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X11 is going to die.
It's not going to die completely—nothing ever does—but it will become a very niche product, used only by a few dedicated fans, whereas all mainstream distributions will switch over to Wayland.
It's also not dead yet; rather, it's in this gradual process of becoming less and less used, with more and more distributions getting rid of it. And truth be told, that's for the best.
I have talked about this more in length previously, but the main reasons are that the developers themselves of X11 — something like 5, 10 years ago — realized that to make a better product, they had to get rid of the structure that they had created significantly, and it didn't make sense to keep X11 around for it. The switch to Wayland made possible some core essential things that X11 just couldn't do, such as a permission systems and better safety.
It should come as no surprise that the number of commits measured over time decreases every year in the X11 project. That was until 2024, when — surprisingly enough — it went up by quite a lot to the levels of 2013. So, 12 years ago.
And it was all thanks to one developer called Enrico, the same developer that, in recent days, has announced a new fork of X11 called XLibre. In order to understand whether it's something that we should keep an eye on or not, we need to first dive into who he is.
Firstly, you might be surprised to hear that it's not the first time that we've heard of the guy. He has already been in the "Linux news" (let's say it like that) when he sent an email to the kernel mailing list claiming that vaccines were bad and they were an experiment of governments that will make all of us humanoid.
His email was so senseless that even Linus Torvalds himself wrote an angry reply saying that - well… - first of all, this kind of "bullshit" doesn't have any place in the Linux kernel mailing list. But even if it did, it still makes no sense at all — because vaccines are, you know, useful.
And I do want to stress the difference between somebody believing that vaccines actually hurt or have more side effects than normal, and somebody who thinks that they're a tool of the government to make us a humanoid. Those are pretty different stances, and I feel like the latter is a symptom of some sort of unease. This is the context that we're starting from.
People with, let's say, "weird opinions" in the past have proven to be great developers. And I think a valid question is: well, all of this work that he has done for the Linux kernel—is that any good? Is he going to be able to bring this fork forward and make it a good, improved product? And to be clear, given that I'm not that good of a developer, I don't have any chance to be able to understand myself whether his commits were any good or not.
However, people who could do so are the developers themselves of the X11 project, who have been maintaining it for the past years—the people with the most commits in the past few years after, well, obviously Enrico, who stepped in and took the leadership immediately.
Well, the first red flag is that we have a couple of bug reports of very significant regressions that were caused by his code.
And we're not talking about some little regression, but—as an example—he completely broke xrandr, which stopped working entirely in an attempt of his to fix a single bug. And this prompted multiple developers to start asking him, "Are you even testing your own changes before pushing them? Because your fix to xrandr completely broke xrandr".
And even though he justified his mistakes, saying that he had gotten some technical things of the testing wrong, nonetheless this got the other developers annoyed enough that multiple times they considered just stopping accepting merge requests from Enrico.
Even worse, the other developers seemed to think that apparently his changes were not really fixing anything and only introducing possibly new bugs without fixing any. The discussion escalated multiple times, with at least three or four developers angry, saying that he was a net negative on the community and that they should stop accepting merges from him.
On top of that, his tone in his commits whenever a discussion arose was always quite aggressive and implying that there was some sort of conspiracy by big corporations to prevent any X11 release and to keep the project stagnant and eventually kill it. Behavior that didn't stop even when one of the other lead developers said that they were planning to make a release of X11 eventually.
He started pushing so many merge requests that apparently other developers didn’t have time to review — or maybe, given the previous regressions, they didn’t want to accept. He reached a point where he had something like 100, even 150, open merge requests, and he was annoyed enough that he created a new issue listing all of these 150 or more merge requests and asking for reviews more intensely.
And this is where the disconnect with the other developers became clear enough, as he said that these merge requests were absolutely necessary in order to get X11 back to being commonly used software instead of, you know, letting it be killed.
As an example, another developer said that if you think that X11 can come back from the dead, then you're delusional. Though it’s some strong wording, and I do not totally appreciate this kind of tone, he is right: X11 is not coming back. And honestly, it's to soon to say that we should just trust the fact that he is able to be a prolific developer for X11, that he's going to be able to bring the project forward simply because he has made a very large number of commits and a very large number of merge requests, even though a lot of these commits and merge requests are very small ones and mostly moving things around, and at the same time another developer told us that they bring little benefit.
We need to have some more information and maybe wait for the next release of this fork. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Let's actually start talking about the fork.
Last week, he decided to fork the X Server project and make XLibre, and he did so in the FreeDesktop GitLab where the X.Org project is also hosted.
And he had a bit of a README to explain the project to the other people, and in doing so, he explained that there were other toxic members in the group, he said, that were preventing the project from moving forward. And he started saying that there's corporate interest that want to kill off the project. And he started heavily criticizing—indirectly but in a pretty clear way—the companies that are currently supporting FreeDesktop development.
