this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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Why is XLibre political?
Mainly their readme being fully magat-pilled, talking about DEI and whatnot. They also waste time on things like renaming functions to own the libs. It's not a project that i put any trust into and i'd rather use plain X11 if i had to go back.
If we ignore the deeply disturbing political views of the Creator the entire project is meant to be a statement. There's a conspiracy theory that there was a grand plot to kill x11 by red hat and xlibre is built upon the idea that red hat was holding it back. This completely ignores the real issues that the codebase was pure spaghetti.
I heard that XLibre developers are working on cleaning the codebase. And I strongly believe we still need X11 at least until Wayland is polished enough, which still seems untrue even in 2026. The concerns about Red Hat are not conspiracy, a commercial corporation controlling important parts of Linux ecosystem is a serious threat, so having an alternative is never bad. Linux won't have a future if everyone just uses Red Hat approved solutions.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/56
Here is the x11libre dev not understanding what the
^operand does in C. Would you trust running this person's code as a display server?Sure. No one expects anyone to know everything from the start, and people improve with time. But this was metux's understanding of C when he forked off xorg thinking he could do better than freedesktop.
You know that "until Wayland is polished enough" is at least a year ago for the overwhelming majority of people, right?
A year ago I got a new PC, installed Ubuntu 24.04 which defaults to Wayland, and installed discord. Push to talk wouldn't work unless discord had mouse focus. I spent a few hours researching and trying different things before switching to X11 where it just immediately works.
Tell me more about how polished Wayland is.
That is a feature. Allowing arbitrary programs to read any key press is how you get keyloggers.
Wayland has a protocol to request reading keys out of focus (which will ask the user for permission, as opposed to just read it like on xorg).
If the program was running in xwayland (which it probably was) of course it won't use that protocol, and will just try to read it X11 style.
In some DEs (KDE) you can select if X11 apps are allowed to read keys.
"I switched to X11 and it immediately works". I'll give you another tip: if you run
chmod 777 -R /the file manager stops pestering about permissions and it immediately works.Two things, one as previously mentioned the codebase is a mess and even the best developers working on x11 tend to introduce regressions (the xlibre dev isn't so this is amplified). Second it absolutely is a conspiracy because red hat did everything in the power to save x11 until eventually they just kept using it (tbh it needed to be replaced two decades ago). As for your last point linux won't have a future if its aggressively held back by an army of enthusiasts who demand things never change and fragmented until software support is non-existent.
The Linux ecosystem would whither and die without the likes of Red Hat.