I'm skeptical about XLibre
The Linux community is no stranger to drama and endless infighting. There is a endless amount of topics that Linux users will happily argue with each other about. Whether the debate is about Linux distros, desktop environments, programming languages, audio servers, text editors, or even spaces versus tabs, if you can name it, there has been probably been a flame war over it. Naturally, the mere mention of Wayland is enough to cause comment threads to burst into flames, as there are both devoted haters and passionate defenders of Wayland.
Back in November 2023, I wrote about how Wayland is hostile to its users. I do not think much has changed since then, as the KiCad team recently wrote a blog post about the problems to expect when running their program on Wayland. It seems that even after many years, Wayland does not meet the needs of many users. X11, however, is getting old, and more developers are thinking of abandoning support of it in the future. Personally, I do not like Wayland, but I think the hate towards it goes too far. I am a big advocate of letting people use what works for them without shaming people for it.
Recently, an X11 fork called XLibre emerged. I know that there was some drama which led up to that fork, but I do not really want to focus on that. Instead, I want to express that I am not optimistic about the longevity of XLibre, even if I do want it to succeed since I am a happy X11 user.
The beginning of the project's readme is rather, uh, interesting. It has already invited a bunch of political discussion throughout the repository that detracts from the project. There are many issue threads that are not even about the code itself, such as the threads that question why the readme is written the way it is. All of this takes time and resources away from actually improving X11, and this also increases the chance that drama will happen, making fractures within XLibre's community more likely.
The behavioral pattern of people wanting to be part of an up-and-coming project for questionable motives despite lacking the skills to work on said project is a pattern that I have seen before, and there will be people that are attracted to this project simply because they hate Red Hat and want to win against Wayland users, despite their lack of programming experience. I am not convinced that this is the right mentality to have, and XLibre can end up being dragged down by those people if the lead developer is not careful.
Similarly, I also have reservations regarding how skilled the contributors to XLibre are. There are many questionable pull requests that are currently open, including a series of patches from one user that blindly ran some static analysis tools on the X11 code without investigating the problems in-depth. Working on a vital component of the Linux desktop is something that needs to be done with care, but currently I am not convinced that the contributors are up to the task. It also remains to be seen how easy it is to work on X11's code in the first place. Code that is many years old, such as X11's code, likely has a lot of technical debt that makes it harder for people unfamiliar with the code to contribute to it. If new contributors find it too difficult to contribute to XLibre, then the project will face an uphill battle to stay relevant, as people are the driving force behind any project.
XLibre's development currently feels chaotic and disorganized, and that is why I do not think that the project will succeed in the long-term.
Despite what I said, it is good that some Linux distros are adopting XLibre and letting their users test it. That is a positive sign for the project, as there is clearly a desire for a better X11. If its users stopped engaging in pointless political discussions and actually give constructive feedback and bug reports to the developers, then XLibre has a higher chance of being a successful project. Personally, I will probably not use XLibre for a long time due to the likelihood that I will experience regressions, and I will wait until the dust settles.
Hopefully I get proven wrong about all of this.