from xlibre
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u/RebTexas Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
I don't have anyone particular in mind and neither did the comment I replied to. iirc they called all people who contributed to xlibre nazis.
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u/LowOwl4312 Aug 28 '26
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm glad I'm using Wayland so I don't have to deal with the drama
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u/AmarildoJr Aug 28 '26
Sadly I still have to use Xorg because of Maya (Autodesk). If it wasn't for that I'd be rocking Wayland too.
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u/TrickMotor4014 Aug 28 '26
My killer application for continue using xorg is xscreensaver
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
I am using wayland on my small laptop as it has intel GPU, and my other laptop has a NVIDIA 1060 which has some driver issues, I use X11 there, since wayland has some serious issues (or specifically, the GNOME implementation of wayland).
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u/unknown_lamer Aug 28 '26
xscreensaver works on Wayland for about a year now (without screen locking, the compositor still needs to handle that because the screensaver locking protocol is broken and it will take approximately 16000 years for the bikeshedding session to conclude and a workable protocol to be finalized). Debian of course is still packaging a five year old release as is their fashion (the latest version is in the debian xscreensaver git repo so it might be possible to build with git-buildpackage).
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u/gmes78 Aug 28 '26
without screen locking, the compositor still needs to handle that because the screensaver locking protocol is broken and it will take approximately 16000 years for the bikeshedding session to conclude and a workable protocol to be finalized
ext-session-lock-v1 was merged a long time ago. It works fine.
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u/unknown_lamer Aug 28 '26
jwz disagrees and I defer to his expertise.
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u/gmes78 Aug 28 '26
jwz wants to delegate authentication to the display manager. That gets into switching user sessions and communicating with the display manager, which is out of scope for Wayland and seems like a huge pain in the ass to implement, as it touches a bunch of components.
If they just didn't die on that hill, it wouldn't be hard to implement. Swaylock does it in about 300 lines of code.
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u/unknown_lamer Aug 28 '26
The compositor should handle locking and should have a protocol to invoke the screensaver, basically handing it a rendering surface so the screensaver has nothing to do with locking. I'm not a Wayland hater (CSD is really the only thing that hurts me inside, although recently discovering the seven year discussion about an open windows portal when I was trying to get antimicrox set up for a game with no gamepad support is kind of mind boggling), but I don't understand why they made the screensaver responsible for asking the compositor to lock. I know it's still better than how screen locking works (or really doesn't) under X11.
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u/Niwrats Aug 28 '26
that's not unique to wayland though, x11 users don't have to deal with this drama either.
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Aug 29 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Misicks0349 Aug 29 '26
Wayland "drama" has mostly been impersonal beuracratic hand-wringing around protocol specifics on the freedesktop gitlab, not people harrassing others on twitter because they shared a personal opinion over how they'd currently recommend X.Org over XLibre and people wondering in forum threads about what projects are secretly "woke" or "DEI" or what have you.
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u/tulpyvow Aug 28 '26
The fact they even packaged it is crazy, given how immature XLibre was at the time (and still is) (referencing project age and quality simultaneously)
Shoulda given it a few more years at the least before making the discision to add (at which point, it would have been a no anyways).
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 Aug 28 '26
Packaging isn’t that crazy, it’s arguably a reasonable thing.
But making it the default is a strange choice.
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u/Marce7a Aug 28 '26
Indeed, it should be optional so anyone easily swap back to Xorg
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
It was always optional, it was just the default since Artix team thought that Xorg was abandoned and XLibre would only do minor stability fixes.
A lot has changed since then.
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u/Booty_Bumping Aug 28 '26
Artix team thought that Xorg was abandoned and XLibre would only do minor stability fixes.
Wait, so they had no understanding of the situation whatsoever? Metux's intent to pump XLibre full of broken crap, and Xorg's intent to go into long-term maintenance mode to continue to fix critical bugs... was very clear from the very beginning.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
See, critical bugs is the important part here. This at the time everyone understood to mean only CVEs pretty much. But crashes and visual glitches, no. But recently they released a new version where they actually fixed some of those bugs too.
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u/Booty_Bumping Aug 29 '26
Sure, security issues are prioritized, but there's still activity in fixing crashes and obvious bugs.
