Someone recommended to me that I ask this question here as that person said Ubuntu forums is a more appropiate place for such a quesiton.
I use several programs that require Xorg. It is not a option for me to use Wayland. It was recently shown that RedHat had been intentionally sabotaging their Xorg branch to try to force people to use Wayland. This is despite the fact that there is software you can only use on Xorg and Wayland equivlents have not been made yet. The primary developer of Xorg was even kicked out of the project for trying to update and fix Xorg since fixing and updating Xorg would delay Linux distributions swap to Wayland. The primary developer forked Xorg and made Xlibre. This is quite viable since the primary developer did most of the work on Xorg anyway.
Since Linux is a long way off from all the problems associated with Wayland swap being fixed, I am wondering if Ubuntu plans on swapping to Xlibre once the first release candidate becomes available. Last I checked, the current versions are not release candidates though I haven’t checked in a few days.
Also, I am not sure how much Ubuntu financially supported Xorg and how much the Ubuntu developers worked with the development of the Xorg project but I am wondering if these resources will be swapped to the Xlibre project.
Also, this statement, while not exactly flamethrowing, is very much a case of “[citation needed]”:
This is what @lproven has to say on the subject over at The Reg:
We must confess to a mistake here. In reporting on the new fork, we referred to him as a long-time X.org maintainer. Some folks from X.org got in touch to point out that this wasn’t in fact the case. He only started committing code in early 2024, and was never a project maintainer.
Honest questions around here don’t usually have so much flamethrowing, gossip, and conspiracies.
So I’m moving this to the Lounge, which is more suited to opinions.
I was actually trying to avoid that as much as possible by not getting into the details of why that it is true. I saw a summary of events/details and it seemed very obvious to me what was going on. I got this information from a series of videos talking about the subject and forum post. This very much is a “Honest Question” but I needed to at least set the background information to ask the question. I would appreciate it if you left this post in the Desktop category.
This is what @lproven has to say on the subject over at The Reg:
@kamennedev I was basing this on commits. That one person has roughly half of all the commits in the last year or more. A project as big as Xorg should never have this be true. Between upgrades and bug fixes, you should see development split between many developers. It showed the point that RedHat is trying to get rid of the project by not having anyone work on it. Adding further to this point, the moment they have a developer work on it extensively, they ban the developer.
Remember that XWayland will always be available, precisely to allow to run applications that hasn’t been ported to Wayland for whatever reason. With XWayland, any X11 application will run seamlessly in your Wayland session, along with other X11 and Wayland applications. And it’s not something that “will work in the future”: XWayland has been here since the beginning, more than a decade ago, and is a stable and mature service, available in all Wayland desktops.
Also, it’s not true that “Linux is a long way off from all the problems associated with Wayland swap being fixed”. That was true ten years ago; today, Wayland offers everything needed for day-to-day work. That was a common critic a decade ago, when it wasn’t possible to share the screen in a videochat, but that, and a lot more things, have been solved, as I said, a big time ago.
Ubuntu would surely not take on the initial packaging for this (way too much effort for minor benefit, even if the whole topic would not be as politically charged as it is, there is a well working Xorg implementation available to cover all your needs and that will not go away (there is XWayland for all Xorg apps, due to its requirements Xorg can simply not go away and flavors will surely also still want to provide Xorg sessions even if the main desktop does not)), you’d have to contact debian to put it in the archive, then Ubuntu would be able to sync it from there (as an optional alternative most likely) …
It has not been shown, no. It has been alleged and from my own personal experience as a former employee of RH, I find this plausible, but no, it has absolutely not been demonstrated to be true.
Someone said it. As the song said 90 years ago, “it ain’t necessarily so.” People say a lot of things.
That’s not really as much help as you make it sound, though.
No, not “any X11 app”.
I use Ubuntu Unity from preference, and failing that, I Xfce. Unity is not available and probably never will be; Xfce only works with major caveats if you switch to a different window manager, which I don’t really want to do, as control of window size/position by industry-standard keyboard commands is one of the aspects of Xfce and Unity that I like.
I personally find GNOME unusable – it’s like trying to drive a mobile phone as my desktop computer – and KDE unusable – it’s so horribly cluttered with options, and there are no ways to turn some things I loathe off, such as to globally disable hamburger menus or client-side decorations. So I won’t use either, and they are the only 2 desktops which fully work under Wayland.
For me, Wayland is not ready for use yet. Which reinforces my suspicion that RH is trying to force people to switch. It’s exactly the same sort of tactic Microsoft used to use, for example with Office 97, which introduced new file formats with the same extensions, so no older Office could open files sent by anyone using newer versions.
(At least when it switched the file formats again with Office 2007, it changed the extensions.)
Those aren’t “apps”, but “window managers”. Yes, technically they are “X11 apps”, but certainly not what any normal user would consider “an app”. And you know it.
Remember that XWayland will always be available, precisely to allow to run applications that hasn’t been ported to Wayland for whatever reason. With XWayland, any X11 application will run seamlessly in your Wayland session, along with other X11 and Wayland applications.
What about applications that use features that only X11 supports but not Wayland. For example, mouse and keyboard macros?
