Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

The recently released Xlibre server aims to modernize the X.org X11 server and improve both its security and performance. The XLibre Xserver is a fork of the X.org X server, started by Enrico Weigelt - probably the most active contributor to the X.org server since 2024.* Weigelt has submitted hundreds of patches since early …

[keithpeter]

Code talks

"The recently released Xlibre server aims to modernize the X.org X11 server and improve both its security and performance."

This is good, depending on the nature of the modernisations. It could provide more choice, and provides a demonstration of the freedoms that oss/libre software is supposed to provide.

"It's explicitly free of any "DEI" [diversity, equity, and inclusion] or similar discriminatory policies."

Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project and ironically discourage participation. The OpenBSD approach strikes me as a good model to follow in this situation.

[cornetman]

Re: Code talks

Agreed that I don't like to see the politicisation of software. However, a large segment of the loony left have made that point rather moot.

Free software *is* explicitly political though so the horse is well and truly gone from the stable.

When people spend significant time and resources wondering if "master" is an inappropriate term for the primary branch of a git repo though, I do have to wonder if they don't perhaps have better, more useful things to do with their time. Idle hands and the devil and all that....

> Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project and ironically discourage participation.

I would have to disagree about that. Equity policies in the main are explicitly discriminatory. I'm all about outreach to encourage participation by any who are technically proficient enough to contribute. Your skin colour should not be a consideration.

[katrinab]

Re: Code talks

Isn't the whole idea of giving away software for free, and having it as a public good, somewhat the complete opposite of capitalism anyway?

[cornetman]

Re: Code talks

Yes. A pure capitalistic society would be truly awful. Capitalism has its flaws (corporatism, and doesn't help those that are physically disadvantaged) and we should be constantly vigilant against them.

I am against the worship in the US (particularly) of the capitalistic system. It brings great benefits and we know of no better economic system, but it is far from perfect and it can form only part of the way that we run societies. The most productive and prosperous societies understand the truth of that.

[rcxb]

Re: Code talks

A pure capitalistic society would be truly awful.

SAVE THE LOWER-CASE LETTERS!

[bemusedHorseman]

Re: Code talks

[turntechGodhead]: people with ironic all lowercase typing quirks matter

[jgarbo]

Re: Code talks

US Capitalist? So long ago, good person. US is now full oligarchy, ie Fascism in expensive suits, the inevitable course of "successful" Capitalism.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

"Fascism in expensive suits"

When you look at the definitions, the original modern fascist entity was the United Confederate States of America

The USA had more registered nazi party members (Bund) in 1938 than Germany did (NSDAP)

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

I always considered open source to be like "volunteer work" and I participate in development by reporting bugs along with research and a possible fix. Several have been implemented over the years, with submissions and fixes for FreeBSD, AVR C libs, gcc, and so on, even a forked library for Arduino for a specific processor series. It's like I win with the patches/fixes I'd do anyway, and everyone else wins too by participating, submitting, and having others continue after me.

[GNU Enjoyer]

Re: Code talks

Even the most malicious capitalists don't have any problems "giving away" copies of their proprietary malware, gratis, as the spying and/or lock-in capabilities is what they really value - not copies of the software (although some can get ultra suckers to hand over money for copies).

Free software is compatible with capitalism, as the money is in service, support and/or warranty (as it costs next to $0 to make a copy of software) - if the program that the business offers support for is free software that is also generally available gratis, people will not hesitate to use and share it, which is the best kind of advertisement for the business's services.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms

But really, the ways proprietary software is implemented is closer to communism than capitalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Ah, the "Everything I hate I call communism" brigade strikes again.

Meanwhile, ironically, the closest you've ever been exposed to communism is through the GNU you so love.

Capitalism can make use of open source software - that's always been a given, but it doesn't change the fact that open-source is socialism, and GNU is "left" of that.

And just as a rolled up newspaper can be used to swat a fly, it doesn't make a newspaper a fly swatter - your examples of uses such as support and software-as-a-service to justify your claim that giving away things for free is capitalist is laughable.

[goblinski]

Re: Code talks

Capitalism is oxygen.

Makes only 20% of the important stuff, can be needed in 100% concentration for a short amount of time to save the day, but breathe it for a longer time at 100% concentration and you'd get unalived quick.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Takes quite a while of pure oxygen breathing at normal atmospheric pressures before symptoms show up. "Quick" it isn't. We're talking (in most cases) of at least half a day of pure oxygen for healthy people to start showing symptoms of toxicity.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_toxicity

But don't let me get in the way of a good sounding anecdote, etc. etc.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

Yes and no. It's not communism even though it enhances the commons.

You're free to make a profit from FOSS (GPL and friends), you're NOT free to gatekeep any modifications you make or obscure the origins

A lot of "free" software is sold. It's free, like beer is (anyone can make and sell beer, if they have the recipe)

[DuncanLarge]

Re: Code talks

> Isn't the whole idea of giving away software for free

Free software isnt given away for free. It's just conventions that most of it is.

Would you give beer you made away for free just because you were free to share the recipe?

No.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

"Equity policies in the main are explicitly discriminatory. I'm all about outreach to encourage participation by any who are technically proficient enough to contribute. Your skin colour should not be a consideration."

Agreed. If not enough Taos Indians (a pueblo tribe from S. New Mexico that I'm a descendant of, several generations back) are, for some reason, UNDER represented in the project, I see no reason NOT to ask them if they want jobs or project participation, provided that equal employment qualifications are met (experience, knowledge, proof of coding ability, a 'mentor' or 'supervised' period, whatever the project has for a standard).

That, I hope, is reasonable and fair.

[Citizen of Nowhere]

Re: Code talks

And by the same token, if male, white, European-descended individuals were to be over-represented in a project while being no better qualified than any of the other groups, action should perhaps be taken to redress that imbalance because it might suggest that prejudice was present in the hiring process. "Standards" often seem to be things which decide who's on the inside and who's on the outside and the objectivity of the criteria for the standard seem, well ... as solid as soup.

[Instinct46]

Re: Code talks

There is the difference though you want equality "provided that equal employment qualifications are met", were they are pushing for equity. Seems to be the biggest division between modern political views.

[veti]

Re: Code talks

If that was the idea, they could have just ignored DEI by... ignoring it.

Saying "Look at us, we're ignoring DEI" is the opposite of ignoring it. It's purposefully drawing attention to your stance. That's the opposite of inclusive, it's clearly designed to alienate some people in order to appeal to others.

[FeepingCreature]

Re: Code talks

I sort of feel like, if you feel discriminated by one sentence in the README, then you are probably the sort of person that sentence intends to keep out.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

you are NOT WRONG.

If I were screening resumes/CVs and ran across one with signs of future HR-related problems, like pronouns or obvious attempts to gain favor through use of DEI friendly terms in a prominent way, my first reaction would be "trouble" in the realm of lawsuits, reporting individuals to HR for petty things, passive-aggressive intimidation, and other "hostile work place" issues. Similar for profanity use during an interview, just to be fair...

(NOT explicitly saying I'd circular-file the above-mentioned resume, which I might, but it would be VERY likely to end up on the bottom of the stack)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Here's hoping you're not making hiring decisions, because screening people out for using pronouns is just stupid, and screening them out for seeming to be trans is close to (or actually) illegal in many states.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

You're against pronouns? So you're offended if when talking about someone, I describe him as "he"?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Code talks

"Saying "Look at us, we're ignoring DEI" is the opposite of ignoring it. It's purposefully drawing attention to your stance. That's the opposite of inclusive, it's clearly designed to alienate some people in order to appeal to others."

But, he does go on to say "everybody is welcome", which IS a DEI policy in it's ideal form. What it ISN'T is the form that seems popular in the USA where people, in some circumstances, appear to have been employed based on their grouping being under-represented and may not be the best candidate. DEI is supposed to be about encouraging under-represented groups to apply and/or work towards a career goal they otherwise may not because of perceptions. It really IS NOT supposed to be about making sure you have the right mix of groupings by whatever means.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

This is the most common claim about DEI policies and is almost always made by those who aren't qualified for the jobs in question

WOMEN are the single largest DEI hire group

All DEI policy asks is that you encourage diversity in situations where applicants are equally qualified.

There are far too many cases of WASP males being hired or promoted over BETTER qualified minorities and that's why DEI exists

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Code talks

I'm all about outreach to encourage participation by any who are technically proficient enough to contribute. Your skin colour should not be a consideration.

Indeed. And that's why DEI policies are good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Having been excluded from an interview because I'm a while male and they were "looking at diversity candidates", I'm very skeptical of DEI policies. "We don't care what your race or gender is" is a good policy. "We'd like more people who are ____" is a bad one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

(The previous AC)

I'm perfectly willing to entertain rational discussion on this, but I'm really wondering about the downvotes. Was it the statement that ignoring race or gender when making decisions is a good policy, the statement that choosing people based on race or gender is a bad policy, or me being skeptical about DEI policies because they're often the latter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

I can't explain the downvotes. I was not one of them. One guess I have is the allegation that you were rejected from an interview because you were a white male. I have heard those stories before. Universally, 100% of the time that I had any information to prove it, they have been incorrect or deliberate lies. The reason: discrimination that blatant is illegal and saying it explicitly is an invitation to get sued. The cases I've seen fall into two categories. There are people assuming that's why they were rejected, which might be true because discrimination of all kinds is real, but there are lots of reasons someone might have been rejected from an interview, and many find it more comforting to assume they weren't at fault. And, to be fair to them, I have seen members of other groups assume discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, etc when problems with the resume or applying to a job that had a hundred other applicants were more likely the answer. The others made up the story without needing a true rejection for their own reasons, and they are the most likely to invent a person telling them this in no uncertain terms, despite that being a really stupid thing for anyone in HR to do which they learn on about day three of HR person training. Perhaps you are the exception to that rule, but merely stating it isn't going to convince me you are.

In addition, in any discussion of DEI policy, we have the problem of what it means. We probably all have a slightly different image of what a DEI program implements. When those images appear to be based on a preconceived notion of whether it is a good idea, the images start to get mangled to serve that point. I don't have a good solution to bring these arguments back on track. As long as people don't agree what DEI is, they have little chance of deciding among themselves whether it's good or bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

(The AC you replied to)

The hiring manager expressly told me "We can't consider your resume until we've gone through all of the diversity candidates." Subsequently, a "diversity candidate" was hired. So, sure looks like they never considered my resume because they found a diversity candidate that would fit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Which, depending on how you view the story, doesn't paint the same picture that you have interpreted. If your resume was in fact downgraded based on your race, that is a problem, though I question how well they could actually implement that if they wanted to. You could have easily pursued that as a legal matter, meaning most people would not have said it. I've seen examples of real discrimination before, but except in the most brazen examples, the people doing it were smart enough not to inform the people they discriminated against that they were doing it. This is, unfortunately, why I have to take into the account the possibility of lying. I'm not accusing you of having done so, but others have used similar stories when they lied to me, so I am not going to ignore the possibility here. There's also the possibility that the manager lied to you about why you hadn't been handled yet for reasons of their own, either political or just having an excuse to make you shut up.