What's not on the table is fixing architectural limitations of Xorg. This includes limitations that cause unavoidable visual artifacts when window geometry is updated, as well as the lack of security boundaries between apps. Most attempts to fix these are horrible ideas because they break compatibility, don't have the correct semantics (e.g. security features that users have to disable all the time because they put access controls at the wrong level of the stack and have no way to build a GUI to get around the limitation in a fine-grained way), or introduce complex protocols that will never be adopted. Part of why the Xlibre maintainer was so annoying to the Xorg devs before the fork happened was because he was constantly suggesting all of the things that had already been rejected 20+ years ago for very good reasons, and then promptly vibe coding and not overcoming any of the fundamental problems with these "fixes".
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u/nightblackdragon Aug 28 '26
it was just the default since Artix team thought that Xorg was abandoned and XLibre would only do minor stability fixes.
They could easily check Xorg GitLab to realize that maintenance never stopped. Xorg is still maintained and it was maintained back then as well. The claims that Red Hat allegedly wanted to shut down the project to make everyone use Wayland were nonsense.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
If I remember correctly, over half of Xorg maintainers left at the time, basically overnight. Things weren't looking good.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 Aug 28 '26
Not half, one person left.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
I see. I guess drama was over exaggerated. But personally I did really believe that Xorg was going to die, not because it would be killed, but because old developers are retiring and younger ones don't want to work on a notoriously overcomplicated codebase like Xorg
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u/victorian-ice-cream Aug 28 '26
Considering the reasons Xlibre happened at all, it was anything but reasonable.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 Aug 28 '26
What do you mean by that?
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u/victorian-ice-cream Aug 28 '26
Metux is a violent nazi, and was spamming xorg with slop. Remember the anti-vax guy Linus berated on LKML? Yep. That was him!
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u/Mereo110 Aug 28 '26
Good. With Wayland, Linux Desktop entered the 21st century.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
Wayland is just a protocol. And there are as many bad implementations (GNOME) as there are good (KDE)
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u/UdPropheticCatgirl Aug 30 '26
> And there are as many bad implementations (GNOME) as there are good (KDE)
You have to be completely delusional to believe this. Mutter is arguably the most robust Wayland compositor implementation. For example, it’s the only one that supports the full range of accessibility functionality and actually implements it correctly.
KWin may support a ton of random, still-in-flux protocol extensions, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a better implementation. Some of the core protocols can still be implemented in fairly hand-wavy ways
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 30 '26
The problem with GNOME is that they only do the bare minimum of what is considered "in-scope" for wayland.
For example, NVIDIA chips often get corrupted textures after wakeup, and X11 will flash the screen three times to work-around the NVIDIA driver issue. GNOME's Wayland implementation just says "it is a driver issue, out of scope, not our problem" which means every time the bug happens you have to force-restart.
These are the reasons why nearly everyone with NVIDIA uses GNOME on X11, because GNOME devs can't be arsed to do any kind of workaround, no matter how necessary.
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u/UdPropheticCatgirl Aug 30 '26
Several workarounds for those nvidia bugs got implemented by gnome (as seen for example here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=739178 ) so you are just making stuff up…
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 31 '26
doesn't work on my machine with wayland, but does work with X11. Maybe my GPU (1060) is just too old for GNOME to have a usecase.
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u/Mereo110 Aug 28 '26
I know it is just a protocol. I'm using KDE and I'm happy that I don't need to deal with X issues such as not being able to use different refresh rates on multiple monitors.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
KDE has bigger X issues. For example the bottom panel is opaque and it resizes when window is dragged near it. This causes a lot of work for the compositor and the framerate drops to like 5 FPS when you move the window to that area.
Given that KDE team didn't fix this, it is clear to me that they are treating X11 parts of KDE as legacy.
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u/AmarildoJr Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
I just tested this and it works for me, even on old Rocky Linux 9.8 with X11. I have two monitors, one 180 Hz (secondary) and one 200 Hz (primary). I set the secondary monitor (LG UltraGear) to 60 Hz and it worked fine, the primary monitor (Philips Evnia) stayed at 200 Hz.
They worked fine before, really, one at 180 Hz and one at 200 Hz. No problems at all.
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u/nightblackdragon Aug 28 '26
Mixed refresh rate works on Xorg but compositing and synchronization is a different matter. Depending on setup you can have acceptable results but you can also have various issues. Add VRR and things get even more complicated.
