Are You Moving to Xlibre?

[Ryu945]

I was told I should ask Clem this here.

I use several programs that require Xorg. It is not a option for me to use Wayland. It was recently shown that RedHat had been intentionally sabotaging their Xorg branch to try to force people to use Wayland. This is despite the fact that there is software you can only use on Xorg and Wayland equivlents have not been made yet. The primary developer of Xorg was even kicked out of the project for trying to update and fix Xorg since fixing and updating Xorg would delay Linux distributions swap to Wayland. The primary developer forked Xorg and made Xlibre. This is quite viable since the primary developer did most of the work on Xorg anyway.

Since Linux is a long way off from all the problems associated with Wayland swap being fixed, I am wondering if Mint plans on swapping to Xlibre once the first release candidate becomes available. Last I checked, the current versions are not release candidates though I haven't checked in a few days.

Also, I am not sure how much Mint financially supported Xorg and how much the Mint developers worked with the development of the Xorg project but I am wondering if these resources will be swapped to the Xlibre project.

edit: Weird. The top sentence of my post is not showing up.

edit2: Now the top sentence is showing again.

[Fantu]

I haven't investigated the project enough but before evaluating its use it would be a good idea to check its quality (doubted by many from the few things I read at the beginning) and actual usefulness. At the moment on Debian I don't know wanting to eliminate xorg, if there was an initial idea of ​​removing it as maintainer several packages that depend on xorg I would receive a notice well in advance as happens with several abandoned/unmaintainer libraries that need to be removed, xorg is also still maintained although mainly for bugfixes.

[yggdrasil75]

before a year or 2 it is highly unlikely that it will become solid enough to replace xorg (given that they don't just want to do bugfixes), and also is assuming there are enough users using it and above all extensive testing for new versions, it is included in at least some of the main distros and also used by some hardware manufacturers. but manufacturers usually think primarily about profits and will most likely focus only on one between wayland and xorg/xlibre for development (one of the reasons why it took so many years before wayland development and support became big enough) while the secondary with limited resources will choose the more stable and less modified one.

given that the current version is xorg with some minor fixes, it shouldnt break a large userbase for a while. as it diverges more, it will eventually get more bugs that need fixing, but if any major hardware devs that still support xorg switch to xlibre rather than wayland, then it will be able to compete.
my reasoning for not wanting to switch to wayland is that its been in development since 2008 and its still somewhere between "barely competes" and "maybe a little better". I know it takes time, but imagine if those 17 years of making wayland had gone into x. chances are almost all the benefits of wayland would be in x by now, and almost all the detriments of x would be fixed.

[Fantu]

wayland it's something made from scratch and structurally completely different, so obviously its implementation required and requires much more work than continue to support xorg which dates back to the 80s (even if it has had improvements and additions over time). It took many years before enough resources were invested in it and only in the last few years has it received enough to get a good implementation and support on a large scale, there is still work to do but it is starting to have good results. I tested wayland quite a few years ago for work and it can achieve performance and fluidity that with xorg you can't reach, even just trying to get a little closer requires a huge amount of optimization work. During the tests when I was preparing images for thin clients based on Debian 10 and Debian 11 in both cases with wayland I also immediately obtained a greater fluidity of the image and a much lower cpu consumption without optimizations (unlike xorg) but unfortunately there were some bugs and limitations from its poor support in used softwares so I still used xorg for now. In the meantime the support has improved thanks to the fact that in general there is more development and support of wayland, I will try it again after the release of debian 13 as soon as I have enough time and I hope that the problems I had encountered are solved because it would be very useful.
Another case in which I noticed significantly better performances on wayland over xorg is with old or very old desktops/laptops but the DEs that I would like to use do not support wayland or not enough at the moment, in some even the drivers that did not support it or at least not enough which is recently improving.

wayland development has been slow for many years due to poor support and received poor support due to lack of resources to invest in it and most people didn't invest in it because of that but now it's gotten to a point where most are focusing on that and given the limited resources xorg has taken a back seat if not almost non-existent (as it used to be the other way around). Given that and the structural limitations of xorg I doubt people will want to continue investing big amount of resources in xorg or a fork of it. To overcome those limitations it would need to be a major overhaul so in terms of support we would have to start almost from scratch like we did with wayland so I guess it's almost impossible or if it is done it will take 10-20 years to get to the good condition.

[SuperDuperDeou]

wayland development has been slow for many years due to poor support and received poor support due to lack of resources to invest in it and most people didn't invest in it because of that but now it's gotten to a point where most are focusing on that and given the limited resources xorg has taken a back seat if not almost non-existent (as it used to be the other way around). Given that and the structural limitations of xorg I doubt people will want to continue investing big amount of resources in xorg or a fork of it. To overcome those limitations it would need to be a major overhaul so in terms of support we would have to start almost from scratch like we did with wayland so I guess it's almost impossible or if it is done it will take 10-20 years to get to the good condition.