But, if they ended up hiring someone before reviewing your qualifications, that doesn't prove that the person they hired was less qualified. It's very common to hire someone before interviewing everybody, especially when there are a lot of applicants. It can be as simple as hiring a sufficiently qualified person who was more available early in the interview period. Ideally, every candidate would receive the same interview and the absolute best one would be hired, but interviews are expensive and take a lot of time and good candidates don't wait. A good enough candidate will get an offer and, if they accept it, then there's no need to interview the rest of them. If you waited to interview everybody, the chances are high that your top choice has given up and gotten a job elsewhere, and you might end up having lost all the candidates you wanted to hire. That process is altered if there's reason to think someone who hasn't been interviewed will be leaps and bounds better, but in my, admittedly limited experiences of interviewing people and seeing how the managers and HR organized the process, it's pretty rare. Stories such as yours often come with an unstated implication included, that if the hiring company hadn't done whatever the story is about, they would have been hired. That is the other situation I described in my experiences of hearing them. People who are so convinced that they would have succeeded that, when they don't, they need to find some reason to explain it other than that someone was actually more qualified or interviewed better than they did, or even that the luck of the draw wasn't in their favor this time.

And of course, we still have the problem that DEI is not intended to do what you describe, partially because what you describe is illegal. Most people calling for DEI efforts do not want to sort your resume lower. If you argue against them using that story, they will ignore you because, from their perspective, you've made up a view they don't have and tried shoving it onto them. Even if it happened exactly how you describe, even if you were explicitly and deliberately discriminated against, not everyone holds the same beliefs. This problem does go the other way, with people who support things they think are DEI failing to recognize places where that goes wrong because they haven't seen it themselves, which is why I don't hold out much hope for this ever getting resolved.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Code talks

So, sure looks like they never considered my resume because they found a diversity candidate that would fit.

Or, even if the story is true, you weren't as strong a candidate as a woman, ethnic minority or disabled applicant, which is something I suspect you would find difficult to accept.

[Graham Perrin]

DEI, not to be confused with a potentially bad employer

From the previous comment, it sounds as if the prospective employer had the wrong idea of DEI.

IMHO that should make you sceptical about the employer, not about DEI initiatives.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

You got downvotes because no-one said that you didn't get the job because you are a white male.

Those against DEI would actually hate it being abolished - it would be one less thing they could blame for their failures.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Code talks

How do you know that they were "looking at diversity candidates" and, even if they were, why are you sure they were weaker candidates than you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Because the hiring manager explicitly told me "We can't consider your resume until we've gone through all of the diversity candidates." Subsequently, a "diversity candidate" was hired.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

What you typed, does not state they were not going to look at your resume, only that they would only look at yours after they'd looked at the others first. That does not mean you didn't get the job due to you being white, just that they found a better candidate.

Also worth mentioning, that if they were trying to fill a quota, which seems to be what you're implying, then that is strictly illegal in the US. So certainly cannot be included in any sort of company DEI (as that would be documenting their illegal behaviour, so easy to prosecute), and would be potentially difficult to do off-the-books, as they'd be opening themselves to prosecution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

I don't know about "filling a quota", but he made it plain that I could not even be considered for the job until they had gone through the diversity candidates. Then a diversity candidate was hired. To the best of my knowledge, they never looked at my resume, so whether the other candidate was more skilled or experienced than me was never considered. And it was expressly about me being a "majority candidate", meaning white and male.

[Not Yb]

Re: Code talks

"To the best of my knowledge, they never looked at my resume" proves nothing other than you don't know whether or not they looked at your resume.

Equivalently, to the best of your knowledge, they looked at your resume and decided against further contact.

You're assuming bad faith and discrimination, when what you actually know is that they might, or might not, have looked at your resume.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Code talks

So, even if that's true, no evidence that you weren't considered or that a weaker candidate got the job. Just your outrage that you didn't-

[martinusher]

Re: Code talks

DEI's been around in one form or another for decades now. As usual, though, what started as a push for equality morphed into one for inequality as the sharp elbows just saw it as another angle to work. Here in the US, though, some semblance of sanity has just come from the Supreme Court (or all places!). They've just ruled in favor of a plaintiff who was actively discriminated against for a workplace promotion because she was white etc. The ruling's a bit technical but effectively says that just because someone is a member of a majority class doesn't permit discrimination against them.

I'd hope that "DEI" in the X context isn't about skin color but the need to accommodate diverse user interfaces has to be baked into the architecture rather than grafted on as an afterthought. Futile arguments about master/slave are just that -- futile, not contributing to the work. Playing with the language (and so culture) should be reserved for NewSpeak.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

DEI is very much coded language allowing people on the right to claim "DEI is bad" without having to say "we want to give more jobs to white people" out loud. Giving people a chance to rationalize a discriminatory policy by claiming that it's "really" against discrimination against the majority.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

I'll take "things that never happened" for $5, Carl

A statement like that is a slamdunk win in a discrimination lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

You should count yourself lucky not to be working at that company. Firstly they were so incompetent with their hiring practices that they hired a clear majority of people of a certain age, gender, race etc. They basically let the bigots hire more bigots so they could be bigoted without fear of repercussions. Not only that, but then when they noticed what they'd done, their idea of a quick fix is to have a quota of diverse people that they must hire.

It sounds like a recipe for a divided culture with a strict division between the old and new hires and no doubt massive animosity between the two groups. The competent, experienced and qualified bigots versus the less qualified, less experienced and probably less competent 'diversity' hires... I could see a policy like this reinforcing stereotypes rather than encouraging a more accepting corporate culture.

Don't get me wrong, I believe in diversity - the alternative is monoculture, monocultures seem strong until something comes along that exploits a shared weakness, then everyone is affected. It's easy to envision how a company full of bigoted 30 year old white males might be able to misconstrue or just miss things that would be understood in a more diverse culture - diversity is generally good for business, leading to novel solutions and deeper understanding of customers while monocultures are generally bad for business, leading to groupthink, shared blindspots and a lack of innovation.

Diversity needs to be organic, the kind of forced diversity you talk about being subjected to has a high chance of fostering resentment of the very people diversity policies are trying to help.

[ianbetteridge]

Re: Code talks

"They basically let the bigots hire more bigots"

and...

"Diversity needs to be organic"

How do you propose to get to your second state from your first one? Bigots hiring bigots who just hire more bigots aren't going to suddenly start to hire more diversely "organically".

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

Non-sequitur. "Outreach" is NOT the same as "DEI". It DOES reflect a desire to avoid discrimination lawsuits by voluntarily going (let's say) to a college that has a large number of minority races represented in the student body, and DELIBERATELY posting a LOT of job offerings and internships there.

DEI would involve the explicit discrimination by race, sex, or other 'identity' during the HIRING process, prioritizing candidates based on "identity" over experience and education and a proper "work ethic". It would also attempt to equalize OUTCOMES, without regard to quality of work or overall performance (which should be the ONLY measurement when it comes to promoting, raises, and who you keep during a layoff). A BIG difference.

If only white men apply for a job, that should not matter. If one minority race female applicant is there, SHE should not automatically get the job. It's really about voluntary efforts in recruiting, whether it is acceptable to deliberately recruit within a realm of "diverse" identities, or just advertise equally everywhere. The recruiting efforts aren't DEI.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Code talks

DEI would involve the explicit discrimination by race, sex, or other 'identity' ....

Nope. Try again.

[steviator]

Re: Code talks

Not neccessarily. If I had two evenly matched candidates and chose the one whose ethnicity, gender, age, physical abilities were in the minority because of a company policy, how would that be any worse than flipping a coin, or choosing based on my gut feeling from their CV? The truth is, that no matter how I select between two evenly matched candidates, it would seem arbitrary.

I have never worked at any company or even heard a reputable source claim to work for a company that hires less qualified candidates for diversity reasons, but even if they did, you would have to somehow prove that diversity isn't an advantage for the business, diversity could be regarded as a desirable trait like punctuality or maturity, in that the diverse candidate is less likely to come up with the same ideas as their coworkers.

It's hard to imagine a scenario where hiring majority candidates over equally qualified minority candidates would yield a better outcome for the company, but it's easy to see how diversity could be helpful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Telle you've no idea what DEI means without saying the words...

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

Diversity - supposedly, a relatively equivalent percentage of people based on identity as compared to the general population (but in practice is another form of 'affirmative action')

Equity - equal outcomes for all, generally with respect to wages, promotions, and so on [except it rewards mediocrity and fails to reward excellence]

Inclusion - hiring/promoting people who might in some ways be otherwise 'excluded' by one individual or group, from the woman with bizarre tattoos and face piercings that's into unusual religions, to the man with a conservative appearance that is inoffensively christian, such that none of that is considered [in an ideal world, sounds good until you look across the office and see a "band of circus freaks" representing your company and wonder if customers see it too and you really SHOULD have implemented a dress code...]

That's kinda how I see it. The problems arise when this becomes a "filter" for hiring, promotion, and raises.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

Yes, and so not a single of D, E or I would apply to contributions to a open-source project of this kind.

X11Libre would never get employees or paid contributors that need to check their identity, and so they all will remain anonymous (until they're starting revealing themselves), nobody would know their age, gender, color skin, so on.

That's say, most of the opened X11Libre issues are about DEI and the political orientation of the project and deviate from pure technical conversion very fast, so maybe the "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed." needs to define the "nicely" bounds.

Actually, there is less than 10 commits for last week so it's certainly too soon to judge it. Let's wait few more weeks where the project is going.

[ianbetteridge]

Re: Code talks

"kinda how you see it" demonstrates you really don't have a clue what you're talking about.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

the fact that you use "loony left"

tells us you are a right wing nutcase.

piss off to xhitter

[JoAnywhere]

Re: Code talks

I always thought the 'master' and 'slave' discussion you refer to was totally overblown, until I spoke to an USA developer of African heritage about this. He is directly descended from slaves. He said whenever he saw those terms, it sent a shiver down his spine.

We agreed then and there to use 'primary' and 'secondary' instead for the project we were working on.

I think before deciding an issue is for those who '...don't perhaps have better, more useful things to do with their time', it is important to engage with those who are impacted by said issue. I certainly learned something when I did just that.

Also, equity policies (by definition) are not discriminatory. They've been politicised as such by those who are very happy with the status quo. They are often viewed as giving people from disadvantaged groups a job they shouldn't get. That's never been what they've been about. They are about ensuring that people from disadvantaged groups (gender, gender identity, gender preference, skin colour, and able-bodiedness being the examples I can think of right now) with appropriate talent are considered equally for jobs as people who are (let's be blunt) white and male (ideally also straight), and are also paid equally. You may be thinking of positive discrimination. That's a different kettle of fish.

The appropriate talent comment from the previous paragraph also needs to be taken back a step further to make sure educational opportunities are provided equally to all regardless of skin colour, gender, economic status etc.

[Roland6]

Re: Code talks

> We agreed then and there to use 'primary' and 'secondary' instead

That’s fine in small implementations.

For one critical system we had three component controllers (primary, secondary and tertiary) each operating in master/slave configuration…

[Not Yb]

Re: Code talks

server/client

host/client

primary/secondary

secondary/tertiary

A/B/C

control/output

Using master/slave isn't technically required. It is a choice that can be easily changed to something more meaningful technically, and less meaningful socially.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

initiator & responder

BOFH and PFY

[Spamfast]

Re: Code talks

We agreed then and there to use 'primary' and 'secondary' instead for the project we were working on.

Replacing 'master' with 'main' or 'primary' or 'trunk' in repo branches is fine. (Although of course the word 'master' has many uses other than master/slave - master craftsman, master key, etc.)