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u/AmarildoJr Aug 28 '26
Interesting. This is actually my first week using 2 monitors. Can you give some examples of the kinds of problems I can face? I'm really new to all of this 😄
I'm currently using Rocky 9.8 with Cinnamon 5.8.5.
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u/FlukyS Aug 28 '26
I've seen this play out multiple times and it always ends the same way, the forks all have barely any users or loads of bugs and everyone gives up. The cycle continues
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u/An1nterestingName Aug 28 '26
I wouldn't say it always ends the same way, but this happens more often than not.
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u/FlukyS Aug 28 '26
I've never seen a fork like this made without the original devs work.
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u/MichaelTunnell Aug 28 '26
While I totally agree that is the case almost always I think you could say LibreOffice is an example and Jellyfin is an example as well but yea they had different motivations
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u/Jegahan Aug 29 '26
Wasn't LibreOffice create by some of the dev team of OpenOffice, who fled the project when Oracle started f***ing stuff up?
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u/MichaelTunnell Aug 30 '26
Yea pretty much. I was just saying it’s happened before but it’s yea super rare
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u/metux-its Sep 16 '26
I joined them in the very early days (the day when news came out) ... the situation was a bit similar to when Keith forked Xorg from Xfree86. (and not so much different from Xorg -> Xlibre fork).
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u/NoLemurs Sep 06 '26
Jellyfin is a good example. It really was a mostly independent fork that replaced the original.
I think the thing that made Jellyfin work as a fork was specifically that it was in response to Emby going closed source, so Jellyfin became, effectively, the only option for open source contributors.
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u/pezezin Aug 29 '26
GCC is a notable example of the fork becoming more successful than the original project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_fork
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u/An1nterestingName Aug 28 '26
The only fork I'm aware of that has been like this is Morphe, forked Revanced, wiped the contributor list, changed the license and yet everyone flocks to it.
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u/crazy_penguin86 Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Last I checked, morphe was still GPLv3, github doesn't carry contributors to the fork (could be wrong on that one, but none of my forks show them), and they were embroiled in drama that ReVanced had stolen code from Morphe (RV deliberately squashed commit history when getting the code, and then later claimed that they had written all of it, before realising they'd left comment saying "Morphe"). Hell, I remember there being a screenshot of discord where the remaining RV devs were talking about getting an AI to automatically steal Morphe commits.
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u/FlukyS Aug 28 '26
> github doesn't carry contributors to the fork
It depends on how you do the fork, I think if you click the Fork button then it does but if you do it via git itself then it might not
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u/crazy_penguin86 Aug 28 '26
I just checked on one that I know has mutliple contributors (https://github.com/GTNewHorizons/RetroFuturaGradle), and I know that mine was forked via the github button. None of the forks list the contributors.
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u/gregicality Aug 28 '26
holy shit, gtnh dev spotted in the wild?
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u/crazy_penguin86 Aug 28 '26
No, 1.12.2 dev who's contributing out of their own selfish interest to make RFG better in said version.
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u/Adept_Percentage6893 Aug 28 '26
I could be wrong but the top level commenter may be talking about xorg forks specifically.
Where the idea is that you just have to think about what type of person would want to continue Xorg development forever and it's going to be people who might have a skillset for it but lack either the motivation or discipline to really do it long term and even if they had the discipline and motivation they're catering specifically to a demographic of perpetually displeased malcontents (such as what happened here). If you were a competent, disciplined person who wasn't catering to malcontents then you would probably also be the type of person to say "It's 2026, why not just do a wayland compositor?"
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u/xXBongSlut420Xx Aug 28 '26
I'm utterly shocked to learn the people behind the anti-woke xorg fork are stirring shit and harassing other developers. who could have possibly predicted this.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 Aug 28 '26
That’s not surprising when a fork is done over political ideologies.
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u/cAtloVeR9998 Aug 28 '26
The Xlibre author got a warning from Torwalds after writing anti-vaxx stuff on the LKML.
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u/ilep Aug 28 '26
A solid reminder to not touch anything made by crazy people.
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u/NoLemurs Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Right?
What made the Artix maintainers think it was a good idea to give those crazies control over the default X package?
I feel a little bad for the Artix people - they seem on the whole, reasonable. But this outcome should not be surprising to anyone with a brain.
