Product Launch
anonymous
2 points
103 comments
Postedabout 1 month agoActive29 days ago
Xlibre
x11libre.netlaunchedlibrarydevelopers
Key Features
code cleanupsXorg Xserver fork
Tech Stack
XorgX11
Key Features
Tech Stack
> It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.
Complaining about DEI is a marker for a specific ideology. I see this and think great, a project of people who want to be allowed to "just crack jokes" but then get super defensive when they get called out on it.
It also makes me instantly suspect that their ejection from the project from which they forked had more to do with how they composed themselves rather than the fact that they were considering a fork.
If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...
"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."
EDIT to make this comment a bit more useful and productive: When people talk about "inclusion" in a DEI context, they typically mean making an active effort to include a diverse set of people. Outreach programs, looking at the community to identify things which drive away groups of people, that sort of thing. It can mean cracking down on "jokes" which make fun of some groups of people, or discussions of topics which make groups of people uncomfortable, etc.
It's a very different beast from just having a policy against explicitly disallowing contributions from people based on their group identity.
That's not diversity, nor equity , nor inclusion.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f8/Interne...
So when I said anti-DEI is a marker for a specific political ideology, it's really because it's a marker for the kind of media a person consumes, which informs the definition of DEI they're using.
The political stuff is just an extra bonus.
I’m not a racist, I’m just not, it’s like calling someone a pedophile because they don’t find a particular type of mature person sexually appealing (over other sexually mature people, obviously).
But people keep telling me unless I do what they tell me to, in the way they tell me to (in a perpetual purity test kind of way) then I am actually leaning in to racist ideology and dogma.
Please, I just want to enjoy technology with other people who enjoy technology. I don’t care at all: the tone of your skin, where you come from, who you sleep with or what hole you piss from.
I’m also anti-DEI because everywhere I have seen policies enacted it becomes a circus. But you are totally welcome to work with me regardless of who you are, I just think its off-topic when talking about rendering systems to talk about how oppressed we all are.
>I don’t care at all: the tone of your skin, where you come from, who you sleep with or what hole you piss from
That sounds like a sad, shallow, deracinated existence. It is human nature to care about these things. You never hear this boomercon cringe in healthy societies.
Did you know its possible to support social systems and equality without gasp making it a huge deal?
You’re both losers, either side of the US political spectrum, leave the rest of us alone.
Yes, I’m mad about it- 15 years of this and its not improving.
It annoys me how Americans think the whole internet is coded to them, it doesn’t even map cleanly onto British sensibilities and prevalent social issues. Shut the fuck up.
THE MAIN REASON I LIKED COMPUTERS WAS BECAUSE WE WERE ALL EQUALS ON THE INTERNET
If there was discrimination it was because you didn’t contribute, or you opened the discussion. Doxxing in the 90s wasn't a meaningful risk, and social networks were small and largely isolated.
the condescension here is palpable. as if you know more? thanks for your sacrifice: enlightened one.
Didn’t like where you were, there was always somewhere else to go and a new name to take.
Getting access to the internet was a major issue for the poor (a situation I have first-hand experience in)- but once you were in, you were part of the club. Unless you behaved poorly- then you had to make a new name for yourself somewhere else.
I grew up in poverty to a single mother in one of the most deprived areas of the country, surrounded by drugs and violent crime and constantly bullied by my peers for having a foreign and female sounding name. To add to that my entire family (sans mum) was dead before I turned 5, to cancer, alcoholism and violent crime.
Hell, my mums best friend growing up was a heroin addicted prostitute who gave me a hicky on my seventh birthday, and my childhood best friend was pimped out by her family and went missing when we were 13 (it was the grandmother, btw).
Lecture me on hardship why don’t you. Fucking douchebag.
You must have had access to a different internet than I did. That is not and has never been true.
The only way for everyone to be 'equal on the internet' (whatever that means) is to throw away or disregard everything that makes each of us unique, and all that leaves us with is a homogeneous beige sludge.