Using primary/secondary is not appropriate for some situaton e.g. where one entity (software module, program, device, etc.) tells another what to do. In that case, if master/slave is deemed offensive which I can understand given the continuing inequities from the African slave trade, some choices might be controller/controllee, owner/executive, director/worker etc. Primary/secondary sounds like one is a backup of the same function for when the other fails.

[GNU SedGawk]

Re: Leader/Follower is the Master/Slave replacement

I'm very pro-equality, I feel that this is often used as proxy for actual change. The policing of language is inherently iniquitous, so I'm somewhat against this sort of thing.

I think you shouldn't employ an epithet to describe me, unless we are on good terms, and so generally I would refrain from using them within the codebase. I think that words with a historical association with oppression are not something that logically is a sustainable approach.

I'm from England we use Glass as a Verb. A Malky in Glasgow is a kiss outside it, and either one could see you seeking medical attention.

Are we to ban only words in English or are other languages allowed to play; I just feel deeply cynical towards the idea. I think in the main it's pushed by people whom are dishonest, or deeply unserious.

If the word master makes you feel bad, and we can ban that, how we doing on Poverty, Inequality, Racism, Genocide - because I don't want to see those words.

I'm also from a background that cheerfully uses profanity without finding itself regularly needing gentle fanning. I generally am happy to come up with a synonym, so am rarely going to kick up a fuss, but really, this is the battle, this is what you'll settle for?

Are we going to ban Open because of Theft? Is Cryptography no longer allowed to have number used once, as it's now on a government watchlist?

There is a line between a decent empathic human, and encouraging people to suggest their feelings are the sole determining factor in an objectively somewhat arbitrary position.

I wouldn't refuse your PR changing Master/Slave to Leader/Follower, I'd want them on separate patches so that change was cleanly identified as obviously that has implication for grepping the history.

But I think you'd do better to have an shared design language, and a vocabulary types, perhaps even a style guide for consistent theming of names etc.

I don't like being told X word is bad. I feel uneasy, I admit it's a feeling not a thought, but still..

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

The issue isn't "master", it's "slave" - and particularly when borth words are used together - but the objection is still to the "slave" part

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

"whenever he saw those terms, it sent a shiver down his spine."

Slavery has been ILLEGAL for 160 years in the USA. People who cannot deal with semantics of 'master' and 'slave' (something universally practiced by EVERY society for THOUSANDS of years until the 19th century) needs to "get over it" and stop being such a drama queen. In My Bombastic Opinion, of course!!!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Code talks

You're right, and in most of the Western world that would be reasonable. But in the US specifically, segregation and related local legislation is far, far more recent, still in living memory and a direct result of and effective continuation of the culture of slavery, so I can see why it's still such a raw nerve in the US, especially some of the more southern States.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Code talks

"Slavery has been ILLEGAL for 160 years in the USA"

Nope, not at all.

PRIVATE slave ownership is illegal in the USA, but slavery is not illegal

The result is private prisons using slave labour and things like the "Kids for cash" scandals

[ianbetteridge]

Re: Code talks

If you think that the repercussions of slavery are not still being felt today, you really don't have a clue what you're talking about.

[John Robson]

Re: Code talks

> Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project and ironically discourage participation.

I would have to disagree about that. Equity policies in the main are explicitly discriminatory. I'm all about outreach to encourage participation by any who are technically proficient enough to contribute. Your skin colour should not be a consideration.

Great - and that's what DEI policies are about as well.

Because inclusion isn't discriminatory, it's the opposite.

Equity isn't discriminatory, it's the opposite.

Diversity isn't discriminatory, it's the opposite.

Since skin colour (to pick on the one you chose) isn't relevant to proficiency we should expect that the pool of talented people approximately reflects the general population - we should be expending effort to see why we aren't seeing all sections of society (however you define those sections), because we're clearly missing many of the very best people...

[ianbetteridge]

Re: Code talks

"Agreed that I don't like to see the politicisation of software. However, a large segment of the loony left have made that point rather moot."

Ah, the "they did it first" argument.

[druck]

Re: Code talks

Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project and ironically discourage participation.

Exactly the opposite, it will discourage politicsm and encourage participation of people who aren't obsessed with imposing codes of conduct on technical projects.

[keithpeter]

Re: Code talks

No, really, just go and look at openbsd.org and see if you can see what I'm on about.

Icon: outta here

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

ok what am I looking for... exactly?

[Liam Proven]

Re: Code talks

> it will discourage politics

I think you're wrong. It _is_ politics. It is a direct political statement, and it will alienate some people. It will attract others, yes, but in my relatively limited experience of this area, the people it will attract are, as a rule, not good people.

Saying that: I am not personally a left-wing type of person. (I don't think it is all about the movement of small green pieces of paper. Indeed, I am not convinced anything really important is.) But most of my friends are leftie types. I also have a handful of friends who are very right-wing types. They are not bad people.

The fact I have capital-c Conservative mates shocks and upsets some of my leftie mates. That, IMHO, is their problem not mine.

But while there _are_ good, smart, well-intentioned very right-wing folks... I fear they're a minority on their side. Sending out a dog whistle to attract them is not a good move.

Having a code of conduct is problematic for some people. But then, some people are problematic.

A code of conduct that says "obey Wheaton's Law" ought to be enough -- but it's still a CoC and that will upset some folks.

[GNU SedGawk]

Re: Code talks

I think we have to distinguish between having different views on how economic systems should be run, and different views on if groups of humans have equal value.

We keeps conflating the two. I'm a classically rabid lefty, but I'm an advocate for commercial principles and profit. I run a business, I think you should legalise and tax all drugs. The best way to make something unprofitable is to make it legal and make someone fill in a form every time.

I think that's the root of the polarisation. We are using the same Right/Left language to completely different ends.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

"Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project and ironically discourage participation."

I gave you an UP vote for the first part. I give you a disgruntled SCOWL for this...

[rcxb]

Re: Code talks

It seems like the DEI quote was perhap poorly worded, and is being taken out of context here. The *very next sentence* is: "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed."

[Burgha2]

Re: Code talks

The *very next sentence* is: "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed."

For a definition of acting nicely that means acting like an arse.

[t0m5k1]

Re: Code talks

Reading between lines to get sentences that are simply not there and then acting upon those lines is just wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

the first line was him telling you he's a twat.

the second line was him pretending not to be a twat

believe what twats tell you the first time!

[Graham Perrin]

Poor wording: clarification (and the poor wording remains)

"It seems like the DEI quote was perhaps poorly worded, and is being taken out of context here. The *very next sentence* is: "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed."

– I agree. Thanks.

Wednesday 2025-06-11, Enrico Weigelt wrote:

"… Just in case somebody's curious: the whole "non-DEI" means nothing more that I'm not doing any DEI things whatsoever. Just welcoming anybody who likes to work on X11. No need for any speech police that's banning people for picking a wrong word or not using somebody's personal pronouns correctly. We're all adult people and know how to get along with each other gently. That's it. …"

That's it, apparently, however it's also apparent that his team has chosen to the not tone down the poor wording. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/24e978b1f19b78e1dae8cfdf672142e3209cc812/README.md today is as troublesome as when he first described DEI as discriminatory.

Oh dear.

Yesterday's post proceeded to mention Red Hat (again), and him not complaining, because the publicity for the team – "yes, we're already a whole team, not just me alone" – was great.

Oh dear.

Perhaps stubbornness prevents his team from toning down the part of their front page that wrongly describes DEI as discriminatory.

In any case, I'll note that a great amount of publicity should not be confused with great publicity.

Last but not least: if I'm the speech police, no-one can blame Red Hat for my policing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Poor wording: clarification (and the poor wording remains)

In one closed issue, we see this post from someone involved who disagrees with a suggestion:

>> Ah yes "No politics" in the "Make X11 Great Again" project. Go away RedHat leftoid. I suspected something was off about you, now I'm certain. <<<

MAGA phrases, and paranoid childish attacks.

Liam was right - regardless of how this project was intended, it's turned into the "truth Social" of desktops. Or, "X" has become like "X".

[teknopaul]

Re: Code talks

Being anti dei is simply Racism.

iLike "all lives matter" it denies there is an issue to resolve.

And there is.

Call it out as racism. It affects you too, unless you haven't got any friends on the butt end of it.

[boblongii]

Re: Code talks

You do not fight racism with more racism.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

If you see someone in the street collecting for a breast cancer charity, do you angrily confront them for not caring about testicular cancer?

[tatatata]

Re: Code talks

I have recently attended a presentation about Django. It should have been a 45 minute introduction, which was what I was looking for.

Instead of actually giving the introduction, over 30 minutes of the presentation was dedicated to the organisation of the project and explaining how diverse and inclusive that organisation was.

There is a time and place for everything. If a person in a project like an X11 server is judged (positively or negatively) on the basis of anything else than the code the is produced, or the quality of the technical feedback or other contributions, that is wrong.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Code talks

That's why you don't put political rants in your project documentation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

And that has happened why? As a result of that environment. You are conflating cause with effect. Saying that the effect should not happen even if the cause is not resolved is ignorant at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Code talks

Well that explains a lot about DJango [I had the unfortunate task some time ago to work on a half-finished system within this bloated inefficient framwork to do what CGI could do 10 times faster with 1/4 of the code, and slowly converted and patched the python spaghetti to call out to specialized C language utilities that basically did just that - 10 times faster, way less overall code].

[Roland6]

Re: It's explicitly free of any "DEI" […] or similar discriminatory policies."

Like the joke!

This is a project devoted to X11 and “pure” X11, so it is not interested in accommodating Wayland et al, it’s all about X11. So yes it will be explicitly free of DEI.

If your interest is in Wayland say, then don’t expect this project to welcome and accommodate you - X11 is what is says on the tin and that is what’s in the tin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

There is someone infesting the comments over on hackaday pushing an anti woke Linux distro

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Code talks

I must admit, when I first saw the Antix distro, I assumed it was a Wayland based one, misreading it as "Anti-X" rather than "Antics". It turns out it's a very good distro on a 32-bit netbook :-)

[DuncanLarge]

Re: Code talks

> Not so good as it will small-p politicise what should be a straight forward technical project

Actually its the opposite as the DEI code was used to exclude developers.

As there is no DEI policy, the Xlibre developer says that even if you are a super inteligent shade of the colour blue, nobody will care about it, you can contribute.

I dont understand where this DEI is inclusive thing comes from. Where it is present it is frequently used to excl;ude people based on race/religion/politics and what sandwiches they like. It is a control freaks dream.

By not having a DEI policy you dont accumulate extremily personal and irrelevant data about someone, like what skin tine they have, what accent they have, when they last prayed and to which god it was etc. WIth a non DEI system, you have no care about that whatsoever, none. You just let everyone be "people".

DEI is a cancer. I have seen some people fail to get jobs simply because they didnt tick enough boxes to satify the DEI reports.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code talks

In the unlikely event that that happened, it isn't DEI. Your ignorance is showing.

[gosand]

"Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults."

OK, stealing that.

I've been using Linux on my desktop since 1998, and switched over fully to XFCE in 2010. I don't get the whole push for Wayland, but whatever... if they make it better, it works, and it is stable I would consider using it. As long as I have a choice to NOT use it. Honestly, since IBMHat is one of the main contributors to Wayland I am somewhat skeptical given the whole systemd thing. I have been using Devuan for 7 years now and everything works fine. I don't get why there is a division and there isn't an option to have systemd or sysvinit or etc. etc. Give me Wayland, but don't require it.