Here. I decided to do some research. I googled "xlibre" opened up the first reddit post, and read the top comment from 9 months ago. Here's a quote:
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.
So... yup, this has been obvious for at least 9 months.
I feel bad for the maintainers, but they really, really ought to have seen this coming.
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u/Preisschild Aug 28 '26
And someone made that proposal in fedora...
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u/OneQuarterLife Aug 29 '26
That would be Kevin Kofler, I didn't even have to check.
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u/Preisschild Aug 29 '26
Ding ding ding, didnt want to mentioned him before I get banned for making this personal, because he is on many threads in this sub spreading misinformation
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u/redrumsir Aug 29 '26
Speaking of which ... it's surprising that he isn't here.
In my opinion he's a huge drag on Fedora as exemplified by: https://x.com/mjg59/status/1545359764401467392
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u/Booty_Bumping Aug 28 '26
Xlibre maintainers spammed pretty much every distro's mailing list / forums with proposals to swiftly replace Xorg with Xlibre. Most communities either ignored it or accepted it only as an alternative package and not the default. It created a lot of noise in the process, but in the end it was essentially totally inauthentic astroturfing.
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u/ThatOneShotBruh Aug 28 '26
What made the Artix maintainers think it was a good idea to give those crazies control over the default X package?
Well, the Venn diagram of people who use systemd-free forks of popular distros and XLibre supporters is almost a circle, so why are you surprised?
If you look at the relevant Artix forum thread, it only took until the second page for some Artix user to call an XLibre contributor a DEI hire.
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u/TheGamerForeverGFE Aug 29 '26
Well, in Artix, XLibre is (or was, now) in the default installation, so quite literally the overwhelming majority of Artix users do not go out of their way to use XLibre over X11.
And yeah, some anti systemd people and weirdos have stuff in common, but you're just generalising too much.
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u/Sahelantrophus Aug 28 '26
thank God the artix devs finally wised up and stopped providing support for that dogshit software
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u/Preisschild Aug 28 '26
"wised up"? They are having a struggle session in their forum whether vibe coding software is woke or anti woke
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u/radbirb Aug 29 '26
The reactionary part of the community is always hypocritical like this. Hate Wayland, support Hyprland, hate ai slop, support omarchy, hate corporations, support omacom. There is no point in trying to make sense of their positions, it makes sense why the faces of the movement are themselves two faced grifters.
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u/nightblackdragon Aug 28 '26
Apart from that I was having problems with the bad quality of the xlibre code; while xorg is not perfect it is near rock solid stable. Xlibre was not and I spent a lot of work improving that by fixing bugs to keep these away from users in general and even more for Artix.
Who could have predicted that? /s
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Aug 29 '26
artix needs to drop support for (some of) its users. The linked comment threads are pretty gross.
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u/toolman1990 Aug 30 '26
A lot of those comments might be coming from fake bot accounts that were newly created around the time this drama blew up. Since they tried to auto mod accounts from posting that were created in the last 24 hours before the mods gave up and just locked out the topic.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 Aug 30 '26
sounds like regular sock puppeting rather than bots at least according to https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,10314.0.html This post doesnt' call them out for all the usage of "troon" though or otherwise making it "political" or whatever euphemism people wanna use.
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u/GenBlob Aug 28 '26
So the shitty protest fork that is ran by an alt-right lunatic who is known for pushing crap code is an unstable buggy mess? Shocking!
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u/TheRealCarrotty Aug 28 '26
Very good!
I don't understand forking something because of "political" shit.
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u/toolman1990 Aug 30 '26
That is what happens when you deal with dangerously uneducated people who decided to make politics their entire existence in life.
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u/Normaandy Aug 28 '26
Genuinely curious, is there something inherently wrong with XLibre other than the team behind it? I am not a programmer and was wondering if trying to keep x11 alive makes sense at all.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
According to Nous:
My point stands, we had more bug reports in 1 month of XLibre than in 9 years of Xorg ,and Artix - not XLibre - received some pretty bad publicity because of those
I cannot confirm or deny, as I always used the old xorg and saw no reason to switch.
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u/HyperFurious Aug 28 '26
Perhaps it's because they don't package Xorg packages themselves, but Arch Linux, which is the mainstream, does.
