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The very strange case of Xlibre

(I have written a bit about this topic in a previous blog post, but allow me recapitulate, to keep this post independent.)

In the early days of Unix and Unix-compatible operating systems there was a demand for a standardized graphical user interface system, and the "X windowing system", or just "X" as it was very commonly shortened, became that standard in 1984.

Over the years X was updated, with the newest version being the most famous and most commonly used one, so much so that the shortened nickname for "X windowing system" became "X11", following the versioning.

However, this version 11 was developed in 1987, and hasn't been updated since. It became stagnant. This became a problem particularly when a new Unix-like operating system started become immensely popular: Linux.

Linux needed its own updated version of X11, both from the point of view of its technology as well as its usage license. This built-from-scratch new system was called X.org (or just "Xorg"), which received regular updates and improvements, and was the basis of all of the modern Linux desktop environments.

Somehow the Red Hat corporation became kind of the "primary owner" of X.org, and their servers the primary "official" versioning system and distribution platform for it. (Like with so many other free open source software projects, while anybody can fork it and distribute it on their own, they usually have a "primary" official platform where the "official" version of the software is maintained and distributed.)

In 2008 a completely new and revamped GUI system was developed and released: Wayland. This is another designed-from-scratch system that takes a very different approach and offers a very different solution to the problem, intended to be more modern, more flexible, have more features, and be overall much better than the "outdated" X.org, which is still based on the stone-age technology of X11.

Some time after, and for about a decade now, some Linux distros have been strongly pushing the switch from the X.org system to Wayland, as they argue that it's significantly better and more modern.

However, there are also those that argue that it's still too soon to make a complete switch, as Wayland is still too recent, too untested, too little "battle-hardened", while the X11 technology (which X.org essentially implements), even if it's a bit antiquated, has been in active use for 40 years. In other words, even if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles, and even if it's a bit clunky to use, its strength is that it has been "battle-hardened" for 40 years, while Wayland has really been in active widespread use for just a decade. It's too soon to make a full switch.

However, rather than allow the switch to happen naturally over time, it appears that Red Hat and some Linux distros, most infamously Ubuntu, have started an outright war to completely kill X.org and force it to be substituted with Wayland.

The administrators responsible for the official git repositories at the Red Hat servers have stopped accepting merge requests for X.org for several years now, even though there were literally thousands of them, made by developers who would still want to improve and polish the project. None of these merge requests were accepted. X.org was deliberately kept completely stagnant, with zero official updates.

But that's not where it ends: Some months ago these admins went on an outright open war against it, and they just closed all of the thousands of merge requests as "rejected", with no explanation given. All of the merge requests were closed at the same time, meaning that they were all closed with a script, rather than someone meticulously going through them and evaluating whether they should be rejected or not.

One of the major contributors got fed-up with this, and forked the X.org project, merged all the pending merge requests into it, and published it under the new name "Xlibre".

Both the admins at Red Hat as well as at Ubuntu got really angry at this, for some reason, and doubled down, tripled down, quadrupled down on this strange quest they have engaged in, trying to completely kill and destroy X.org and stop it from existing: They started a smearing campaign against Xlibre, using far-leftist political rhetoric.

Unfortunately because the vast majority of Linux distro developers are far-leftists, they just believe it without any research when someone is called a "nazi", so without even looking into it, many of these distros have also rejected Xlibre, just because. 

Why do they want to kill X.org so badly, and why are they going to such insane lengths to do it, even to the point of trying to defame someone who wants to keep the project alive? To the point of trying to rally all Linux distros to boycott it? Why do they hate X.org so much? Why do they want so badly and so desperately to see it completely buried and destroyed?

I genuinely have no idea. It's absolutely incomprehensible. 

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