[cornetman]

I would expect that the main beneficiaries of Wayland/Weston would be gamers. The big issue about choice is they they work fundamentally differently.

A good analogue might be the difference between DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan. They are all looking to do the same job and many game engines provide some kind of abstraction so you have less need to choose, but ultimately one platform will likely be more efficient for certain workloads. Honestly, I don't get the ire over this subject. X11 has some issues with the modern usage of video that Wayland/Weston hopes to address. I'm not qualified to judge the technical merits of either though.

Another parallel is Pipewire. It's still a bit buggy but hopes to take over from Pulseaudio, pure ALSA and Jack. I would welcome an implementation that is reliable and performant, but I haven't seen the same kind of controversy surrounding it.

[gosand]

Interestingly, I bought an external DAC/Amp last year and Pulesaudio started giving me some fits. My audio was always just fine before that. So I decided to check out Pipewire. Found some instructions that seemed reasonable - apt commands to uninstall Pulseaudio and install Pipewire.

Worked perfectly, and has been ever since. That is only 1 use case of course, but it's the most important one - mine. :) Again, there's a choice of things to use which is always good because there are many different use cases out there. Some may bemoan there are too many choices within the Linux ecosystem but that is what got Linux here and there is really zero reason to ruin that now.

[Joe W]

The only time I really f'd up a Debian (now Devuan) system so much it was easier to reinstall from scratch was when I tried to install pipewire. What a mess (for me). I'll give it a try maybe... next year. Or the year after. And I'll mess up my kids' laptop first ;)

My problem was that I could not install pipewire and configure it to run as a daemon and support my bluetooth headphones. The original (i.e. what came with my Devuan installation) just works. Maybe I will get that external DAC/ADC box at one point in time and then I'll need to give it another shot. Though my next project is building a phono preamp to go into my 30 years old amp (I could build the original one, I have the schematics and board layout, but I'll stick with the Elliott sound-au.com one (I need to change some stuff around so it can go into the amp the way the manufacturer intended) - and for that I need to get my home lab (re-)started...

[gosand]

There was a bit of discussion on the Devuan forum about Pipewire and running it as a daemon. Someone posted a script that can be run at boot time to kill any potentially running instances and start up the new one. I copied that, made a personal tweak or two, and stuck it in my XFCE startup and it has worked every time.

[FuzzyTheBear]

Not ready at all.

I do pro audio work here on my workstation. Pipewire is not at all ready to take over from Jack .. or anything for that matter. The applications are not there , routing is not there , hardware recognition and use is not there .. if you got one soundcard it may work , but with external interfaces ( Focusrite 18i21) it just dosent work yet. Maybe in a few years it may be .. but for now PW is junk if you got serious audio work to do.

[losinggeneration]

Re: Not ready at all.

That's fair. PulseAudio took quite a bit of time before it was stable. However, I've been using PipeWire for at least 3-5 years, and haven't had almost any issues with multiple sound cards or even any of the growing pains PulseAudio had as it was maturing (on a related note, I forgot PipeWire is into it's 1.x versions.) I not a pro audio user, but I do have about 4-6 devices in use at any given time, but typically it's only one or two different ones in use at the same time. Audio routing has been sufficient with Helvum for me as well.

I'm not going to say it's a replacement for Jack, but I'd strongly argue it's an easy replacement for most people. I'm not alone in this thought either, as distros have been migrating to it as well. That's the nice thing about having choices, use Jack if that's working well did you. As you said, it's still probably the best for pro audio users. The tools are very mature and has a lot of support. I don't see it going anywhere for quite awhile.

[Caspian Prince]

Re: Not ready at all.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-doesnt-love-me-back-post-2-the-audio-stack-is-a-crime-scene/

Seems germane to the conversation.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Not ready at all.

Absolutely spot on and matches my (sighted) experience of Linux sound.

I moved from OS/2 to Linux (Ubuntu 6.06) because when i tried Linux, sound on PC (just) worked, as it never did under OS/2. That impressed me. I would have been less impressed if I had known that over the next 19 years I would never again have a Linux system on which sound worked reliably.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Not ready at all.

PulseAudio is stable? When did that happen? Or did you mean "stable" as in "the Lusitania is stable"?

[Joe W]

Re: Not ready at all.

... as stable as systemd...

[Hardrada]

@cornetmam"I would expect that the main beneficiaries of Wayland/Weston would be gamers."

I suspect you're correct, since even semi-demanding applications like 3D CAD don't require particularly high frame rates or intricate ray-tracing.

Mr. Weigelt may also be right about big commercial sponsors being the main impetus for switching to Wayland... a lot of them already have mobile/media products that use non-X graphics stacks.

[David Pearce]

Wayland lacks many features by design that CAD and GIS software needs

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

[ovation1357]

Wow! That's a pretty damning list of issues and I find them entirely believable based on other bad encounters with the zealotry pouring out of the Wayland/GNOME teams.

[LadyGaia]

Please remember one thing

Yes some cad stuff and other professional software lack pieces they need in Wayland, but Wayland has built in support for running x11 programs in x11 but shown and used from Wayland.... So Wayland technically supports x11 and the backwards compatibility. I run gnome latest with Wayland and have never seen an issue running openscad, freecad or any other piece of professional software. It just detects it needs x11 and gives it the pieces it needs. Uses both pipewire and Wayland and I have yet to run into an issue in the last few years of swapping to Wayland. It's not like they just said screw anyone and anything that needs x11 to operate, it just uses a compatibility layer.

[Graham Dawson]

There's several reasons for the ire.

First, Wayland is being pushed by the same people who actively prevent improvement to X11. They've decided that their way is the only way and no competition shall be tolerated. They grudgingly accept security patches, but anything that tries to fix or improve features is rejected. The very obvious conflict of interest frustrates people.

Second, their approach to development of the Wayland protocol (and it's gnome implementation) is high-handed and highly opinionated. They have, as the article notes, broken accessibility at a fundamental level and refuse to even address any argument or criticism of their decision to do so. They routinely reject anything that doesn't cleave to their very particular beliefs on how things should be and have spent most of the last decade bikeshedding. The consequence is that it took 15 years for the project to not even reach parity with X, and it's only after KDE and Steam became involved a couple of years ago that the project began moving forward appreciably again, but even they face continuous resistance when implementing what should be uncontroversial features.

The "extension" system is inherently fragmentary and opens the whole stack up to quasi-proprietary lock-in, which given who has been driving the project, should a great concern. This is probably the biggest issue a lot of people have with Wayland.

[ianbetteridge]

"Wayland is being pushed by the same people who actively prevent improvement to X11"

I think, if you're going to make a statement like that, you ought to tell us who "those people" are.

[Graham Dawson]

I would have thought, given the context, that it was self evident. The core development team behind wayland also gatekeep commits to the xorg repo. They have blocked anything more than the most bare-bones security patches and have forced development to stall out entirely, a state of affairs that they then use as justification to abandon xorg and replace it with wayland.

[Anonymous Coward]

... or use an OS which has a functional OSS, and doesn't need silly userland hacks.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get why there is a division and there isn't an option to have systemd or sysvinit ...

Far too many people don't get it.

And that is because they cannot see the writing on the wall.

It has been there for ages.

.

[bombastic bob]

ambiguity... Don't get WHAT exactly?

Far too many people don't get it.

Don't get WHAT exactly?

How does this explain why we do not have a choice of init systems when we install Linux?

I happen to LIKE the freedom to choose among the available options.

It was a HUGE mistake to (at onetime) drive userland (especially gnome stuff) into EXPECTING systemD to be there. It affects FreeBSD ports in MANY not-so-nice ways, for starters, and puts extra burden on Devuan devs and FreeBSD ports maintainers to test for compatibility and make patches to compensate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ambiguity... Don't get WHAT exactly?

Don't get WHAT ...

This.

.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ambiguity... Don't get WHAT exactly?

It was the same with audio. FreeBSD having to work with programs that dropped OSS for ALSA or pulseaudio, requiring FreeBSD porters write unnecessary hacks to get around the linux hacks to get around the fact they had a crappy OSS implementation.

The "L" in Alsa stands for "Linux" - and Linux folks have the gall to complain about "embrace, extend, extinguish"!

[doublelayer]

"I don't get why there is a division"

Because in most cases, the alternatives work completely differently. There isn't a single standard that anything can implement and you just drop in the one you prefer. If you mix and match, you'll get things that break in places you don't expect because they were written for or integrated with only one of those. Therefore, almost everything chooses one of the options and makes everything work with that. In principle, you could integrate everything with everything and then let people choose what they wanted to run, but that's an inefficient process that most people don't want to bother with.

It all gets settled eventually; a bunch of projects start to try implementing some part of the system, many crash and burn, the remaining ones fight among themselves until the less popular ones start to lose users and be cannibalized for their useful code, and we find something that pretty much everyone uses. Then someone comes up with something the existing one handles badly and they start another version and this process starts over.

[bombastic bob]

Give me Wayland, but don't require it.

Excellent point

[I also use Devuan for Linux when I can]

[Felipe Contreras]

Straw man

"Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults."

Yeah, but that's an irrelevant straw man because Weigelt didn't say he was against vaccines. People are inventing an opinion he never claimed to have.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Straw man

> Weigelt didn't say he was against vaccines

Weigelt said vaccinated people were not human any more.

That is a pretty damned clear position statement, and it is not a good one, and it is not one indicative of general sanity and understanding of reality.

_However_ saying that, there are several outstanding programmers who are, to be charitable, somewhat untethered from reality, and I don't just mean Terry A. Davis. Or indeed Richard Stallman.

It is entirely possible that Enrico Weigelt is a brilliant but erratic and idiosyncratic developer who is just what X11 and FOSS X11 servers need to drive them forward into a hostile future.

Yes there is an eternal problem with funding FOSS. Red Hat is a giant company that funds a tonne of FOSS. That's good. But RH is also a for-profit corporation and it is axiomatic that corporations are psychotic.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201103/why-corporations-are-psychotic

When your opposition is psychotic _and_ rich and powerful, maybe it needs someone crazy to go up against them.

It depends on your view.

Some will go "OMG he is an evil anti-vaxxer, so I will not use anything he writes!"

That's their choice.

I detest anti-vaxxers. I have ended friendships because people were anti-vaxxers.

But I am not trying to be Mr Weigelt's friend. I am, however, very interested in using an X11 server on my Linux machines in a few years' time. I do not personally want anything that runs under Wayland: I have tried them all and I find them all lacking.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

Liam,

I don't think we should confuse these new mRNA therapies with vaccines. The benefits of the Covid jabs have been way oversold, by using Relative instead of Absolute risk reduction. The side-effects have been down played. Like you say above, Corporations are psychotic. Not just Red Hat, but also Pfizer and Astra Zeneca. And Shell. There's good money to be made. Really good money.

Even with vaccines in general, I feel like we've been a bit oversold on their benefits *** in some cases ***. If you read Turtles All The Way Down, it sets out a pretty convincing case for how they have mostly not been tested against a true placebo. They are tested against other vaccines, or against something with the adjutant / agent still present. I would really love for someone else to read this book and criticise it, because it seems pretty convincing to me.