In my benchmark on Cinnamon consisting in a translucent Conky window and opaque Alacritty window, I've seen the same 0-1% CPU on idle, with peaks up to 3-4% when moving the Alacritty window around, both with XLibre and Wayland, and the Wayland session actually looked a bit choppier, probably because Nvidia, and I've also seen zero screen tearing on XLibre. Maybe it's just my system that's fairly high spec and I can't appreciate the difference, but I have a CPU that isn't even from this decade, and it wasn't high end when it was new. Btw, I did the benchmark with Alacritty because the Wayland session crashes as soon as I open my terminal of choice, Kitty.

Lack of applicaiton sandboxing, lack of HDR support, and lack of high end touch support aren't limitations of the protocol, they're limitations of Red Hat wanting to kill X11, in fact XLibre already has application sandboxing, high end touch support is planned, and HDR support is being worked on by a volunteer. Even mixed refresh rate can be probably dealt with with nested servers, by extending Xrandr, or by a new protocol extension.

Since when do we strictly need corporate support? Remember that the Free Software movement was born from RMS getting angry at Xerox, while corporate contributions are nice, we don't need them. The community clearly wants XLibre to be a thing: just look at the repo, it's as active as it gets and already has lots of contributors. There may not be corporate interest in XLibre (yet), so what?

XOrg is dead, it was murdered, and XLibre is here to carry its legacy.

[Fantu]

Conky and Alacritty have very low resource usage.
To notice the difference you need something heavier, it is more noticeable even when you do not have a dedicated or powerful enough gpu, you run videos without hw acceleration etc... Unfortunately the more you go forward the more you tend to make everything heavier (sites, software, video etc..) often uselessly and it is said a lot that you need to get better hw and change it more often (even with fairly basic use). However I think this is a useless waste that could be avoided and/or reduced in many ways. wayland with a direct implementation in the compositor rather than a communication of the graphic part between 2 parts (server and client) done by xorg seems to me to give a significant help to decrease and optimize the use of resources for the graphic part, things that xlibre cannot do unless starting from scratch as wayland did or almost and with the same big obstacles.

[SuperDuperDeou]

I didn't use my eyes to notice the difference, I used a CPU motor, actually two of them: the very conky window, plus htop running in the terminal, and they didn't notice a difference.

Running several software-rendered windows while soft-decoding windows is going to have a suboptimal experience regardless of it being X11 or Wayland, and how many CPU cycles are wasted that way doesn't even depend on the display server, especially with video decoding. Maybe Wayland will fail a little differently? But that's really it. Still, on XLibre, I'm not noting anything breaking even with stacked translucent windows. Maybe should I go to dig a landfill for a 20 years old CPU instead of a 10 years old one? Maybe I should use the iGPU for that 20 years old CPU as well, except it might not even have a Wayland driver.

If you said someone in year 2000 that they can have a 10 years old CPU and everything works fine, with no slowdowns, they'd laugh at you. The thing is, CPUs have gotten so powerful that even human incompetence can't easily catch up to slow them down. Microsoft had to go out of its way to make W11 slow by making AI run in the background 24/7 and having the start menu be a React app that denial of service attacks the system.

[firepower9966]

The way Redhat, Xorg, Gnome are behaving i want nothing to do with Xorg and Wayland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4o1uXe6cVc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5guSWznnA

[LinuxGuy-cyber]

Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum.

Why do you say so? Just curious.

[Secret-chest]

I think the actual non-corporate Wayland will be wlroots. It has many of the missing protocols.

[Ryu945]

When I saw changes made to Fedora (RedHat Creators) and a lack of software support for certain things, I got a feeling I should move away from them. After seeing this, it reminds me of the crazy people that run other open sources projects like Home Assistant, OBS and Mastodon. I am not sure how these type of people get control of these projects but there really does need to be a good alternative. I guess I made a good decesion to not use Fedora anymore. I may have to change a family members computer that already had it installed off this a lot sooner.

[NoVaSpikeXX]

Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum.

Why do you say so? Just curious.

Just to start I am not necessarily talking about the developers. They might be included but I know some are just developing software and staying out of all this drama/politics. It seems like its all the people promoting wayland that are crazy.

So it was big news about a new maintainer of Xorg and all the drama around that. He split off and made XLibre. Cool its open source software it gets forked all the time. Maybe Xorg will get some much needed improvements or it will fizzle out, whatever.

Then the responses to it have been absolutely crazy. As soon as yet another fork in the Linux community happened everyone suddenly went straight to booting Xorg and throwing Wayland in because Xorg/libre is now ran by a fascist nazi evil badman. Community managers and COC members are for some reason throwing DEI talking points and other asylum shit into a discussion about a graphics driver. I see these community managers putting out statements disavowing Xlibre and somehow Lunduke is used as a swear word...??? These people are posting psycho shit then deleting it and claiming they never said it. It's a mess, channels covering Linux are loving it though the content is nonstop for them.