The only thing I know about you is that you call yourself, “basscomm” and unless I go digging (something that I couldn’t have done in the era of the BBS) then I’d have no way of judging your character before reading the words that you speak.
If you don't actively oppose discrimination then you're indirectly supporting it by being a passive enabler.
“do what I say the way I tell you to do it or else you're a nazi sympathiser at best” is a super compelling argument by the way. Good going.
Grow up the lot of you. We all have to learn to live together.
It's not about fascism in particular, but the behavior that enables it and other discriminatory control systems.
> “do what I say the way I tell you to do it or else you're a nazi sympathiser at best” is a super compelling argument by the way.
That's not the argument, which you may have realized if you weren't so upset.
“Do DEI the way we say, or else” is littrally what we’re discussing. The PR guidelines state that background doesn’t matter.
Ignorance of context is not a compelling argument either, though I notice that people I would ideologically align with on the internet treat it like a weapon. Ugh
Are you even committed to the ideology?
Or maybe the project's infrastructure or documentation is somehow more difficult to use for left-handed people, or assumes shared experiences that's common among right-handed people but which is foreign to most left-handed people.
And since roughly 10% of the population is left-handed, if only 2% of your community is left-handed, it could be worthwhile to ask why. Maybe that difference is due to a broader societal issue, but maybe there's something about the community that repels left-handed people. Worth investigating, no?
https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...
Accessibility is a different matter, not related to handedness - being left-handed is not considered to be a handicap. Adding accessibility features does not mean the team needs to include people with whatever handicap those features are tailored to though, they just need to gather enough input from people who need these features so they know what to implement. This does not mean the team should not include someone who happens to be blind (etc.), if that person is willing and able to contribute he's as welcome as anyone else.
> I'm left-handed and I will use whatever tools I can get my hands on to the fullest of my ability.
I'm not sure I can get you to look beyond what you yourself can do, but try to consider these groups: older people who will not learn precise right hand movement anymore, people with temporary or permanent right hand injury, people with no right hand, people with missing right hand fingers, etc.
And consider what do you actually lose from your side if the UI can be tailored to dominant-left-hand usage.
Perhaps, but that does not seem to be a software issue, at least, not a software issue with the X window system itself. If you want to consider such things, it is probably more important if someone who is concerned about such things wants to design hardware specifically for such people.
Allowing you as long as you want to type something instead of adding a time limit can be helpful for such people (since having less fingers or only one hand might make it take longer to type) but it can also be helpful for any other people for whatever reason (e.g. you have to answer the telephone before continuing to type on the computer, etc).
Accessibility features are for everyone.
However, if they add the possibility to use touch-screens (although I don't like touch-screens, some people might want to use it), then considering being left-handed vs right-handed might potentially be significant when designing a GUI library or a GUI program, although even then it is not certain that it will.
Still, if something does affect the users in this way (with accessibility, which involves other things too; and accessibility is not only for people with the relevant disabilities, but is for everyone (including people with those disabilities)), then it is true that having people who use those accessibility features (and whatever other features you might add or change, even if they are not accessibility features) in the testing team is helpful, so yes, that is a case. However, it is FOSS and does not necessarily need a dedicated team for testing. They do say anyone who wants to and is able to work on it is allowed to do so, so if someone is concerned with this then hopefully they can help, too.
"It comes down to stating that you don't care whether contributors happen to be left- or right-handed: well, duh, of course you don't care and it would be silly to insist on having 'equal handedness representation' as a policy for a project."
that's how DEI works in X11?
I respect someone who stands up for their beliefs, even if I think they are flawed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...
Which ideology ? I find that DEI is a very ideological position specific to the America left (and to the America political situation). Not everybody wants to have to deal with it. Judging contributors just according to their contributions to the project (in general, not just code), is inherently anti-DEI because it would be about equality, not equity.
It's not. It's not called explicitly DEI in other countries, but the ideas are in no way limited to the US.