Regarding DEI, it seems like a nice idea on the surface but often has the opposite effect to that's intended. If you send a white person on a DEI course and they get told that all white people are unconsciously racist, then you can see how that might upset people. It's impossible to disprove. It's unhelpful. We're better off without it. Just be nice. "Am I racist?" was an interesting watch. It does seem that some companies in the US are taking it too far, and employing charlatans. Not so much in the UK.

We should really keep this stuff out of the workplace, and well away from README files. Keep your flags at home, and keep your politics to yourself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

fuck off with that anti-vax shit, piss off to xhitter

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/part-1-10-the-grand-debunk-of-the-antivaxxer-book-turtles-all-the-way-down/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

No need to be aggressive. It does not help your argument.

From your link ...

"The primary mission of a vaccine inventor in the eyes of a regulator is to prove a new vaccine improves upon an old vaccine in some way – this is the most direct reason why a placebo is often an old vaccine. The mission is not to prove the vaccine is more effective than plain water. Practically, it would constitute additional unnecessary steps to compare to saline placebo when the vaccine is supposed to be compared against its older predecessor.".

So, not really denying that vaccines are only tested against other vaccines in many cases. Just saying "this is fine" and also this is the only ethical thing to do.

My feeling is this is very much not fine. This is because the new vaccine could have ever so slightly worse side effects than the last one, and over time this could amount to something quite significant. Wouldn't we want to know that, as a society? Why would you want to hide that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

ho for fucks sake you antivax wanker

There is no point testing a new vaccine against water, we already know the old vaccine works, this is to test if the new vaccine is more effective than the old.

and at the same time check for side effects.

it saves wasting resources and time that could prevent more people dying or being disabled from diseases.

"No need to be aggressive"

Yes we fucking do, until you anti-vax wankers get it into your thick skulls

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

... and if all you can manage are playground insults, than you are kind of losing the argument. Also, not worth arguing with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

Not sure how I can lose an argument when i'm just explaining fucking facts.

you a fucking masochist, you seem to keep coming back for more humiliation, you anti-vax wanker.

don't get me wrong if that's yer kink, fine, but it would be nice to know your just doing this to get off

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

I know you aren't supposed to feed the trolls, but this is just too much fun. As a commentard you are making yourself look like a complete idiot by just name calling.

When I said "...we've been a bit oversold on their benefits *** in some cases ***..." I hardly think that makes me a hard-code anti-vaxx w*nker as you seem to think. Just a bit sceptical of big pharma and their motives.

When you said... "There is no point testing a new vaccine against water, we already know the old vaccine works" that is not "just explaining fucking facts", it's just your opinion not facts. My opinion is there is very much a point in testing against a true placebo, as they already do with other medicines. What if the amount of adjuvant in the circa 72 childhood vaccines IS actually causing some kind of problems? It would be really useful to know this. Perhaps we can find a better adjuvant? Perhaps science will find some answers. Science is not burying your head in the ground and pretending that everything is OK, and that these companies couldn't possibly be motivated by money in any way because they have only the good of humanity at heart (awww bless their little hearts).

This is not anti-vaxx. This is better-vaxx. Or at least be damned sure these things aren't doing too much harm if you are giving it to little babies. Not "no point in testing".

This should not be a hugely costly exercise in the bigger picture. I believe RFK Jr is even insisting on this being done, so in a couple of years we'll hopefully know, and then we can put this to bed and not worry about it any more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seal Ion

> "No need to be aggressive. It does not help your argument. [..] Wouldn't we want to know that, as a society? Why would you want to hide that?"

"There's no need to raise your voice, I'm right here. I'm just curious if you have any sources to back up your opinion [..] I have been unfailingly polite and you two have been nothing but rude [etc]"

[Alan Brown]

Re: Straw man

The standard antivaxxer argument against the Covid vaccines is that "they must be risky because they were developed so quickly"

Never mind that there was more than 12 YEARS of development. Covid is a SARS variant and teams have been working on that one for quite a while. All they had to do was tune it in the same way annual flu vaccines are tuned for the dozen or three mutations that develop each year

===

BTW: Covid should be regarded as a warning shot from Nature. H1N1 has been extinct in humans since 1956.

When it showed up in 1918, it had been extinct in humans since ~1870 and anyone born since that date had virtually zero immunity to it

We've been living around our companion/farm animals for so long there's an entire family of viruses that have evolved to easily jump the species barrier. H1N1 went from humans to New England horses(*) to chickens(**) before jumping back to humans in 1916 Kansas and then mutating to a deadlier form in French field hospitals

The USA was so badly affected by the 1918-20 outbreak that it was culturally erased from history. The 1920s movie tropes of street orphans was a nod to the pandemic. This has a LOT to do with why antivaxxers are so prevalent

(*) Horses were so sick that they couldn't haul fire wagons - this is why the Great Boston fires of 1872 were so bad. On the frontiers, both Indians and US Cavalry had to resort to hand-to-hand fighting

(**) The Great Hendemic - look it up

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

These new therapies are not vaccines. A vaccine introduces a small amount of the actual pathogen (attenuated) and lets your immune system figure out how to fight it. These new therapies recruit your own mRNA to produce a part of the pathogen, in the case of Covid the Spike Protein. They are supposed to stay in the site of the injection... they don't. They are supposed to stop producing the spike protein after a short time... they don't (can go on for many months). This appears to be causing a great deal of autoimmune issues in people.

After a pandemic such as we've just experienced you'd expect to see a decline in excess deaths. This is because the older/vulnerable people were pushed over the edge. At present we're STILL seeing increased deaths. This could potentially be related to these new therapies. It could also be other things relating to lockdowns or Covid itself.

There's also a theory going around that a lot of the deaths in 1918 were actually caused by over prescription of the new wonder drug Aspirin. Doctors were often giving out 11,000 mg. or 11g. They didn't understand the side-effects. The symptoms matched overdose of Aspirin. Much like over use of ventilators in 2020, often the cure is worse than the disease.

And did anyone notice how the Oxford AZ vaccine (which is a traditional vaccine) was quietly dropped?

And is anyone actually taking these mRNA jabs any more? I don't see massive queues of people lining up for these as they don't trust them. Because they are concerned about side-effects.

Covid should be considered as a warning shot from over medicalising, not from nature.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Straw man

"There's also a theory going around that a lot of the deaths in 1918 were actually caused by over prescription of the new wonder drug Aspirin"

Which wasn't in evidence when it hit Samoa (28% mortality - 35% amongst males) or Fiji (12% mortality)

People hit by the 1918 flu were frequently fine in the morning and dead in the afternoon. 9000 people died in 3 weeks in Philadelphia alone

It's not a "theory" until evidence supports it. Until that point it's a hypothesis (at best) or a wild-eyed claim on par with using jade objects in the Vag for "healing chakras"

Yes, those percentages are real. Nearly 1/3 of the entire Samoan population died, whilst 50 miles away in American Samoa, strict quarantine rules meant nobody did. It's an epic demonstration of the effectiveness of quarantines

[ianbetteridge]

Re: Straw man

"And is anyone actually taking these mRNA jabs any more? I don't see massive queues of people lining up for these as they don't trust them. Because they are concerned about side-effects."

That's odd, because I when I went from my last booster, which I got along with my flu jab, there were quite a lot of people. Over 65s, people with compromised immune systems, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

> "And is anyone actually taking these mRNA jabs any more? I don't see massive queues of people lining up for these as they don't trust them. Because they are concerned about side-effects."

Those poor uninformed people who believe people like you, and "Dave down the pub".

Besides, that comment is bollocks. the boosters are spread out. They aren't as time dependent as the first vaccinations were.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

Well not really uninformed, although I can't remember the exact statistics and I can't be bothered to look them up. I just remember the uptake was very low, even in the age groups that are being offered it. Also even lower in the USA where it was still being offered to 6 month old babies until fairly recently. People just weren't taking it. They don't trust these particular so-called vaccines. Having looked into it a little more I won't be taking the flu jab when I reach that age, unless things have changed drastically by then. It doesn't help at all with most Influenza Like Illness (ILI) and even actual Influenza it often gives you some immunity against the wrong strain. The only people that age that I know personally who've had any symptoms are the ones who have taken the jab.

So not really Dave down the pub, but more by doing a lot of reading about this. The substack of Professor Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson is a particularly good one. They are both from the University of Oxford. They seem to know what they are talking about.

https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/p/the-licensed-avian-influenza-vaccines-f1e

They seem to advocate for actual evidence based medicine, without the influence of money. And the regulator doing actual regulation, instead of being an "enabler". Most of the articles go behind a paywall after a bit, but if you subscribe you get the email version for free as soon as it comes out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

Actually H1N1 is not extinct; it is just not a death sentence these days because we have immunity to it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

But how could we have developed "immunity" without a vaccine? Being as the WHO changed the definition of "immunity" to mean you had to have a vaccine, and not natural immunity this must be impossible? At least until about 15 years ago. And presumably you don't mean that H1N1 was a death sentence prior to 2009?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Straw man

Interesting that this comment on a week old article gets a downvote within minutes of being posted (and the one above from an hour ago). Either someone is hitting F5 all day, or there's some bot activity involved?

Would it be paranoid to think that 77th Brigade have written a bot to monitor for anti-vaxx on these forums (and thousands of others) to affect public opinion?

And just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Straw man

> I don't think we should confuse these new mRNA therapies with vaccines.

(All the rest trimmed.)

Yeah, no, none of this. Not a line of it. This is 100% conspiracy-theorist BS.

There are real conspiracies you'd be better off worrying about or spreading doubt about.

Here's a list of real bogus fake nonsense that should not be even entertained:

* generative "AI"

* anything to do with blockchains

* plastics recycling

* carbon offsetting/capture/storage etc.

* gradually transitioning from fossil fuels, or some being cleaner than others, or biofuels

All utter crap.

Vaccines: real, work, safe, effective. STFU with your raving.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Straw man

> Yeah, but that's an irrelevant straw man because Weigelt didn't say he was against vaccines.

>> I know *a lot* of people who will never take part in this generic human experiment that basically creates a new humanoid race (people who generate and exhaust the toxic spike proteine, whose gene sequence doesn't look quote natural). I'm one of them, as my whole family.

Refusing to take a vaccine, stopping his family taking it, talking bullshit about what will happen to the people who take this vaccine - sounds like someone who is against vaccines and wants to spread this, not just quietly make his own choice.

(expecting you to then reply) > No, he is against *one* vaccine, not all vaccines

He is against the entire *class* of vaccines, one that we were waiting for and will be seeing more of in the future.

[Smirnov]

Re: Straw man

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”

— Margaret Atwood

[Not Yb]

A similar bumper sticker: "No need to vaccinate all your children, just the ones you want to keep"

[Alan Brown]

"I don't get the whole push for Wayland"

Gaming, video editing and hardcore graphics manipulation

There are limitations on use of X which can only partially be resolved with extensions. As a network-exclusive display protocol (even when client and server are the same box) it's great, but when you need high speed screen drawing and guaranteed response times it tends to falter

Wayland is specifically for local display. You still need X for remote clients (remember the display is the server in X terminology)

[Graham Perrin]

Go!

Day one, I am the forty-ninth up-voter of:

"Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults."

[TimMaher]

Personal view.

Wayland = shit. Used it once.

X11 = fine if not terrific. Used It for decades.

X11 wins.

[cornetman]

Re: Personal view.