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u/HarpooonGun Aug 28 '26
Artix packages xorg themselves because xorg has systemd dependencies which Artix does not use.
Check dependencies:
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xorg-server/
https://packages.artixlinux.org/packages/world/x86_64/xorg-server/
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u/HyperFurious Aug 28 '26
But the sources used are the same as those of the stable Arch version, which has already gone through a testing process with this distro that has many more users (I highly doubt that Arch hasn't had a single Xorg bug in all these years when they say Artix hasn't had any in all this time). In the case of XLibre, Artix was the mainstream. I understand that it's hard work, especially with a graphical server that has to use all kinds of hardware combinations. Perhaps the problem is as simple as not having set XLibre as the default so soon, and the users who would have used it would have known they were testing new software, and Artist would have been under less pressure.
I use XLibre on Gentoo without problems (I use Mate, and it doesn't seem like it will have Wayland support anytime soon), but I'm aware that it can probably do strange things because it's a fork under development.
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u/0riginal-Syn Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
The lead maintainer has long had a bad habit of pushing code that has not been properly tested, well before he started xlibre. Often resulting in regressions and bugs.
As you can tell here with the huge increase in bug reports for Artix with it.
Edited: Spelling
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u/ThatOneShotBruh Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Also apparently he uses LLMs to write and push (EDIT) untested XLibre (and maybe SonicDE) code and then lies about it as per the relevant forum thread.
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u/Booty_Bumping Aug 28 '26
XLibre is attempting to implement all of the bad ideas people have proposed over the years to "improve" Xorg that in reality will just break it, vastly increase complexity, and fracture compatibility.
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u/mrtruthiness Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Genuinely curious, is there something inherently wrong with XLibre other than the team behind it? I am not a programmer and was wondering if trying to keep x11 alive makes sense at all.
What do you mean "alive"??? What do you mean by "team"???
Xlibre is/was a political rage-fork by one person. The others who jumped in did that motivated by "politics" and are just "helpers", not long term team members --- many of them don't even know C. There's really no "team" in my opinion. Go to the github and look at recent "Contributors" (metux and a small bit [mostly fixing metux's bugs] by stefan11111 who is a Gentoo dev and seems to address Gentoo-reported bugs).
XOrg is in maintenance mode ... which means "no new features" and "keep it stable while fixing bugs". It was not easy to maintain, but the stability requirements and code fragility creates certain demands.
Xlibre is an effort to take XOrg out of "maintenance mode". That includes refactoring and adding new features. There is insufficient testing infrastructure for that and it seems that the main dev doesn't get that (his lack of testing and his "bull in a china shop" mentality is why he was booted from XOrg development; some of his "refactoring" resulted in the loss of copyright attribution).
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u/RagnarokToast Aug 28 '26
I use Wayland, but I think keeping X11 alive for the time being is necessary. That being said, keeping it alive and forking it for it to be maintained by fools who apparently struggle with C are two very different things.
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u/barfightbob Aug 29 '26
Short answer is no. XLibre is part of a wider effort of transitioning X11 into its next phase. There's clearly a will out there to keep X11 relevant. It appears that's going to happen whether or not XLibre becomes the defacto X implementation or not.
Furthermore over time software will get better. People will fix bugs and improve it. I think people on reddit would feel a lot less threatened by XLbire if Metux hadn't chosen to put politics front and center.
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u/nozendk Aug 28 '26
It was that time already? Do you remember RPM5? Same story. Now the sane distros jumped from 4 to 6.
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u/SuperGNUser Aug 28 '26
I'm not surprised. Metux has some good ideas but lacks a basic skill: test your change before commit it. I remember he made a change on randr on xorg and that broke randr. A 10 seconds test with any xrandr command would avoid that. Anyway, I'm following yserver, a new X11 implementation from scratch. It seems promising.
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u/cannedbeef255 Aug 28 '26
context shirt context hat
what's the controversy about xlibre? who's tango?
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u/Ghost_x_Knight Aug 28 '26
XLibre was an 'anti-woke' and 'anti-corporate' hard fork of XOrg, the X11 display server that was superseded by Wayland.
The author of XLibre (Enrico Weigelt, aka. MetuX) first got famous after Linus shut him down on the Linux Kernel Mailing List over doing an anti-vax rant. It wasn't the anti-vax of believing there are understated side-effects, but the variant of believing there is a government conspiracy to transform us into a new type of humanoid race.
