r/linux • u/DontFreeMe • 4d ago
Distro News Artix Linux drops support for XLibre
https://artixlinux.org/news.php#XLibre_support_discontinued32
u/xXBongSlut420Xx 4d ago
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/DontFreeMe 4d ago
Here is the forum thread which led to this: link
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u/AsexualSuccubus 4d ago
The things he worked on were complex driver/graphics related code. So he did not need to use bit operations anywhere, and even if he did, xor is not useful at all.
Things like bit operations are usually done by so-called "code janitors" who write code that isn't complex or requires much thinking, but is very repetitive. Metux was the opposite. He writes highly complex and sophisticated code. If there is any person who is to be trusted with using AI, it is Metux.
This is the funniest LARP I've seen in a while. Why would anyone even pretend to be a programmer? I don't get this person at all.
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u/RagnarokToast 4d ago
Reading your comment lowkey forced me to read through that god forsaken forum thread because I just could not believe someone would unironically post a take as inconceivably stupid as the one you're quoting (unfortunately it's real).
And now that I have read through the rest of the thread, I regret being able to read altogether.
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u/ThatOneShotBruh 4d ago
Same, I am only on the third page and I don't know whether to laugh or cry at what I am seeing.
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
Third page is when the XLibre users come to the thread and conflict ensues.
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u/ThatOneShotBruh 4d ago
My favourite so far is that exlibredev guy who basically tried to excuse the usage of untested LLM-generated code by explaining that most people working on XLibre don't know how C and Xorg work and that the codebase is too complex to easily understand.
Almost as if there are legitimatr reasons why Xorg is being replaced.
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u/NotQuiteLoona 4d ago edited 4d ago
This isn't some banana republic parliament to entertain tango's whims. Do you know how many bug reports we had since we reverted back to Xorg? Exactly zero.
Given tango's extremely insulting behavior and attacks on social media, consider Artix still packaging XLibre a gratuitous gift.
Yeah... I can see why. Apparently from the thread going forward, XLibre kicked out from their team a person who on Artix forums, if there were problems with XLibre regressions, recommended to switch back to Xorg because XLibre is unstable right now, while he himself has been an active contributor to XLibre trying to make it stable.
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u/ThatOneShotBruh 4d ago
Prepare to get a random comment from Metux in a few weeks/months saying that it's all lies.
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u/KhorneLordOfChaos 4d ago
oh he's terminally online. he'll probably be in this thread by the end of the day
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u/Booty_Bumping 4d ago
I think he got sitewide banned from reddit. Makes sense because he was very aggressively spamming critics with a constant stream of hostile bad faith comments.
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u/Rezrex91 4d ago
If Metux spent as much effort on XLibre as spamming critics on social media, XLibre might have amounted to something. Though, he is just as bad at engineering software and writing working code as he is at formulating good arguments so probably not.
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u/redrumsir 3d ago
I think he got sitewide banned from reddit.
It was apparently a tmp-ban. His username (metux-its) is alive again. He made this comment on the linux subreddit 5 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1vto4jw/xorg_server_261_rc1_prepares_for_first_feature/p5faghh/
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u/toolman1990 3d ago
Sadly Reddit bans are easy to get around with creating a new account with a different email. So if that person is determined to comment they easily can do that under a new account.
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u/setibeings 4d ago
"Reality deniers only. If you're going to come around and say true things, you should probably just leave."
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u/Some-Studio3266 4d ago
Yikes, the thread is just vile.
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u/Such_Highlight9873 4d ago
QRD? It looks way too long for me to read.
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u/Nereithp 4d ago
The first page is okay but then it devolves into slurs, fingering each other about who is ACTUALLY the ultimate DEI hire, remarks on Drew, Poettering and arguing about "CCP-controlled lefties".
So pretty much what one could expect, really.
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u/Such_Highlight9873 4d ago
Well Pottering made systemd so to Artix, he is like the devil, worse than Microsoft.
And Drew is a lolicon pedophile isn't he? Not sure if he ever apologized for that.