The biggest drawback to Wayland (or more properly Weston) is poor driver support by manufacturers. That's getting better, but I had similar experiences when I tried to use it some time ago. Things will improve. I believe that NVidia is onboard now so perhaps there is light at the end of the tunnel.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Personal view.

You forgot the ONE THING that makes X11 superior to ALL OTHER GUIs: the DISPLAY environment variable!!

* It is possible to run multiple X servers on the same box - one Video, one VNC (for starters - I like TigerVNC)

* It is possible to run an application on an embedded system and use the GUI on your desktop to display and interact with it. (example, pluma to edit source files and a graphical GDB wrapper to debug things)

AND

* If you make standard X11 API calls AND statically link X libraries (not large) , your application load times are NEARLY INSTANTANEOUS.

* Extensions to XOrg include direct memory access and OpenGL and in SOME cases (NVidia) there can be a special OpenGL implementation that leverages particular hardware.

* lots of legacy support for old systems [this can become a dynamically loaded 'as needed' feature in future versions for performance reasons - probably should be already but that's what new modernization can give you]

* well tested code that is NOT a "rapidly moving target"

So, what does Wayland give you that's actually BETTER...?

[RAMChYLD]

Re: Personal view.

> So, what does Wayland give you that's actually BETTER...?

Closer to hardware.

X11 is built for a networked environment. You can SSH into another machine, run an X program, and if you have a local X Server, that program will then appear on your system as if it's running locally.

However, the networked environments adaptation also means inherently higher latency. Your program must still talk to the X server through a port. This also potentially means data has to at least go to the network stack and then back to the CPU, inherently introducing more delays.

[geoff61]

Re: Personal view.

> Your program must still talk to the X server through a port.

That hasn't been true since 1991 when the MIT Shared Memory Extension was released.

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shm.html

[Alan Brown]

Re: Personal view.

MIT-SHM exists, but it's fairly limited

Wayland is vastly better when interfacing with GPUs

Horses for courses. You can't use Wayland in a networked environment, which is why Xwayland exists, but with a supported video card it works better (and significantly more securely) than X for local stuff

X is "more universal", but it's not "optimal" and most of the objections to it are the "but sometimes" kinds of arguments you see against LED traffic lights (mainly that they don't melt snow due to internal heat - something that is fixed by adding a heater that's switched on if needed)

That said: the people problems aren't deniable. Just like SystemD is a nice concept but Poettering is a complete ass

X has been forked multiple times. Xorg exists _because_ Xfree86 was being rigidly controlled. If the fork is better it either gets folded into the trunk or the old trunk is abandoned - which is what happened to xf86 and OSI before it

[geoff61]

Re: Personal view.

> MIT-SHM exists, but it's fairly limited

I cited MIT-SHM in order to give 1991 as the date when RAMChYLD's assertion stopped being true. There have, of course, been other more capable additions since then which also don't talk to the X server via a network port.

> Wayland is vastly better when interfacing with GPUs

Better than what? With X the best ways to interface with GPUs are OpenGL and Vulkan. A bit of searching for Wayland v. X11 in GPU benchmarks suggests Wayland sometimes wins and X sometimes wins. Neither is "vastly better".

[Liam Proven]

Re: Personal view.

> which is why Xwayland exists

What? No it isn't! That is not even distantly related to what Xwayland is or does.

I invoke the spectre of Wolfgang Pauli upon you:

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!

Xwayland is an X11 server for Wayland environments. It lets you run and display X11 apps under a Wayland compositor. That's all.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Xwayland

Maybe, just maybe, you were thinking of Waypipe.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: to the network stack and then back to the CPU, inherently introducing more delays.

OK, that seems reasonable.

But in the case where there is no actual/physical network transit (i.e. over some wires or wiffi), and the diversion is therefore internal to the machine you are sitting in front of, how long are those delays likely to be relative to human reaction times? E.g. delays of a microsecond are irrelevant on human timescales, but tenths or longer are not. I would imagine that delays of hundredths are best avoided, but milliseconds?

In order to decide whether to care about these internal delays, and so to decide whether a switch to wayland might be useful to me, I need to know whether they have any discernable effect.

[FIA]

Re: Personal view.

X11 is built for a networked environment.

This for me is the problem, X11 is both built to be a networked window manager and also not very good at it.

Using X in the late 90s on the universities X terminals was eye opening. I didn't realise something so professional could be so slow! (I'd been spoilt by things like RISC OS). It wasn't that much quicker on the nice new DEC Alpha's we'd just got.

The real kicker for me was when I first got DSL in the 2000s. I used to SSH to home from work and run RDP across the SSH tunnel. It wasn't quick (this was in the days of 512kbit down and about 64kbit up) but it was usable. I could log in to my home box and use Windows.

So I thought I'd see what X was like across the same link. I think it finally drew some of the window after a few minutes, but it wasn't what you would call usable, and considering it was designed to be used in this scenario, when compared to Cyrix's efforts to networkify GDI it stood up poorly.

I know it's a joke, but the chapter on X in the Unix hater handbook makes some very good points.

I get that it's not the same software from the 70s, it's not even the same software from the 90s, it's now a glittery, beautifully reflective turd, but it's still at it's heart an unopinionated windowing system that doesn't even define window controls. (Because who needs consistency?)

[Alan Brown]

Re: Personal view.

"poor driver support by manufacturers"

In which case it falls back to generic modes and you don't get to use hardware acceleration, etc.

Makers with poor Linux support usually have rotten Windows support too - buggy drivers, code bloat, etc etc - they may do well for a while but it always comes back to bite them on the ass, as we can see from the long list of graphics makers who have collapsed since the 1990s

It's become the norm to code drivers for Linux or MacOs and then port to Windows

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Personal view.

It strikes me there is a degree of almost desperation on the side of the Wayland developers here.

They've been trying to persuade the community for over a decade to move over to their project, and despite being backed by one of the big names in Linux, they are still getting pushback. This is actually because they are not listening to the very people they are trying to serve, and not implementing the features that people say they need in their display system.

So now they've crossed a line. Not only have they been refusing for a year to merge fixes back in to the main line and issue a new release of X.org, they're actively trying to sabotage the people who have felt it necessary to fork it to continue X11 as a viable system.

I have played with Wayland, with XWayland and waypipe. I can use it for what I need. But I would prefer to keep using X11 for the moment, as I am still working with Unix, and there is no hope that Wayland will ever be implemented on any legacy Unix platform.

I could not believe what they were doing when I found out. It's almost if they've forgotten the Open ethic of Open Source.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Personal view.

agreed

[Liam Proven]

Re: Personal view.

> It strikes me there is a degree of almost desperation on the side of the Wayland developers here.

Exactly so.

Wayland is old enough to drive a car and vote.

It still has serious problems in lots of areas, but the problems are in areas that the Wayland devs and the devs and users of Wayland environments don't care about. So they won't get fixed.

Which is why the big Wayland backers decided to start forcing us to use it. Make Wayland the default in the big 2 desktops, as it is today, and then next year, X11 support will be removed.

Fine. Doesn't personally bother me. I don't use either of those desktops and as long as nobody forces me to, I don't care.

I don't want Flatpak, or systemd, or Wayland, or Pipewire... but if they don't get in my way I can ignore them.

But I _do_ care if someone is going to keep working on the things I _do_ use. I am willing to swallow any political objections if their code is good.

That itself is a political statement. But then, the existence of FOSS is a political statement. Choosing to use it is another.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Personal view.

I just want fullscreen to work properly in Ubuntu 24.04. I have tons of old games that work just fine under earlier Ubuntu versions, but when they go "fullscreen" in 24, the screen resolution stays the same but puts the game in the upper left as its original resolution. So getting a 640-pixel-wide image on a 1920-pixel-wide screen, which is so small as to be almost unreadable.

(Tried different Wine versions, PlayOnLinux, Lutris, etc. No effect. At least Lutris lets me set the resolution to 800x600, play the game, then revert, so better than nothing.)

[steelpillow]

In for a penny

EDI, aka woke, began as a Good Thing. Zealots overdid it. The zealots on the right rebelled and turned it into an insult. Elsewhere I see the backlash against the backlash rising. Such is social politics.

Xfree86, X.org, Xlibre and the denizens of the Wayland ecology (which is no less diverse) all have their value for different requirements, and we enjoy the choice. But, being dicks, we dicker and squabble. Occasionally some fsck-ing bustard gets to be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Damn! I've run out of popcorn. Anybody want a fight in the foyer?

[Alan Brown]

Re: In for a penny

"woke" is just a variation of "liberal" as an insult that started to get adopted when Americans realised "liberal" isn't an insult in most of the rest of the world

As for the origin of the use of it as an insult - that derives from a certain Mr Hitler and was eagerly adopted by his American fan base (German-American Bund, etc)

Ironically, what they call "liberals" or "woke" are actually progressives - but trying to turn that word into an insult makes their real stance obvious

[bombastic bob]

"Modernize" - does that mean what we WANT it to, or what we FEAR it means?

"The recently released Xlibre server aims to modernize the X.org X11 server and improve both its security and performance."

GOOD NEWS! ... I hope.

When I hear 'modernize" I *HOPE* it means tweeking what's there for performance and hardware compatibility, and improving performance overall for video and gaming. BUT, we unfortunately see OTHER precedence, in both open AND closed source.

I fear what Gnome did for Gnome3 and GTK/GDK 3 and later... 'Adwaita can DIE to DEATH by BURNING with FIRE... for example.

I fear what GOOGLE has done to Chrome... and what Firefox did to THEIR UI, following them OVER THE SAME CLIFF!!!

I fear what MICROS~1 did with Windows 8 and later, and ESPECIALLY 10 - abandoning 3D skeuomorphic and Control Panel for 2D FLATTY FLATSO FLATASS FLUGLY "minimalist" (allegedly) UI design, TIFKAM, and STRONG-ARMING a CLOUD LOGON, a STORE, and ADS IN **YOUR** COMPUTER!!!

CHANGE is NOT ALWAYS for the better. You see it happen with an egg. It's called "Going bad" (something Prince Caspian of Narnia noted...). Let us hope the new "Xlibre" project for X11 provides us with a stable development and maintenance path forward, NOT the changes that we FEAR the most!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Modernize" - does that mean what we WANT it to, or what we FEAR it means?

It's frankly amazing how the human brain automatically discounts anything WRITTEN with stupid CAPTIALISATION as stupid and not worth reading. If YOU need to SHOUT your ARGUMENT sucks.

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: "Modernize" - does that mean what we WANT it to, or what we FEAR it means?

No, he's PASSIONATE about it. That's ok

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: "Modernize" - does that mean what we WANT it to, or what we FEAR it means?

I'd like to defend old Firefox here. Sure, they changed the UI. But they also allow you to keep it the old way. I still have proper menus, like I've had it set up for well over a decade. I'm experimenting with the tabs on the left thing at the moment, still can't completely get used to it after 2 months - but I think it's actually better. I'm just a creature of habit - or possibly a bear of very little brain...

But even if FF have a mode where you have one massive, unweildy, horrible menu summoned on the right of the screen (aping Chrome) - you don't actually have to use it.

Can you blame them for copying the popular thing? Not realising that Chrome became popular through underhanded methods and monopoly abuse - rather than people necessarily liking it. Although there is some of that too.

[Alan Brown]

Re: "Modernize" - does that mean what we WANT it to, or what we FEAR it means?