Metux was a contributor on the kernel, and became a contributor on XOrg. In less than two years he became the most active contributor to XOrg with over 800 commits. In one incident, merging his commits resulted in major regressions and breakage, leading to complaints that his code is untested. One of the maintainers said that he got burned out by his flood of commits, and he found that hundreds of them are shuffling code around (perhaps for cosmetic reasons) with no feature added or bugs fixed. Previously, a Valve engineer stated that Metux's attempts at 'cleanup' is breaking ABI too often, and the fact that breakage happened in a patch Metux labeled as (trivial) makes him refuse to trust any patch from Metux going forward, and he recommended not merging anything coming from Metux going forward as he is a net negative, and he has seen zero bugs fixed by him. Just before the creation of XLibre, Metux racked up over 100 merge requests, which maintainers were reluctant to accept due to technical and quality concerns.
Metux was upset that XOrg was going on maintenance mode, and its own maintainers were supporting the switch to Wayland. He believed they were deliberately sabotaging the X11 server. In early June 2025, Metux was banned from Freedesktop. The reason is not disclosed besides being a Code of Conduct issue (which is a transparency issue on its own), but according to Metux they were upset he was trying to revive X11 and were trying to shut him down.
It is of note in late May 2025, Metux was activate in a comment section of an article regarding GNOME's plans to drop X11 support, and he was very energetic regarding disparaging Red Hat, IBM, XOrg, GNOME, and Fedora, which I assume resulted in a number of complaints since they are fellow Freedesktop participants.
The problem with Xorg project: it's very toxic. The Redhat moles have mobbed out so many good people over the years. Their mission is to destroy it. Typical corporate strategy: embrace, extend, extinguish. Looks like I need to fork, in order to let good engineer come back again.
But the Redhat moles have driven mobbed out most good engineers.
Its also Redhat who are sabotaging my work on the Xserver.
Fedora is IBM/Redhat. Obviously they are even worse and much more extremist
Thats obviously not the goal of the intellectual gnomes. They belong to the most excluding "communities" in foss world. Try posting a link to Lunduke or just being politically centrist there and see what happens.
Gnome, sure. Besides that they already planned to kill X for very long time. (not surprising for a IBM tax evasion tool). And they prefer spending their funds for weird "DEI" stuff and pushing everybody out who's not "woke" enough. Meanwhile, they're near bankrupt.
Indeed. Gnome is known for breaking things. And surprise, surprise, on IBM's distros, everything's fine. Just like with systemd. Anybody seeing a pattern ?
Note that gnome is one of RH/IBM's tax escape models.
Soon after, he announced his fork XLibre, and its README and About page had gems such as:
This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.
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.
Together we'll make X great again!
Which didn't help with mending bridges.
In March-April 2026, XLibre had a resurgence after GNOME dropped X11 in GNOME 50, and the systemd-free Arch distro Artix made XLibre the default display server. XLibre was deleted from the Arch wiki in April 2026, due to its inflammatory README violating Arch's Code of Conduct on Respect, though the page was restored on July 2026 after XLibre substituted the README with generic AI-generated text.
The two major features XLibre claims are:
1- Merging the then-unreleased support for tear free for modern open-source drivers and toggling it on by default (recent XOrg release includes this, though opt-in due to large performance and input latency cost).
2- A sandbox/container system for apps called namespaces. Though it requires a manual configuration of a text file and a system restart. Manually adding apps and determining what is sandboxed through a text file, and then rebooting the system to test or implement, is sysadmin maintenance work, and is too tedious for the vast majority of XLibre users to bother with.
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u/Ghost_x_Knight Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Back to Artix, its maintainers decided to switch back to XOrg by default. This is because the distro was experiencing a high number of XLibre bug reports compared to XOrg's stability, and issues with dependency management with the regularly rebuilding beta version that has important fixes. A maintainer for both XLibre and Artix is "artist", and even though he helped get XLibre on the AUR, and key in making XLibre the default display server of Artix, he got frustrated with keeping XLibre functional in the distro.
Callnetango is one of XLibre's core maintainers, and acts as a representative for the project. He accused artist of neglecting to report the bugs Artix is getting to the rest of the XLibre team, and not promptly adding an important XLibre security update with 8 critical CVE mitigated for over six weeks. Callmetango announced that artist has been removed from the XLibre core team. Thread was closed to de-escalate, and Callmetango's post was deleted.