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u/Nereithp 4d ago
For the first statement, hence the "what one could expect".
For the second statement, I don't really know much about Drew besides the fact that he is the guy behind SourceHut and that he is hated largely by the same people who hate Lennart.
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u/AiwendilH 4d ago
Trying to figure out if parts of that thread are serious or satire.
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u/nightblackdragon 4d ago edited 4d ago
For example, one of Metux's first commits used the XOR operator (^) wrongly as he thought that it was a pow operator.
Lol.
And the best thing is that this comment mentions it as an argument to justify the use of AI.
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u/LawfulnessNo8446 4d ago
That one is serious. It was made by someone who came over from 4chan, and even the people on 4chan are calling them out for being an idiot by posting that.
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u/AiwendilH 4d ago
Thanks...I really couldn't tell.
Someone called "exlibredev"" making a post about how incredibly bad the xorg/xlibre codebase is and how almost impossible it is to improve on it and then using that as reason why quality standards shouldn't apply to xlibre and the xlibre devs being in the right to slash out any anyone requesting such...come on....that had to be satire ;)
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u/LawfulnessNo8446 4d ago
Lol, sorry. Just figured I should clarify in case. There's even a screenshot of the 4chan conversation later in the artix thread.
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u/icywind90 4d ago
We have been saying that for decades, that's why we need Wayland and not AI-driven xorg xD
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u/_AACO 4d ago
Let me see if I understood correctly. Someone that doesn't know how to program in C was in charge of a massive C codebase and is using AI to help them write in said language?
No wonder things weren't going well.
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u/mao_dze_dun 4d ago
I have 16.39 USD in Deepseek API credits left, at the moment. I think I might be qualified for the job 😀
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u/LowOwl4312 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
My killer application for continue using xorg is xscreensaver
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
jwz disagrees and I defer to his expertise.
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u/gmes78 4d ago
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 4d ago
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/Spra991 3d ago
Wayland has been drama for 15 years and ongoing.
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u/Misicks0349 3d ago
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/Aggeloz 4d ago
"We will fork because we dont like politics." Proceeds to fork just to do their own politics.
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u/TheOneTrueTrench 4d ago
Just once, I'd like them to just say "I'm forking this because I have different politics" instead of pretending that being opposed to a political position isn't just politics in itself.
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u/Yeox0960 4d ago
continues to be worse than the original in both code and politics
That's what happens when you do things solely out of political reasons.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 4d ago
That’s not surprising when a fork is done over political ideologies.
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u/cAtloVeR9998 4d ago
The Xlibre author got a warning from Torwalds after writing anti-vaxx stuff on the LKML.
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u/NoLemurs 4d ago edited 4d ago
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 4d ago
And someone made that proposal in fedora...
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u/OneQuarterLife 4d ago
That would be Kevin Kofler, I didn't even have to check.
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u/Preisschild 4d ago
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 3d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 3d ago
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/Hadi_Chokr07 4d ago
Wait the shitty protest fork by shitty people turned out shit?
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u/alastortenebris 4d ago
B-but Lunduke told me XLibre was the future! How could this have happened?
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u/nightblackdragon 4d ago
It's obviously IBM/Red Hat's fault.
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u/Preisschild 4d ago
They are already blaming XLibre DEI hires
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u/hueheuheuheueh 4d ago
Sources tell me a guy called Pennart Loettering wearing these glasses is actually the culprit.
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u/Sahelantrophus 4d ago
thank God the artix devs finally wised up and stopped providing support for that dogshit software
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u/Preisschild 4d ago
"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 3d ago
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/FryBoyter 4d ago
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 4d ago
He was in Artix since 2020, so I can see why Nous would be pissed about this
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u/FryBoyter 4d ago edited 4d ago
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 3d ago
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 2d ago
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/sheeproomer 1d ago
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 20h ago
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/nightblackdragon 4d ago
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/tulpyvow 4d ago
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 4d ago
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/victorian-ice-cream 4d ago
Considering the reasons Xlibre happened at all, it was anything but reasonable.
