On 6/23/25 8:21 PM, Wirlaburla via tde-devels wrote:
On 2025-06-23 04:23 PM, E. Liddell via tde-devels wrote:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts suggests that unfortunately the real reason the main developer for X11Libre broke away from the main X project is that he isn't a very good coder.
It had nothing to do with him being a bad coder. It had been well known for awhile that the X.org Foundation was holding back development from the X11 project because they have their own conflict of interest in regards to Wayland (and wanted to kill X11). Enrico was the only one who was trying to contribute anything, and he ended up forming his fork (before they reverted anything and banned him) because his merge requests would get ignored. It should also be worth noting that the article you linked is written by Michael Larabel, who is very clearly Wayland-biased and has admitted it.
The changes Enrico made that ended up getting reverted were major code cleanups and security improvements, and they were pushed in master and asked for testing. Was he perfect? No, but it is the master branch and nobody would help him test so he just kept moving on. Despite the supposed "bad code", XLibre works almost flawlessly and it is a community project, not just the guy who got kicked out of FDO. Every issue users have faced have had quick bug fixes and there are major improvements in both functionality and security without hurting the users or developers under X.
Proof positive the politics and code don't mix. Still, there does appear to be fire where there is smoke. The Devuan reversions and Torvalds apt rejection of the "bat sh.. crazy" Anti-Vaccine comments from the Xlibre maintainer is cause for concern.
That said, if he can maintain focus on the code and leave the distractions alone, I'm very happy to see progress on improving X11 and providing a path forward. The distractions are just that, but they take time, toil and energy away from Xlibre development for naught.
I fully support continued development of X11 no matter what form it takes. I've never liked the idea of one "compositor" providing the graphics on anything I use. A crash in the Wayland compositor takes all apps down, not just one, and anything not saved is lost -- in all GUI applications, not just one.