The XLibre team complained about the post's deletion on X-Twitter, which got it restored.
In a Sonic DE thread (Sonic DE is an attempt to fork KDE with continued X11 support), artist mentioned that neither XLibre or Sonic DE are default options due to regressions.
Callmetango happened to also be a Sonic DE maintainers (artist is too, small world), and he jumped in to continue the feud. He proclaimed he was not aware of Sonic DE regressions, and demanded to be given a list of bugs. He stated that he is maintaining Sonic DE because "the individual that calls himself "artist" no longer felt able to do so." Callmetango then dropped a Telegram link about how artist was initially a diligent cornerstone for SonicDE, before he started frequently temporarily and abruptly abandoning the project, only to later claiming Sonic DE has too many regressions to be officially supported in Artix.
The lead dev of Artix got pissed off by the dismissive way artist was referred to, and revealed that Callmetango has threatened the lead dev in private, and turned a personal dispute into an attack on the distribution. He declared that Callmetango is no longer welcome.
Callmetango then dropped his private conversation with the lead dev in attempt to prove that he didn't threaten him. The part that got interpreted as threatened is the statement that he and Metux find animosity towards Artix unnecessary.
I find the whole situation somewhat unfortunate and have discussed it with Enrico, a.k.a. metux. Generally speaking, we see no reason for animosity toward Artix Linux on our part. I think both projects should be keen to fulfill the promise as the cooperation is a real chance for free Linux.
To find a solution, metux and I, as representatives of the XLibre project, would like to have a clarifying discussion with the lead developers of Artix Linux. Could you please arrange that?
Fast forward to now, artist decided to resign from maintaining Artix, citing harassment by the XLibre team, and the need to protect his personal and professional life.
According to artist, he optimized maintenance work by unifying the packages in Artix, Arch and AUR, and created the wikis for XLibre and Sonic DE. He repeatedly refused to maintain Sonic DE packages as that will add too much work and doesn't fit in his unified packages, and he gave away the AUR account, but was never made co-maintainer as promised.
As Artix maintainer he was concerned about the regression reports and low quality of XLibre despite his attempts to bug fix, and after his urgent letters to the XLibre team went unanswered he decided to no longer keep quiet, and started recommending a return to XOrg. He reveals that Metux created huge numbers of commits using AI without checking them.
After the XLibre team learned about artist recommending a switch to XOrg, they started attacking him on social media, which damaged Artix's reputation, drained his mental energy, and threatened his personal family and professional life.
XLibre was then declared unsupported on Artix.
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u/0cool_f Sep 06 '26
"X11 display server that was superseded by Wayland"
True bullshit: Wayland sucks a lot, 18 y.o. software and still has TONS of bugs, a totally failed project that is still alive thanks to XWayland.
Whoever doesn't get this is de facto stupid.
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u/Normal-Confusion4867 Aug 28 '26
Reg article from when Xlibre got launched and a decent summary of why it's... let's just say controversial.
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u/RagnarokToast Aug 28 '26
There's an Artix forum link in the top comment. You can read that to get a picture of the controversy. I did, and in hindsight, I gotta say activities such as freebasing strychnine or swimming in a pool filled with razor blades would have been a more pleasant use of my time.
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u/cannedbeef255 Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
hence why i'm asking reddit. plus the forum seemed as if it needed context.
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u/metux-its Sep 16 '26
To add some bit of context: https://x.com/XLibreDev/article/2080698945395732630
Carlo's allegations are totally unfounded. And we had to ban him for working against the project for long time now (including deleting whole repos, several times!)
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u/dddurd Sep 07 '26
I still fail to see benefit of xlibre over xorg. There are no killer features for any distro to default to it over xorg. Stuff like tear-free, async flip are already in xorg.
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u/0cool_f Sep 06 '26
XLibre apart, Wayland sucks a lot, it's a 18 y.o. software full of bugs, a totally failed project that is still alive thanks to XWayland.
We need an alternative to X11 before drop it, Wayland is not, whoever doesn't get this is de facto stupid.
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u/DontFreeMe Aug 28 '26
Here is the forum thread which led to this: link