A commentator on my 2024 entry on the uncertain possible futures of Unix graphical desktops brought up the XLibre project. XLibre is ostensibly a fork of the X server that will be developed by a new collection of people, which on the surface sounds unobjectionable and maybe a good thing for people (like me) who want X to keep being viable; as a result it has gotten a certain amount of publicity from credulous sources who don't look behind the curtain. Unfortunately for everyone, XLibre is an explicitly political project , and I don't mean that in the sense of disagreements about technical directions (the sense that you could say that 'forking is a political action', because it's the manifestation of a social disagreement). Instead I mean it in the regular sense of 'political', which is that the people involved in XLibre (especially its leader) have certain social values and policies that they espouse, and the XLibre project is explicitly manifesting some of them.

(Plus, a project cannot be divorced from the people involved in it .)

I am not going to summarize here; instead, you should read the Register article and its links , and also the relevant sections of Ariadne Conill's announcement of Wayback and their links. However, even if you "don't care" about politics, you should see this correction to earlier XLibre changes where the person making the earlier changes didn't understand what ' 2^16 ' did in C (I would say that the people who reviewed the changes also missed it, but there didn't seem to be anyone doing so, which ought to raise your eyebrows when it comes to the X server).

Using, shipping it as part of a distribution, or advocating for XLibre is not a neutral choice. To do so is to align yourself, knowingly or unknowingly, with the politics of XLibre and with the politics of its leadership and the people its leadership will attract to the project. This is always true to some degree with any project, but it's especially true when the project is explicitly manifesting some of its leadership's values, out in the open. You can't detach XLibre from its leader .

My personal view is that I don't want to have anything to do with XLibre and I will think less of any Unix or Linux distribution that includes it, especially ones that intend to make it their primary X server. At a minimum, I feel those distributions haven't done their due diligence.

In general, my personal guess is that a new (forked) standalone X server is also the wrong approach to maintaining a working X server environment over the long term. Wayback combined with XWayland seems like a much more stable base because each of them has more support in various ways (eg, there are a lot of people who are going to want old X programs to keep working for years or decades to come and so lots of demand for most of XWayland's features).

(This elaborates on my comment on XLibre in this entry . I also think that a viable X based environment is far more likely to stop working due to important programs becoming Wayland-only than because you can no longer get a working X server.)