Chrome took off because the alternatives were suffering from massive code bloat. It then succumbed to the same disease a few years later

[John Brown (no body)]

It's a bit like watching and admiring what SpaceX have done and are doing and remembering it's that twat Musk fronting it :-/

[Like Magic]

What does Health and Politics have to do with coding

Hi,

It should be best person for job regardless of options on health or DEI. There health and views is not going to effect the code they produce.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What does Health and Politics have to do with coding

of course it will if your to stupid to think logically, your way to stupid to code properly.

[SundogUK]

Re: What does Health and Politics have to do with coding

'To' or 'too' you fucking cretin?

[andyprough]

you will be one day

@Liam - >"Even if you're not disabled yet, you will be one day. Today, the desktops and apps that are most controllable by stodgy old-fashioned keyboard-centric user interfaces are ones like MATE and Xfce – which also means that it is the less-cool, older-style desktops that are more accessible."

So my stodgy old DWM with my stodgy old vim should serve me well as I go clickety-clacking on my mechanical keyboard into my less able years? Good to know.

The program I really think will serve me best is ranger - that is a brilliant little file manager for keyboard lovers. And the default color scheme seems perfect already for impaired eyesight.

[Norm81]

Unfair assumption?

"Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults."

Lmao, love that. I do have to ask though, did he actually say "vaccines cause autism" or something along those lines? Because in the quote referenced here, he's saying that he specifically doesn't like the mRNA vaccines, which use a different method than most vaccines. I feel like you're kind of misconstruing what he was talking about.

(Personally, I don't love the idea of messing with RNA myself; at least not without a little more research. I'm aware that it doesn't mess with or change DNA, but directly influencing cell production instructions seems... creepy. Idk.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Unfair assumption?

Personally, I don't love the idea of messing with RNA myself; at least not without a little more research. I'm aware that it doesn't mess with or change DNA, but directly influencing cell production instructions seems... creepy. Idk

At the time I was not too keen on mRNA vaccines opting for AZ (actually that early on there wasn't any choice.) From my major in molecular genetics a few decades before I vaguely remember a little chap called reverse transcriptase which RNA viruses use to transcribe their RNA genes into DNA. So I can see the assumption mRNA vaccines couldn't mess with your chromosomal DNA is not incontestable.

Our knowledge of human or indeed eukaryote molecular genetics is a mere speck of an island in an ocean of ignorance.

Pragmatically mRNA COVID vaccines do work in preventing serious illness, reducing hospitalization etc which when offset against some undemonstrated presumably small risk, makes their widespread use desirable - I certainly get Pfizer or Moderna every six months (along with fluvax) just avoid serious illness and its long term effects.

Haven't sprouted a second head yet. Given the first one isn't quite up to speed these days a second head might be welcome.

I am not sure I would particularly care that one or more developers that created and maintain an application I want or need to use were complete prats. Still at some point the moral and ethical questions must come into play. Can you justify using a vaccine or medication developed using prisoners some of whom were harmed or died as a consequence? Heaven knows what nonsense ChatGPT would vomit but such questions will always keep moral philosophers and theologians in work.

I would note that it's not unknown for an intelligent individual to fully support a principle but also be completely dismayed by a cack- and heavy-handed implementation of that principle along with the simplistic and opportunistic policies leading to that dismal pass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Unfair assumption?

> I am not sure I would particularly care that one or more developers that created and maintain an application I want or need to use were complete prats

We can guarantee that there are some complete prats who happen to be developing commercial software - but we usually don't get to hear from them and just use the software. Or don't use the software, for unrelated reasons.

No doubt there are plenty more OSS authors we'd not want to share a dining table with, if we ever met them in person. But their code and even their READMEs are useful, so who cares? They would be equally unhappy dining with us. Huh, you and I may find each other insufferable over the soup.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Unfair assumption?

> did he actually say "vaccines cause autism" or something along those lines?

No, not AFAIK.

I merely used the #1 antivaxxer dogwhistle.

What Weigelt said is that people treated with mRNA vaccines are no longer genetically human, and that is [a] 100% NOT TRUE and [b] millimetres away from a nightmare maelstrom of racist horror.

Any German born in the 20th century is _very_ well aware of that, more than perhaps any other nation's citizens.

That in turn means that if they publicly say such things, then either:

[a] They are very well aware of the resonances and consequences, and they're doing it knowingly, and that strongly implies other things about their beliefs.

Or

[b] They are unaware which means they are so disconnected from consensus reality that they are deranged.

A is worse than B, but neither is good.

Frankly Philip K Dick was disconnected from reality. Dude was as mad as a bagful of spiders. He still wrote some good stuff, though, and his reputation as a creative artist outlives him.

As I wrote: I like diversity. That includes diversity of viewpoints and beliefs.

"An it harm none, do as thou wilt."

But the *AN IT HARM NONE* part is very important.

Antivaxxers, for example, do massive harm.

[SundogUK]

Re: Unfair assumption?

So you deliberately used a straw-man?

And only dogs can hear dog-whistles...

[abend0c4]

Accessibility matters

The way we deal with that presently is to have laws that impose accessibility requirements on commercial products and services.

What's the appropriate mechanism in the world of open source software? It's already the case that unpaid developers will - quite naturally - spend most of their time on the part of the problem that interests them most: usability - in all its forms - is often not at the top of the list.

Is it sufficient that accessibility is only a consideration once projects are commercialised, leaving those with accessibility requirements with fewer choices and higher costs?

[42656e4d203239]

Re: Accessibility matters

>>Is it sufficient that accessibility is only a consideration once projects are commercialised, leaving those with accessibility requirements with fewer choices and higher costs?

The root of the DEI fuss and bother is the thought "Why should I pay for your convenience?" aka "I'm All Right, Jack". So in that context, yes, it is sufficient.

Many people hold views that amount to "I'm all right Jack" - Apparently, not as many people don't so we are where we are and society, as a whole, will, arguably, be poorer for it.

[Mockup1974]

It's not the first time "Freedesktop" bans people. Happened to the developer of Hyprland before.

I think the Red Hat / Gnome people are destroying Linux from the inside out. Whether on purpose or not is another question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether on purpose or not is another question.

No.

It is not a question, it is a fact.

And it is not only Red Hat / Gnome.

Where do you think systemd came from?

And who is the author of that abortion of nature working for working for now?

Like some other 'tard has said before:

---

Systemd is a virus, a cancer or whatever you want to call it. It is noxious stuff.

It works just like the registry does in MS operating systems.

It's a developer sanctioned virus running inside the OS, constantly changing and going deeper and deeper into the host with every iteration and as a result, progressively putting an end to the possibility of knowing/controlling what is going on inside your box as it becomes more and more obscure.

Systemd is nothing but a putsch to eventually generate and then force a convergence of Windows with or into Linux, which is obviously not good for Linux and if unchecked, will be Linux's undoing.

There's nothing new going on here: it's nothing but the well known MSBrace at work.

Now go and tell me that Microsoft has absolutely nothing to do with how systemd is crawling inside/infecting the Linux ecosystem.

---

.

[Anonymous Coward]

>we are enthusiastically in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Sad to hear that Liam is in favour of racism and discrimination! Well, like so often, people who know a lot about tech have no clue about the "real world".

[Liam Proven]

> Sad to hear that Liam is in favour of racism and discrimination!

Thanks for clarifying for us that you don't know what any of these words mean. Not surprising you're an anonymous coward, though. We knew that.

[Anonymous Coward]

"No real world experience!"

"No common sense!"

Never comes from anyone you'd have any reason to listen to.

[LeighdePaor]

Your statement of faith

* Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults.

* Climate change is real.

* Social justice is a good thing

* We are enthusiastically in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The above is a statement of faith not a statement of facts. (And includes implied false equivocation)

Faith means trust, these statements show a complete, unquestioning, trust in the statements of others, the four pillars of modernism.

Scientism is real, people blindly trusting corporate pharma sales people using scientific language and selected stats is real.

Open your eyes, test the data, make data driven decisions about what you believe not emotional ones.

Don't trust sales people with your life.

I expect to get some emotional responses to this post.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Your statement of faith

The problem with your viewpoint of "open your eyes, test the data", is that we can't test the data. Or are you able to wander down your garden to your pharma/chemical lab, where you are able to do your own large scale testing of the effects of vaccines on people?

It has been the case that it's not possible for individuals to "test the data" for many, many hundreds of years. And if you can't test it yourself, it all falls to trust and, yes, faith. You have to trust that others that do have the ability to "test the data" are doing it and reporting the results in "good faith".

So what it all falls down to is who you trust. You obviously distrust big pharma, and I can see why you may think that (profit, greed etc.) But who can you trust? Government sponsored research? But governments have agendas that may colour the research (think about the bidding process for government grants - it often concentrates on whatever the current in vogue concerns are). Maybe Citizen Science? But how do they get the resources to carry out all but the most trivial research. How about rich philanthropists? Well, Bill Gates is an example of what happens there.

How about some random person posting on X/Twitter, YouTube or Reddit...?

The problem is that we don't and in reality can't personally know these things. And the Internet and Social Media only makes it worse.

Think back 40 years. We had TV, Radio and the Newspapers for general information. And for a more specific view, we had specialists publications, like Scientific American, New Scientist, Nature, the Lancet to name but a few, and research texts, some of which may appear as books. We had to trust in them, and in general, there were some publications that garnered high degrees of trust. But they still had their critics, and often this was discussed in the open, in the letters pages etc.

Now, we have self-reinforcing echo boxes with no wide discussion about these things, and we just don't have general trust in anybody. I may have some degree of trust in the BBC, but I know of a lot of people who don't. In varying degrees and in different ways, the news arms of Sky, CBS, NBC et. al. may also have their followers. But I won't trust things like RT, or GB News. or Fox News. But other people think the other way. And some people think that they're all bad, and instead we should use totally non-fact checked sources like Facebook, X/Twitter and Instagram for example, even when total nutters have the ability to post junk which has the same impact as anything else on these platforms, and which being believed by people who have "trust" in them.

I first came to this realisation when I had a long conversation with a friend who was unashamedly a Christian creationist (but he was still a good friend, I like to think I am quite open minded) who was positing that my belief in evolution required so many degrees of trust that I couldn't personally verify that it became untrustworthy, whereas his simple, single trust in the Bible (conveniently forgetting the selection of the gospels, and the trust in the translators and transcriptions), because it was more fundamental, was more reliable! As soon as I realised how he was arguing every level of my trust and proof, we agreed to disagree with each other and still remained friends.

But it changed my mindset and the way I have since thought completely, and for that I am grateful.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Your statement of faith @myself

BTW. I am a person who had a bad outcome from the AZ vaccine that I'm still living with today. But in general, I still trust vaccine programs in general to be a good thing, and even with my personal experience, would still recommend that people have vaccines themselves, and have their children vaccinated.

I'm just one of the statistical minority that is unfortunately the result of the fact that we don't and can't fully understand the outcomes of anything, much less everything.

[Zolko]

Re: Your statement of faith

we can't test the data

of course you can : a specific website had been set-up by the EU during the first covid infection (the SARS 1 : remember that Covid is SARS-2 ?), called European Mortality Monitor, EuroMoMo : https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps. Look for yourself, there was no overmortality whatsoever for ages 0 to 44, and standard winter overmortality for older agegroups.