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u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 4d ago
What do you mean by that?
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u/victorian-ice-cream 4d ago
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/Marce7a 4d ago
Indeed, it should be optional so anyone easily swap back to Xorg
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
Not half, one person left.
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago edited 4d ago
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/RebTexas 4d ago
>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 4d ago
How about, they're a disgusting Nazi because they are, in fact, a disgusting Nazi?
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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 4d ago
...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 4d ago
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 4d ago
... 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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
are you hearing yourself?
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
It sounds convoluted to somebody who has never met the guy
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u/icywind90 4d ago
It's extremely straightforward. It's a nazi scum.
For someone who was born in Poland that's extremely obvious-15
u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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 4d ago
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/icywind90 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
who did you have in mind? I don't know other people from xlibre
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u/RebTexas 4d ago edited 4d ago
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/Business_Reindeer910 4d ago
artix needs to drop support for (some of) its users. The linked comment threads are pretty gross.
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u/toolman1990 2d ago
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 2d ago
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/DazzlingAd4254 4d ago
The moral of the story: cozy up to fascist nut jobs at your own risk. What did you expect of a rage fork by a reportedly disagreeable fellow?
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u/TheRealCarrotty 4d ago
Very good!
I don't understand forking something because of "political" shit.
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u/toolman1990 2d ago
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/Mereo110 4d ago
Good. With Wayland, Linux Desktop entered the 21st century.
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u/DontFreeMe 4d ago
Wayland is just a protocol. And there are as many bad implementations (GNOME) as there are good (KDE)
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u/Mereo110 4d ago
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/AmarildoJr 4d ago edited 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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/Maximum-Bobcat5612 4d ago
KDE 6.8 is dropping X support completely. They've already started deleting X11 specific code
With XWayland apps still supported.
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u/UdPropheticCatgirl 3d ago
> 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 2d ago
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 2d ago
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 1d ago
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/cannedbeef255 4d ago
context shirt context hat
what's the controversy about xlibre? who's tango?
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 4d ago
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 4d ago edited 4d ago
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/Normal-Confusion4867 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago edited 4d ago
hence why i'm asking reddit. plus the forum seemed as if it needed context.
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u/Admirable-Song-7353 4d ago
Jesus fucking christ, all this linux drama... I'm tired boss. Glad I made my switch to fedora couple years ago, I'm having a healthy life since then.
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u/Normaandy 4d ago
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/0riginal-Syn 4d ago edited 4d ago
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 4d ago edited 4d ago
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/DontFreeMe 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 4d ago
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/Booty_Bumping 4d ago
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 4d ago edited 4d ago
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 4d ago
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 3d ago
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/SuperGNUser 4d ago
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/S7relok 4d ago
TLDR : bunch of nerds arguing for projects nobody gives fucks about.
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u/FryBoyter 4d ago
I think we should be fair here. There are definitely users for whom this is important. Just like in the case of systemd versus non-systemd.
But these people need to realize that they are in the minority and that, objectively speaking, they aren't always right.
And as far as nerds go, that basically includes everyone who uses Linux.
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u/the_abortionat0r 3d ago
I'd agree that the nut jobs aren't right.
Most x11 evangelists don't actually rely on x11 specific features but instead see a technical advancement as an emotional attack.... Which is weird....
And for SystemD it's 50% have some religious hate/conspiratorial take on SystemD and the other 50% of SystemD haters base their hate on the insane idea that the entire SystemD suite is one binary that is the init system and it has no modularity which is also weird as it's one of the most documented things in existence.
And for nerdom? Linux is a tool, using it simply as a tool doesn't in of itself make someone a nerd. I have installed Linux mint, Fedora, nobara, Garuda, and CachyOS for a shit ton of tech illiterate average joes including people in their 60s and they enjoy it because it works.
Not because of a design paradigm, or the specifics of a files system, philosophy, lisencing, etc but just because it works.
It's only nerdy once it's somebody's hobby/identity.
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u/FlukyS 4d ago
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