X.org fork, XLibre

Hello X community,

tl;dr:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
Unfortunate they chose GitHub.

The following is copied from:
https://nitter.net/LundukeJournal/status/1930727192964514137

Holy smokes, got an exclusive story here that is a BIG one for Linux
users:

Xorg is being forked, by the most active Xorg developer, with a first
release planned later this month.

And, based on the tentative release notes which The Lunduke Journal got a
sneak peek at, this looks to be the most significant release of Xorg in
years… possibly over a decade.

Importantly: So this isn’t some fly-by-night fork.

This fork, named XLibre, is being spearheaded by Enrico Weigelt — who was
responsible for 63% of the commits to the Xorg source code repository in
2024.  This is the real deal.

The Lunduke Journal spoke to Enrico Weigelt to get some additional
details.

“For a while we had hoped to get an actual Xorg release, but that's not
going to happen anymore, so I'm finally going for a full fork,” Enrico
stated.  “This fork [XLibre] became necessary, because it’s the expressed
wish of the current Xorg group's majority to abandon the project, let it
rot forever, and block any substantial contributions, let alone new
features. I'm leaving it to the reader to deduce which corporate interests
are behind that, and instead just moving on.”

Enrico described the huge number of commits to Xorg which have been simply
waiting for a release.  In some cases for years.  Those changes will
finally see the light of day with the XLibre fork.

“First of all, it's the first major Xserver release since 4 years,” said
the XLibre lead.  “About 3,000 commits waited for release. And hundreds of
open merge requests that are shadowbanned by the [corporate Linux] moles.”

Some of the bigger changes include:

1) Xnamespace extension: a novel approach for isolating clients from
different security domains (eg. containers) into separate X11 namespaces,
where they can't hurt each other (for cases where Xsecurity from 1996
isn't sufficient).

2) Xnest ported to xcb - no more dependency on old Xlib anymore.

3) Per-ABI driver directories (allows distros installing multiple ABIs at
the same time, eg. for smoother upgrades)

4) Cleaning up a huge amount of technical debt.

The XLibre project also says they aim to remedy some of the organizational
and discrimination issues which have plagued Xorg in recent years. 
Specifically noting that all people are welcome to contribute… regardless
of their political views.

“It doesn't matter which country you're coming from, your political views,
your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or
heels, whether you're furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a
small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just an boring average
person. Anybody's welcome, who's interested in bringing X forward.”

The Lunduke Journal will be keeping a close eye on XLibre as it gets
closer to their first planned release, currently scheduled for later in
June.  While many Linux distributions have moved to Wayland as an Xorg
replacement… there remains a large majority of software which is reliant
on Xorg, and many users who prefer it over Wayland (for a variety of
reasons and use cases).

As such it is reassuring to see a viable fork of Xorg, by an established,
prominent developer.


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To health and anarchy