He went on to implicitly criticize the companies that support X11, saying that XLibre is "not affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc". And then on top of that, he started injecting his own politics into it. We already had a hint of it when he said that vaccines make us subhuman. But he also said that this XLibre project was going to get rid of DEI—Diversity, Equity, Inclusion—and that it was a place that is free for everybody who wants to contribute.
Which is an interesting claim, because of course any project wants to be open and inclusive for anybody who wants to contribute. But then, when you start taking into account the fact that people are people and are going to behave in certain ways, you realize that you start to have some kind of limit to what people can do, such as: they cannot harass other people, they cannot insult other people. And then you need to take their sensibilities into account: what does "harassing" mean, exactly? And if somebody is actively transphobic, then (hopefully!) we can decide that, yeah, that's also the type of behavior that’s going to hurt people. And we do not want that to happen to our contributors, especially because a lot of the software that we all use— even transphobic people — is written by trans people. So let’s maybe not let people harass them.
And of course, he also decided to end the README saying "Make X Great Again," mimicking Trump’s slogan; which is not the worst thing that could happen, but you can’t say "let’s keep politics out of this" and then mimic Trump’s slogan (come on!). And, obviously, even saying that you want to get rid of DEI is a political statement. There were quite some politics on this fork!
Understandably enough, when the FreeDesktop project — and especially the Code of Conduct committee — realized that there existed a fork within the FreeDesktop GitLab repository that implicitly criticized the FreeDesktop project and even went against its very values of being inclusive to people, and mimicked Trump’s slogan — they decided against it. They deleted the fork and banned Enrico, who did not let that be an obstacle to the XLibre project’s success.
Of course, he started claiming to be censored by freedesktop. He did so in an email that is incredibly deaf to the actual reason he might have been banned. I have to read some quotes here:
So much for freedesktop.org being "indipendent" and embracing freedom. Perhaps we should nominate them for the next Orwell award.
It's now clear that freedesktop.org is the Redskirts, and they want to kill X. By the way, the same corporation that tried to proprietarize a lot of FOSS code, including the Linux kernel.
And again, I feel like it’s pretty important to say here that when you own a project, a GitHub instance, and you decide that somebody’s values do not align with yours and you decide not to host their project on your server, you're not censoring them. You’re just saying, “Well, I’m not going to give you my free resources for your project that actively goes against my values.” And it’s not like censorship: you can use other instances. And that’s what Enrico is doing — he just moved to GitHub.
I don’t exactly think that being banned from the FreeDesktop repo is going to be a great damage to the XLibre project, which is flourishing anyway — as much as such a project can flourish. All in all, I think that this XLibre fork still has to prove that it can survive with the help of this just one developer with very strong political ideas and that has technical knowledge of the codebase that’s maybe a bit debatable. Of course, he says that he’s very good at it and he's going to bring a lot of improvements; but, at the same time, other X11 developers say that he hasn't brought new features so far.
So I think we’re just going to have to wait and see whether this project is able to reach the goal that it gave itself. Let's talk about Brodie, now.
Brodie made a point that banning this person from the FreeDesktop repository was a mistake because in this way they gave him much more force compared to just if they shut up about it—which is a reasonable point. However, at the same time, I don’t feel like the FreeDesktop repository can just completely ignore what’s going on on their very own server which goes against their very own values just because they’re scared to give them even more visibility by banning them.
If it goes against their values then it would be newsworthy even if they decided to keep them on their own repository. Imagine the titles: “FreeDesktop decides to host a fork that goes against FreeDesktop’s values, that is against DEI, and that has a Trump slogan.” They just cannot allow that to happen.
One more thing: all of this was mostly reported by one right-wing QAnon anti-vax anti-climate-change tech journalist. (I feel bad for using this term, but let’s call him a journalist). I still feel like we could have just ignored this whole thing if it wasn’t just for him.
Of course, he just went on to create more made-up news, claiming that as a reaction to this fork, a lot of major distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, decided to just get rid of X11 immediately.
Because yes, it is true that Fedora and Ubuntu have just announced that they are discontinuing their X11 distributions, but this was actually planned for months before this. It’s not a reaction to XLibre, because to put it bluntly: we don’t give a fuck about XLibre. That’s really not on our minds when we decide to, you know, roll out—make—this kind of change, very important changes to a distribution. Again, there’s public record of both distributions planning to do this. So it’s not exactly news. It just happened very shortly after this unrelated news.
So yeah, I’m skeptical about all of this. But I also realize that maybe actually he has shitty political views, but he is also a great developer, and this actually birth thing is going to be great and distributions are going to switch to it. I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t think barely anybody is going to switch to it. But maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.