* The people who make XFree86, GNOME and KDE are all part of the same FreeDesktop club. They have a (not so) secret plan to completely ditch X11 and replace it with the thing they've been dicking about with for 17 years: Wayland.
* Wayland's still nowhere near X11 replacement quality, and in several cases, they actually think they've done you a solid by taking away useful things X11 can do, like the ability to reliably take screenshots with third-party software, or get a reliable list of screens and pick the one you'll open on. They exhibit worrying levels of phone-brain or "platform"-brain. My computer, my rules, you dipshits.
* To ensure they achieve their goal of killing X11, the developers of XFree86 are _intentionally_ going to stop supporting it, to scare you over to Wayland. "Who'll support your precious X11 if we, its own developers, abandon it? Muhahahahahaha!" they might ask.
* What they didn't count on was the batshit conspiracy theorist who'd been submitting hundreds of patches to XFree86 that they'd just been ignoring. He's escaped the asylum, he's anti-woke, and he's the saviour of X11. God help us all. And if you dare take him up on his offer to keep using X11, the X11-haters club (FreeDesktop) will call you a Nazi to delegitimise you so they can move forward with their plan to kill X11.
It's a side-issue that the FreeDesktop/KDE/GNOME folks have gotten more divisive and confrontational in their politics and have no problem milking their tech projects to further their political goals. If you want someone to blame for this, blame the general increase in divisiveness that came from social media weaponising disagreement to the point the orange shitbag got elected and all the tech corps kow-towed to him. The GNOME developers have always been officious pricks who seem completely deaf to user feedback and actively fight you in the bug reports, but they haven't previously been banging on about "Nazi bars"; that's a recent development.
It's worth noting that a bunch of those patches are just straight up broken and seemingly untested.
* The people who made it who also want to murder it
* The crazy guy, who knows enough to be useful, but dangerous
* Yourself
None of these choices are good, and the XFree86 developers know that. They're super-stoked about how much compelled Wayland adoption they're going to get.
It sounds like you're seeing something much more sinister for some reason, and I don't understand why.
Unfortunately, this means for third-party developers and users that the ecosystem they've built on top of is going to get thrown away, because the first-party developers have prioritised their own fun, over the utility and effectiveness of what they built.
It did not have to be like this. The early freedesktop initiative managed to massively improve XFree86/Xorg without fundamentally throwing out X11. They threw out X11 so they do stuff like this: argue with developers that wanting to get a list of screens, and choose one inside their own UI to open on, is fundamentally, non-negotiably, not allowed, and fuck you for even asking for it (BTW it's standard on Windows, macOS and X11): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
This is what they live for. This is why X11 has to die.
GNOME has form for this. In describing the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (CADT) development model in 2003, JWZ says:
> I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?
> But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.
He managed to predict Wayland, or at least the causes of Wayland, back in 2003.
But FDO seems to have morphed into the replace-X11-with-Wayland club, or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.
I despair at how unfit Wayland is to replace X11, but the big guns are going to force its adoption anyway. People who wrote X11 applications will be compelled to rewrite all their work too, or their users will have to use them in the locked down X11 emulator that can't do anything more than Wayland lets it do, which will make some X11 applications become fundamentally useless, e.g. xwd will not capture your screen.
As an example of why I think this is bad, I'd highlight we're still seeing intense ideological fights on basic capabilities, today. We're rushing into replacement while even the basics aren't settled. IMO, people like Sebastian Wick don't feel the need to yield an inch to backwards compatibility, and Wayland to them is all about these greenfields that they get to control - by fighting on bug reports, or refusing to implement protocols. This is what we're all about to be dropped into.
Here's the weird vague conspiracy posting again. What exactly do you think Red Hat, IBM and Canonical's desired "return on investment" is with regard to Wayland, other than just a more polished desktop that works better for most people?
Initially, Wayland was an option, unsupported. Next step was offering Wayland as a supported option alongside X11. This is the expensive part, where their release testing and support has to cover both systems simultaneously! The sooner they ditch X11 and start saying WONTFIX to bugs and glitches, the sooner they save money!