I've just been watching and reading about it over the past week or so and its crazy. This should be all technical discussions and talks about performance or compatibility. It should be boring to everyone but the developers. Somehow people are now torching their reputations and entire projects because someone forked Xorg. Either the fork is ruining some plan or these people are mentally unstable.

I want my software developed by nerds proud of their code not people screaming fascist because they forked a project.

[yggdrasil75]

Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum.

Why do you say so? Just curious.

while I dont think most need to be in the asylum, there are those like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20250624171012/https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/23/the-fascist-maggots/ which should make you think twice about whether the reasons for dropping x have anything at all to do with it being "harder to maintain". makes it seem more like they just didnt feel like it and hate everyone who is willing to.
the response is like if when michael shanks left sg1 for a season, he tried to force everyone to stop watching it. except he didnt. no reason that freedesktop should either.

[firepower9966]

@LinuxGuy-cyber ask them what they think of Lunduke. did you watch the youtube i linked?

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On Fri, 27 June 2025, 22:03 Penguin, ***@***.***> wrote: Wayland is ran by people who should be in an insane asylum. Why do you say so? Just curious. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#991 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAYYCVBU6TJLLZZBFRQ7TEL3FVMMBAVCNFSM6AAAAACABJ4UNSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGNJZHA4DAMA> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[ghost]

I think a better question is simply "will Xlibre be considered once it proves itself"? A lot of groups like Gnome are outright hostile to the xlibre fork and had announced they would be removing X11 support entirely. However it logically makes sense for Linux Mint to adopt Xlibre as Cinnamon is still primarily using X11 and X11 has proven itself to be stable and with user friendly features. I would think it's best to take a "wait and see" approach where it's likely Xlibre will be adopted once it's proven itself and it's development cycle becomes predictable (unless red flags start tom pop up) - as apposed to outright refusing to consider it but potentially being forced to if Wayland simply cannot keep up. I don't know if Xlibre would be used in Linux Mint 23.0 but i'm pretty confident it will be by 24.0, possibly 23.1

[LinuxGuy-cyber]

Isn't Mint also focusing on Wayland?

[yggdrasil75]

Isn't Mint also focusing on Wayland?

@LinuxGuy-cyber cinnamon is still not fully compatible with wayland. the devs of mint are trying to get it working, but if xlibre can act as a drop in replacement for the majority of users, then its significantly easier on the devs of mint than wayland is. wayland was only being focused on because freedesktop project was intentionally trying to shut down xserver for the last 13 years. if x had stopped being supported entirely, then they would have had to switch to wayland, but since xserver is now being supported again by a different dev, it has a chance.

[firepower9966]

Wayand Is experimental, they still supporting xorg in the future releases. They leaving there options open to see how thing evolve. They also have LMDE Linux Mint Debian Editions just incase Ubuntu is no longer a viable option. So much opensource software is being replaced by software with less feature and stability just so it can be new licenced and put behind community standards for political or agenda control by big tech. Xlibre has put a spot light on the corruption of long held open source ideals. Nows its not about code but control.

[Heavygrass]

This pretty technical video analyzes Xorg commits in which Xorg is NOT looking good at all.
E.g. there was anti-screen tearing commits YEARS ago (and lots of others).

[Sunderland93]

It is not a option for me to use Wayland

Xwayland is not an option? Also, there is a project that have way more chances to widely supported by desktop's that want to continue be on X11 - Wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

[Sunderland93]

There is no "cold war", everyone is busy with their own business. Also don't forget about wlroots devs, thanks to which Wayland is rapidly developing and improving in all aspects

[Heavygrass]

Plus there's a cold war brewing between GNOME and KDE over wayland compositors

@Betonhaus
Could you tell us more?

[ghost]

Plus there's a cold war brewing between GNOME and KDE over wayland compositors

@Betonhaus Could you tell us more?

https://absurdlysuspicious.github.io/wayland-protocols-table/
This should help point it out, but without delving through irc logs and such the base matter is that Wayland is very slow to adopt protocols that wasn't in their original vision, and KDE and GNOME are refusing to support each other's protocols. Already stuff like screen capture tools are rarely cross compatible, but as these protocols get adopted there will be more and more software thay will only work under a specific DE and will not work at all on certain other ones.

[Sunderland93]

screen capture tools are rarely cross compatible

PipeWire + portals is a solution for cross compatible screen capture. And software like OBS Studio works on all major Wayland compositors this days. But I agree that adoption of new protocols is slow

[Sunderland93]

Also please note that not all Wayland protocols are mandatory. Some of them are optional, e.g. there is no need for xdg-activation in Gamescope, since activating windows is not part of its responsibilities, or xdg-toplevel-drag

[firepower9966]

Installed xlibre on linux mint Zara. No Issues
https://github.com/xlibre-deb/ubuntu