That’s a great idea. Thank you!

Upon further reading, this proposal appears to have thoroughly been in bad faith with right-wing, socio-political virtue-signalling and/or advertising the X11Libre project as the actual goal.

Some highlights:

• X11Libre does not even have a Fedora package available on copr, yet the proposal was to replace the consistently maintained X.org server.
• Bonus to the above: The submitter conflates “not adding new features because X11 is planned for deprecation” with “unmaintained”.
• There is one maintainer of X11Libre and the fork is less than a month old.
• The maintainer of X11Libre purportedly “doesn’t believe in” automated testing.
• The maintainer, when actively contributing to X.org caused multiple breakages and made code review problematic with their 800+ merge requests. This includes breaking the ABI.
• On the code quality front, the maintainer also appears to have failed to understand the difference between XOR and exponents in the C syntax.

Sidenote: The two above make me suspect that AI slop may be prominent, beyond the general code quality issues.

• X11Libre openly admits that future Nvidia compatibility is unlikely.
• The cited benefit of the new features is adding security and the like. However, under the X11 model, use of these extensions is “opt-in”, making the utility and security benefits questionable (beyond the fact that all major DEs are moving to Wayland and deprecating X11 support).

Extra double-bonus Metux has history of being problematic enough that Linus roasted him for speading anti-vax disinformation.

EDIT: I remembered that there was something else that I found reading through that thread that makes it pretty clear that the change request was in bad faith.

I wanted to understand the reasoning, so, here’s the summary section of the README (with my commentary):

Xlibre is a fork of the Xorg Xserver with lots of code cleanups and enhanced functionality.

Ok. That sounds reasonable. A little long for an initial README/manpage line but not bad.

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.

Hrm…seems a bit historically inaccurate, as Wayland was created by an X.org dev and the reasons for deprecating are related to performance, security, and moving away from dated architecture. Also a bit intense and opinion-based for technical writing. Maybe the guy is just passionate and hyper-focused on X11?

Right after journalists first began covering the planned fork Xlibre, on June 6th 2025, Redhat employees started a purge on the Xlibre founder’s GitLab account on freedesktop.org: deleted the git repo, tickets, merge requests, etc, and so fired the shot that the whole world heard.

That…sounds even more weird to put in a README or manpage because it has nothing to do with usage or development instructions and seems like the guy is taking it very personally.

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.

Why is he writing “Big Tech” in upper-camel case? That’s kinda weird. And the dev is treating "Big Tech".replace(" ", "") as a singular corporate entity with subsidiaries?

“Political activists groups”

…?..Ok that’s a bit weird and the pluralizing of “activist” looks grammatically problematic.Going in a pretty weird direction.

state actors, etc

I’ve not been aware of any xz-like issue being found in Wayland but, maybe I missed something.

It’s explicitly free of any “DEI” or similar discriminatory policies.

Oh. This is a racist. Things make a lot more sense now.

… Anybody who’s treating others nicely is welcomed.

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 a boring average person. Anybody who’s interested in bringing X forward is welcome.

Conspicuously missing LGBTQ+ people but, maybe that’s what they mean when using the derogatory “fairy”?

a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri

DO NOT USE WORDS FROM OUR SACRED BOOK IN YOUR UNHINGED PRO-DISCRIMINATORY RANT MASQUERADING AS A README.

Together we’ll make X great again!

Repurposed neo-nazi rhetoric. Gross.

Significant mention in the thread of freedesktop.org Code of Conduct violations. I can likely guess but, let’s see what that’s about.

Code of Conduct freedesktop.org has adopted the Contributor Covenant for all the services we host. Please conduct yourself in an appropriate manner, avoiding abusive, bullying, and/or discriminatory behaviour. For more information, including where to report any inappropriate behaviour, please consult the full Code of Conduct.

Ok. That seems to be pretty thoroughly reasonable for anyone who does not have strongly held discriminatory feelings. What did he (git blame for the changes shows that it was metux ) do/say?

Looking through the thread, there’s a Mastodon post showing

Digging deeper, it appears that the freedesktop.org CoC Committee is not very open in its decision making so, it’s not clear what part of the CoC was broken.

Version control integration

Almost always garbage, in my experience. Except for merge conflict resolution. That’s unbelievably nice. But git command lines have always been more reliable and less likely to end up with broken local branches.

Seriously though. The merge conflict resolution in three panes is super nice.

TIL. Thanks for that!

Yeah. I like using main() that way too. It’s usually just a high-level function that handles globals relevant to running in standalone and calling other functions to do work.

This is exactly why the conditional is used. It allows the script to function both as a standalone application and a library.

ETA: Probably would make sense to just treat it as default behavior in the interpreter and only require the conditional to overwrite in cases where main is not the main function and/or pre-processing is needed.

Use the modulo operator? Nah. Need to import the isEven library and a ton of other unnecessary sub-50 LOC libraries “maintained” by a single dev to make their CV look more impressive. /s

Absolutely. I’m happy that people have options.

Related to the image, not the article: I find the asymmetrical thumbstick layout to be terrible, ergonomically - the layout on the Switch sometimes causes me physical pain. I’m very glad that Valve didn’t go that way.

An AI company not respecting copyright and licensing? I’m shocked.

I was going to ask whether it runs on Linux but then saw what comm it was <3

Svalboard. Not am EMACS user (it’s a fine editor/Lisp interpreter) but, even nice mechkb isn’t necessarily going to prevent RSI or exacerbation of existing conditions. Best to change to a text-entry device that is designed with humans in mind.

In this case, it’s a feature of the language that enables developers to implement greater amounts of parallelism. So, the developers of the Python-based application will need to refactor to take advantage of it.

https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.13.html#whatsnew313-free-threaded-cpython

It’s also, I find, much more widely supported on a wider variety of hardware and with easier config automation.

That would be reasonable. The people running these things aren’t reasonable. They ignore every established mechanism to communicate a lack of consent to their activity because they don’t respect others’ agency and want everything.

I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

I’ll believe it after review and approval by the OSI. It still is philosophically in direct conflict with the Open-Source Movement by making software less accessible to end users and especially non-technical users than it is to corpos.

It’s not free and open source. And it’s contrary to the F(L)OSS movement philosophy (cost should never be a barrier for one to use technology). Conceptually, it’s nice to try to get corpos to compensate devs but that’s not what this would do. Small businesses and individuals would be impacted while corpos can work around it.

Additionally, it seems a bit ethically questionable to try to forcibly extract fees from end users when, increasingly, they’re feeling economic strain from the continued wealth hoarding and impending recession/depression.

vi in base Ubuntu isn’t really vi. It’s vim-minimal.