1mo ago

"Together we'll make X great again!"

Context: X11Libre is a fork of X11 aiming at preserving the X Server (fair enough, right?). One of the creators got permanently banned from freedesktop.org for apparently violating the Code of Conduct (no info on that, they just blame Red Hat), see themselves as hunted by both Big Tech and "toxic elements" who "took over the X11 project" They want to "make X great again".

The issue about their highly political README (which they wrote due to the original project "becoming too political", lol) also contains the usual red flags like transphobia. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/40

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Found more context, for who is now curious:
Apparently threatening violence with guns is okay (just got marked as "off-topic").
The maintainer of X11Libre, Enrico Weigelt, is an anti-vaxer who already got scolded by Torvalds for writing bullshit on the kernel mailing list
The more I read into X11Libre, the more I'm laughing. Now the freedesktop ban also makes perfect sense.
- The maintainer of X11Libre, Enrico Weigelt, is an anti-vaxer who already got scolded by Torvalds for writing bullshit on the kernel mailing list
  Oh, so it's him. Dude got absolutely lucky Linus is on mild mode nowadays. On his prime the scold would've been of such epic proportions all the viruses he could have on his body would've leave him out of pure cringe.
  
  Linus has good values, by he's also a toxic asshole that surrounded himself with other toxic assholes. And that's why both immoral people and nice people eventually get shown the door / leave the Linux project.
- Honestly, I'm fully on board of this development. It might be useful for those distros that can't move to Wayland and, more importantly, can keep the developers far from everything else.
  
  Lol, how will they get any contributions if they explicitly say that trans girls are not welcome? You know who run the internet?
  
  Actually... X11 is still maintained and there are forks of X11 like Xenocara from OpenBSD.
- YOOOOOO!!! IT'S THE SAME FUCKING GUY. I remember that legendary Torvalds roast. Good shit.
- At least his aim is shit… lol (talking about this GermaA.. dude)
Think we can get them to rename it to xy11? You know, because only having x is part of the feminist agenda.
- Oh is that the red hat they are blaming?
- XXY11 so they have to learn about intersex and other way sex characteristics can show up.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/40#issuecomment-2963760417
Yeah, that's not great, is it
- O.m.f.g.
  What even..
- Lmao, they even tried to say that they learned it from Dave Chapel (I think, it's hard to understand) a few comments down like that makes it better. He literally used it in reference to jewish people, like come on.
- Reading that made me want to unalive myself.
If you want to know more about how unhinged the dude is, I recommend reading this email thread in the DNG mailing list.
- I've been watching a lot of Miniminuteman lately. Weigelt sounds exactly like the crackpot conspiracy theorists whose "facts" are being "silenced" by "the Establishment" of "mainstream science" because "they don't want you to know this".
  
  First time iv ever seen someone reference mini minuteman. Neat. The great raft was a good video!
Of course Lunduke is a fan rolls eyes
- What is that guys deal?
  
  Idk but in his thumbnails he always looks like he has to take a shit
  
  My take is that they grew up religious and take conservative things being correct as an axiom. Its why some parts of conservative movement's are considered Christian, even if they or the followers are not that religious.
  
  He used to be fun... Like 25 years ago
Reminds me of the Hyprland dev and the shit that community is. https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html
- Yeah but hyprland, unlike x, is actually pleasant to use.
  Not an excuse for poor behavior nonetheless, merely an observation.
Very typical projection ("I'm not political, you are"), but the reactions are unnecessary in my opinion (feeding the trolls as some would say). If you don't like the attitude of the maintainer, fork it if you like, ignore it if you don't.
- I mean, it's funny to laugh at nazis.
- There's no feeding going on. We're simply laughing at their expense.
No wonder why freedesktop nuked their repository.
And Fedora apparently wants to add xlibre to their repository (hopefully not)
X11 was never great.
(Like seriously, it's nothing but config files you have to edit from the local console shell and and proprietary stuff from nvidia that misbehaves, all the way down. Always has been.)
- it's nothing but config files you have to edit from the local console shell
  Some people seem to love that, as well as the total lack of any kind of access control or security. I mean, look at how many people are still arguing that "Systemd is destroying Linux", clinging to initd with all its bash scripts and no nice way to prevent race conditions and such.
  To roughly quote someone from a talk (not sure where I heard that, was about systemd as well I think):
  "We nerds are very good at change when we're the ones proposing it, but very bad when it comes from the outside."
- To be fair they made a lot of strides to the point where config file wrangling went from mandatory to almost never done.
  But yes, Nvidia would have quirks driving people back to wrangling config file, but they got better too.
  Though I'm not particularly interested in X11. The biggest thing they had was trivial application forwarding, but the architecture didn't scale well to modern resolutions and UI design that was largely bitmaps being pushed, as well as not handling higher latency networks too well.
X11 drama.
Why did the discussion turned into distro advertisement?
I miss the days when the OS community found -often painful- ways to deal with excentric or even toxic and erratic developers. That definitely had more class than conformist mobs celebrating each character assassination of somebody disagreeing. Not that I'd support any anti-vax bullshit or bigotry, I just dislike mobs of holier-than-thous. Because they aren't holy or as "good" as they think they are. IMO they're just the sort of people waiting for a reason to get their torches and pitchforks. I don't think that's any better, morally, or less intolerant than having unhinged opinions.
- "No, go away."
  That's a perfectly valid way to deal with toxic contributors. There's always people with better social skills and equal developer skills out there, you don't have to accept and include toxic people just because they wrote some code.
  
  Just alienate them more and they will get better on their own.... Right?
  I think the guy you're responding to is saying that communication and not alienation is how we bring these people out of whatever holes they've dug themselves into.
  I know hes getting downvoted a ton, but if my take on what he wrote is correct then I also agree with him.
  The reason the world is so divided right now is because nobody wants to talk through things with open minds and with empathy.
- I miss the days when we tolerated assholes and bigots instead of calling them out.
  
  You're not calling out anyone here. That has happened elsewhere. You're nothing but gossiping about it. You're not the defenders of anything but spiteful, ugly people.

56 comments