Wrong address
Ubuntu would surely not take on the initial packaging for this (way too much effort for minor benefit, even if the whole topic would not be as politically charged as it is, there is a well working Xorg implementation available to cover all your needs and that will not go away (there is XWayland for all Xorg apps, due to its requirements Xorg can simply not go away and flavors will surely also still want to provide Xorg sessions even if the main desktop does not)), you’d have to contact debian to put it in the archive, then Ubuntu would be able to sync it from there (as an optional alternative most likely) …
If I understand you correctly then Debian forums is where I should have been asking this.
What concerns me is that even if Xorg is continued to be used, the project is essentially dead. No upgrades and no bug fixes unless it is something so major that they feel forced to fix it.
It has not been shown, no. It has been alleged and from my own personal experience as a former employee of RH, I find this plausible, but no, it has absolutely not been demonstrated to be true.
It is impossible to truly know what is in someone’s mind but from what I saw at least, it seems pretty clear that this is the case.
Are you sure these are actual caused by wayland and not simply by the application developers simply not having moved the apps properly to wayland yet ?
Wayland uses different interprocess communication, apps that were communicating via the X11 sockets will need to be ported to the new protocol handling via dbus, apps that did global stuff will need to be moved to handle this through pipewire, the technology is there in most cases but app maintainers have shied away from porting to it, this will undoubtedly happen at some point (or new apps will be written that fulfill the same purpose), you can not wait forever for these to catch up… ( I remember how a lot of people freaked out that synaptic and gparted did not work under wayland a few years ago because these apps expected you to run them as root on a desktop, ignoring the most basic security principles. Today they both use proper privilege separation and run fine on wayland (and even relatively safe on X11 due to that design change))
Well, not sure if Debian changed its processes, but I think it would rather have to go to some developer mailing list discussion and IIRC it is common to file an ITP (intend to package) bug in the debian bug tracking system to start such a discussion, not sure if forums are a thing for this in debian nowadays…
That doesn’t mean it is not maintained in the distros though, if you make contributions to the packages for bugfixes they will likely be accepted (you will alongside be asked to file the fix upstream and should do that, even if it is ignored and just sitting there for later consumption)… There will likely be no future feature development though, but is that really needed given it will eventually actually die because its design can simply not hold up to the new requirements and standards anymore ?
It might be a bit early for asking about it. Ubuntu 25.10 will be released in about three months and it’s too late to make any changes, and Ubuntu 26.04 is a LTS release and is unlikely to make any drastic changes.
Ubuntu 26.10 might use Xlibre, as by then if the project hasn’t imploded it will have had time to prove it’s stability, and have a clear release cycle so that Ubuntu can use a more stable version while further changes happen in the unstable branch.
Are you sure these are actual caused by wayland and not simply by the application developers simply not having moved the apps properly to wayland yet ?
Wayland uses different interprocess communication, apps that were communicating via the X11 sockets will need to be ported to the new protocol handling via dbus, apps that did global stuff will need to be moved to handle this through pipewire, the technology is there in most cases but app maintainers have shied away from porting to it, this will undoubtedly happen at some point (or new apps will be written that fulfill the same purpose), you can not wait forever for these to catch up… ( I remember how a lot of people freaked out that synaptic and gparted did not work under wayland a few years ago because these apps expected you to run them as root on a desktop, ignoring the most basic security principles. Today they both use proper privilege separation and run fine on wayland (and even relatively safe on X11 due to that design change))
If XWayland can’t support it and it has to be ported manually then that is a good sign it will be many years before something is made. The best Macro program I can find so far is ActionA and it is nowhere near as good as a Windows equivlent made over 15 years ago. Screen casting is another feature made over a decade ago and there is still no good implementation of it yet in Linux(at least not in Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu/Mint based versions, I haven’t tried Arch). The latter is not related to Xorg/Wayland but more about the point that new features moving into Linux is a slow process.
It might be a bit early for asking about it. Ubuntu 25.10 will be released in about three months and it’s too late to make any changes, and Ubuntu 26.04 is a LTS release and is unlikely to make any drastic changes.
@futurdreamz It definately wouldn’t be ready for Ubuntu 25.10 stable repositories but it would be okay to release in the unstable repositories. On the other hand, wouldn’t the fact that Ubuntu 26.04 is a LTS release and much further out make it more important for Xlibre to be included if it is found to be stable ahead of time? A lot of of people only use the LTS branches and they would be stuck with the dead Xorg project for quite a long time. Even if Ubuntu makes fixes in their version and the upstream push of those fixes get ignored, that is still years with a dead project.
I could be wrong but I do not see that as likely.
Devuan is talking about adopting it. That seems more probable.
The next Ubuntu LTS wont support an Xorg session, it will include xorg though to support XWayland. The LTS will commercially be supported by Canonical for 12y, would you really expect Canonical to switch to a brand new project that will not have been able to show that it is capable of doing sustained maintenance of the code in the time until next LTS ? If you would have a company living from sustained support of software you bundle, would you bet your company on it in that situation ? If debian would accept it, it would most likely be ready for inclusion into Ubuntu by the start or somewhere during the LTS cycle, that is typically not the time Ubuntu switches to new technologies …
Xlibre is wildly controversial for multiple separate reasons.
I tried to explain some of them on the Register here and here.
The plan is controversial, the project lead is controversial, the project is controversial, and his coding skills in considerable doubt. It is opposed by the largest and richest company in the Linux space.
I think that it is unlikely to be adopted by, or feature in, any mainstream distribution.
Maybe, if he can keep the project going for, say, a year or two and several significantly different and improved point releases, which do not have any notable problems at all, then maybe people will start to take it seriously.