I'm sure they're aware of just how much of the software they ship does / doesn't work with Wayland, because users file bug reports. At some point, they've decided that _this_ release is the cutover, Wayland is sufficient, e.g. there's only 20,000 open bugs against it compared to 80,000. I don't know the actual number or metrics they're using, but it worries me given how many things I know don't work for me, today which is why I use Xorg (not that I'm a paying Red Hat customer); they are not waiting for zero bugs and perfect compatibility with existing software before making it your only choice.
By XFree86, you meant X.org.
XFree86 was the first X11 implementation used by linux distributions from 90's and 00's. Then, in mid 2000's FreeDesktop guys forked it as X.org and convinced all linux distributions to switch to it.
...only to declare X11 as old and unmaintainable and announce Wayland just a few years later.
Also note that they twisted the situation very well to their benefit as part of Wayland's PR campaign saying "X11 developers are the ones who's developing Wayland", making people believe as if they've been developing it for decades even though they've been only working on X.org for the last few years. Unfortunately this myth still persists to this day. This was actually a textbook case of CADT [0] looked retrospectively.
However, in that potted history, let's not forget a lot of progress and advancement that Keith Packard and the FreeDesktop.org initiative did make. Standardising on autotools/make rather than the obnoxious imake, creating fontconfig rather than requiring arcane settings and conversion software to add fonts, creating the RandR extension and supporting hotplugging monitors and autodetection; I can't remember the last time I had to add a modeline manually to a config file!
But the problem is the current Xorg developers want to kill X11, however short their tenure on it was. If they choose to leave, there aren't other Xorg developers waiting in the wings, apart from the crazy guy.
x11 is nowhere near replacement for wayland. It's great that people will maintain it themselves instead of relying on others.
Anti-DEI = Political
That’s not a fair standard. Both are politics.
Whereas anti-DEI is all about politicizing people's race or gender or whatever.
> If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...
That might have been a good idea, to avoid mentioning such things if they are unnecessary to do so, but now it is done. It can be changed (and maybe it should be changed), but I do not really care much if they change it or not.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/182...
> From a technical perspective, as someone who had previously been merging the MR's from that author, there are also a number of technical reasons we'd slowed down on merging them and started rejecting more of the MR's - most notably it becoming increasingly obvious that the MR's were untested and breaking things. Many of the MR's already have technical objections in them to the changes, and many have no benefit other than refactoring the code to make it easier for future changes he had planned, but now will not contribute to us, so would cause code churn and risk for no remaining reason.
And for almost all the somewhat famous traditional X11 DEs or tiling managers or wms, there is now a wayland compositor mimicking them. Cinnamon and XFCE both have advanced wayland sessions (a recent review of LMDE 7 by distrowatch praised Cinnamon's wayland session as even better than KDE's wayland). They might support X11 for now but it will be increasingly harder to maintain both especially if the majority of their users use the wayland session. This will lead to bit-rotting of the X11 code paths both here and upstream (GTK, mutter, etc).
There are obviously people unhappy with wayland because it has issues with accessibility or automation or other more niche use cases. As hard as it may be, I think the time would be better spent solving these issues in wayland instead. If it cant be solved upstream, downstream protocols like the wlr-protocols can be an option. In fact, even upstream, ext-namespace protocols only require 2 ACKs which shouldn't be too hard to get especially once more wayland compositors join upstream development.
This starts to impact the entire stack as toolkits, mesa drivers, etc. are increasingly developed with Wayland in mind and are simply better tested there. IMO wayback is probably a more fruitful investment than an x11 fork for those who want to run traditional X11 DEs.
I did appreciate a lot the revert of all their code.
But isn't the problem of X a problem of responsabilities breadth ? I.e. a philosophical problem rather than a "implementation" one ?
(For my part I haven't switched to wayland yet, and still use BSPWM)
Not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator. We simply enrich the public API with analytics.