Update: added OpenMandriva response that gives support to X11Libre, and they already switched to it for the development branch. Consequently, OpenMandriva is another non-DEI distribution rejecting the woke nonsense with sexual perversion needing to be espoused in everything.
There has been a renaming of the project as I think there was some trading service using XLibre. But for X11Libre to be successful, there is going to have to be some additional changes within free and opensource software as many other software projects are set to stop supporting X11 (Xorg). Of course, this was due to Red Hat controlling X11 with limited patches and no new releases, convincing much of the world that it was dead. Consequently, since switching to X11 on my old Chromebook laptop running Arch, it works noticeably better than Wayland, which is being pushed as the path forward by the megacorps involved in free and opensource software. If only Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation would have beat Linus to a kernel, we might have an entirely different software stack today without the meddling and infection (closed source firmware) of the megacorps. Hopefully, this is the first step in getting out of the megacorp shadow and restoring some software freedom.
[xlibre] possible X11Libre community goals
to xlibre  |
I made a few posts on social media and forums to see if people were
aware of the X11Libre project and to get some feedback on it. Was
very surprised at how divided the responses were about the possibility
of continuing to use X11 instead of switching to Wayland. The most
concerning point that was brought up was that if the major GUI
libraries like GTK+ and Qt drop support for X11 and if there are no
modern browsers that work with it, it isn’t going to be a very viable
alternative to Wayland.
If X11Libre is able to put together a thriving community that’s
interested in continuing to use it, I think it would be vital for that
community to reach out to projects and encourage them to continue to
offer a way to support X11 APIs and not just Wayland. It would be
nice if that community could connect with projects such as Ladybird
browser, FLTK, WxWidgets, Raylib, SDL, SFML, etc. I know FLTK didn’t
even plan to add Wayland support for several years and there are
desktop environments that have been built completely using FLTK.
Lightweight GUIs such as nuklear and some of the immediate mode GUI
libraries should be fairly easy to keep using with the X11 API.
There’s also the possibility of using a modern browser library with an
alternative GUI front end which is what the Fifth project did.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of any projects of that nature that have
stayed up to date with the latest version of a major browser library.
I think it would be beneficial if some of the smaller Linux
distributions and some of the BSD systems could pull together and
continue to support and create software that works with X11. It’s
important to have alternatives to projects directed by private
interests. It’s also crucial in FLOSS to be able to build software
from source in a repeatable manner and not have such a complicated and
interdependent chain of dependencies that only large corporations or
major Linux distributions can build that software successfully. If
there’s a roadmap or some next steps that could be put together for
growing the X11Libre community and reaching out to FLOSS projects that
could interoperate with X11Libre, I think that could be a favorable
objective.
| Bernhard Rosenkränzer <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> | 8:28 AM (2 hours ago) |
| to xlibre |
On Saturday, June 14, 2025 13:33 CEST, LM <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> I think it would be beneficial if some of the smaller Linux
> distributions and some of the BSD systems could pull together and
> continue to support and create software that works with X11.
Count us (OpenMandriva) in — our plan is to support both X11 (XLibre — we’ve already switched Cooker (our development branch) over to it, and aside from some issues with the mouse cursor, it works great – writing this in Plasma 6 running on XLibre) and Wayland as long as it remains viable — or, of course, until something better comes along – I think everyone looking at things objectively will agree that neither X11 nor Wayland are perfect. Wayland fixes some real X11 problems [most of which could be solved with new X extensions too], but at the same time introduces a load of problems of its own, some by design and some by oversight. Obviously there’s no chance of the breakages-by-design getting fixed ever. An alternative that is better than either one might still appear.
ttyl
bero