You can also see statistics for the cruise ship Diamond Princess :

Reports of total deaths vary, reflecting difficulties in establishing causation, differing national approaches, and changes in total mortality as time went on. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine put the figure at 9. Between February and April 2020, Japanese government officials declared 13 fatalities from the ship, while one other person was evacuated from the vessel and died in Australia. In April 2020, the World Health Organization said there had been 13 deaths. All the dead were older passengers; none were from the crew

which means that it march 2020 we could scientifically know that the covid was harmless and posed a risk only for the elderly (>70)

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Your statement of faith @Zolko

This is not testing. It's analysing the data others have presented, and you have to have trust that this data was correct. And then you have to analyse it, which implies some degree of subjectivity.

You've clearly not thought through what I said. I was commenting on belief, faith and trust. Not specifically on Covid-19 or SARS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Your statement of faith @Zolko

not sure what you expected from an anti-vax nutter

earlier he said only 8 died on that ship, now it's 13, prime example of "do your own research" nutter

[Frank Zuiderduin]

Re: Your statement of faith

¨which means that it march 2020 we could scientifically know that the covid was harmless and posed a risk only for the elderly (>70)"

This must be the most retarded nonsense about covid I've come across in years.

Except for my half brother, the people I mentioned, who died of covid or were hospitalised, were in their fifties and fourties and healthy.

You're an idiot.

[Ian Johnston]

Re: Your statement of faith

How many people do you think die on the average cruise ship, per month?

[cmdrklarg]

Re: Your statement of faith

***** whereas his simple, single trust in the Bible (conveniently forgetting the selection of the gospels, and the trust in the translators and transcriptions), because it was more fundamental, was more reliable!

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken

[Robigus]

Re: Your statement of faith

Will written and an example of a good human.

We all know people with curious ways. As decent people we get along.

Less so on the Internet, sadly.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Your statement of faith

There's a really easy way to see if vaccinations work: Go to a cemetary and count the number of child graves for each year

They virtually disappear after 1950

[t0m5k1]

Your Typical Linux situation

This for me just sums up why I still dual boot with Windows.

My son relies on accessibility features so it's just easier to keep windows present on the box and the default boot entry.

Everything fundamental to the system is a coin toss as to which way it will go.

Politics and philosophies seem to be the controlling factor followed by clear business interests and then the over arching rule of RedHat.

The Freedom of choice that is offered is veiled and it's expected that "If you want choice then recompile!", This is NOT the way of your average user and is the reason the "Year of the Linux desktop" will never happen.

Sorry for veering in to a rant but the reasons for this fork are all the things many "users" don't care about and are also why just bloody coding grinds to a halt because xyz was not discussed.

If the lead dev wants to dress as an elephant with 1 leg out of the window I really do not care and I'm sure the rest of contributors don't as it has 0 impact on the code they create, if it does their focus is clearly not on the contribution so stop your internal dialogue that is telling you it does!

[mark l 2]

Its all well and good to fork X.org and go off and do your own thing, but even though this is by the top X.org dev is anyone going to actual risk using this project?

Just like any fork maintained by one person it could well get abandoned because the developer looses interest, can no longer afford to spend the time on it or has some other personal issues that are unforeseen at this time.

X.org was kind of in maintenance mode for a while now so it doesn't appear there is going to be much chance of getting lots of other developers onboard to improve on X11 with this Xlibre fork, if they couldn't get devs working on X.org. Especially now that Redhat have dropped X.org in RHEL 10 so their paid devs won't be working on anything X11 related other than fixing CVEs for the still in supported older RHEL releases.

It appears that most of the DE are now set on going down the Wayland route, with even older code bases such a Mate and XFCE working on the transition to Wayland, and Gnome and KDE almost at the stage to go Wayland only.

Perhaps if they had just called Wayland X12 from the beginning the whole issue would have been less divisive?

[Peter Gathercole]

@mark l 2

No. If you think Wayland could be called X12, then you don't understand the problem.

Unfortunately, many of the influential people in X.org became Wayland developers without passing the mantle of being in a position of control in X.org to anybody else. And they have been actively blocking updates/fixes to the code base by not merging them in for quite some time. It was this deliberate apathy towards X11 by the very people curating the project that first of all made it look like nothing was happening, and then forced the people/person who did care to take the action to fork it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @mark l 2

The thing is that Wayland is a totally different API but X11 applications continue to run due to the XWayland server.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: @mark l 2

There's a number of things that XWayland can't do with regard to re-parenting the root window, tracking and warping the cursor, and some font query and handling that can prevent some X clients, including X Window managers from working properly. This quite often gets in the way of accessibility software written as X11 clients. XWayland interacts as a client to the compisitor, leading to a disconnect between X11 clients and native Wayland clients running on the same display.

Basically XWayland is a full-blown X11 server that is running in a frame buffer provided by a Wayland client, which talks to the compositor. Yes, it works with a majority of X11 clients, but there can be problems.

It's a good job that it does do a reasonable job, however, because most people using Westron/Wayland are actually still using X11 clients for much of what they do. There are some native Wayland clients, and the number is increasing, but it's only been quite recent that things like web browsers and office software have become native Wayland clients.

[Alan Brown]

Re: @mark l 2

"Yes, it works with a majority of X11 clients, but there can be problems"

Which is a good description of various X servers over the years.

X is even more patchy than Apache, with various blocks coded for or by people who wanted a specific feature and usually didn't bother with consistent standards. It's the epitome of "If architects designed buildings the way programmers write code, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilisation"

If you could rewrite and optimise out the 30-40 year old crud written in days when memory was expensive and LAN bandwith was poor, along with all the extensions created to support proprietary kit (eg: SGI's stuff) then you might have a chance of keeping it going, but so far nobody's volunteered to do a ground-up rewrite

At one point my employer had a forest of Xterminals. They are long gone for the simple reason that they were awful - and that site is 90% linux on the desktop (previously Slowaris and SGI)

[Alan Brown]

Re: @mark l 2

"many of the influential people in X.org became Wayland developers"

If one or two people move from developing Xorg to Wayland that's their problem

If large numbers of the core developers do so, there's clearly a problem with X and the peanut gallery shouting insults won't make it less so

As for handing over the mantle:

1: There's usually nobody willing to take it on

2: Those who are willing are generally not able

Forking is the reliable and traditional way of carrying on. It's _why_ XF86 and Xorg exist and we're not all still using OSI or Motif

[t0m5k1]

Given there's already over 400 contributors I'll be keeping an eye on it and will test it.

If it works and provides improvements then yea I'll happily run it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those aren't the contributors scraped from the Git history?

[Steve Graham]

I think Weigelt is even less likely to stick with something than the average solo forker. His "unusual" opinions suggest that he might just get angry about something else and go off at a tangent.

[Liam Proven]

> His "unusual" opinions suggest that he might just get angry about something else

This is one of my main concerns.

[Alan Brown]

"is anyone going to actual risk using this project?"

After what happened with Reiserfs, most FOSS people steer well clear of conspiracy nutters

[LBJsPNS]

Superior my ass

I have seen in my many many years in technology a lot of individuals with some understanding of said technology claim that said understanding makes them superior intellectually, and thus superior human beings. Judging from the comments in this particular thread, at least half of them appear to be the same sexist, racist bigots as anyone else, only with a little tech knowledge and extremely limited social skills.The developers of this project would seem to be the same kind of bigoted assholes.

[Smirnov]

Re: Superior my ass

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

― Isaac Asimov

"The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject"

— Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (AD 121 - 180)

[Tron]

When the culture wars pop up, regardless of which side is posturing...

...just walk away. Let them get on with it.

[Alan Brown]

Looking at the README

I have some advice: "Shiny side out"

[cjcox]

In a way, you want this to succeed, but, highly unlikely

An X Server without applications isn't much. Application developers are actively moving away from X Sure, in this state of transition, things like XWayland are hit pretty well, but I fear that down the road, XLibre will become desperate for client apps. The old days being... the old days.

[A Non e-mouse]

I came here expecting some "passionate" comments. I was not disappointed! It makes me shed a tear for the Moderatrix... (Am I showing my age?)

[fche]

"We deplore anti-vaxxer and other anti-science disinformation. Vaccines don't cause autism; they cause adults. Climate change is real, social justice is a good thing, and we are enthusiastically in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion."

That's ok, you might grow out of that stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

DEI is not DEI anymore

DEI is not DEI anymore. Neither is Code-of-Conduct. While they originally were well meaning, they've evolved into two very specific problems.

The first problem is that these open source projects aren't about code anymore. When it was about code, people understood that free speech went right up there as a principal to free code. There was no difference between free speech and free code. Linus is free to fly a finger at nvidia just as much as anyone else is free to write an open source driver for nvidia. The restriction of free speech with code-of-conduct and DEI programs means we're trading free code away for political correctness. What happens when a company doesn't want to participate in open source anymore because someone was rude? What if everyone stopped developing for Linux because Linus violated a code-of-conduct? I think people are starting to realize that we have to tolerate expression if we're going to tolerate expression (be it code, or speech). You don't have to be friends with Linus if you don't like him - you're free to simply appreciate his efforts and the fruits of his labors. This applies to anyone else writing software too.

The second problem is the Code-of-Conduct and DEI programs have been weaponized by companies against the adoption of forks and open source software. RedHat, for example, does this _constantly_ with their kubernetes and container runtime spec. The goal is to make their stuff work well _at the expense of everyone else_. And they do this with making boards, and making foundations, and making codes-of-conduct and DEI sorts of things so that they can clutch their pearls and kick people off projects who don't toe that line. Anyone who has tried to run openshift recently and add it to their existing managed K8s environment surely has run across the weirdness which RedHat injects. Why? To sell you more openshift, of course.

[Liam Proven]

Re: DEI is not DEI anymore

> While they originally were well meaning, they've evolved into two very specific problems.

[[citiation needed]]

If this is real, prove it.

If you can't prove it, shut up.

Meantime, although I don't believe you, I think this anti-anti-nastiness school of thought, deranged as it is, might work to attract people to the project, and that's a good thing setting aside value judgements.

[Josesk Volpe]

Re: DEI is not DEI anymore

I can agree that code-of-conducts have been weaponized both by corporations or by some people, and that it is leading to the repression to speech and personal opinions. But it doesn't help the fact aswell many people criticizing CoCs are solely criticizing the things CoCs originally tries to prevent. Look at the Hyprland example, it has a entire unwelcoming community, if you're a trans person you may either get your code rejected because of "politics/pro-DEI code" or you'll get constantly harassed in their discussions lists or chat, and it's owner is the same that claims discrimination to his ban on Free Desktop. I agree his ban on Free Desktop was unfair, despite his really ugly racist statements, but he was banned due to statements on his Discord server, this in no way should be considered a CoC violation since it wasn't in FD's environment and wasn't targeting someone in FD's development, and i think no-one should be denied all code contributions. But notice here there's some sort of hypocrisy.

I feel the XLibre case is just a similar one. He's right about the corporate control and intent to proprietarize free software. But he doesn't seems to me to be someone who want code to be community-driven and wished people weren't banned for saying bullshit about vaccines in their pages, or to have many many people boycotting a whole project, full with contributors with diverse opinions, because a contributor is "problematic", but he seems to be just someone who wanted that FOSS communities would adopt anti-vaccine rethorics, letting people attend present conferences without protection in the middle of a pandemic, and clean itself from any "DEI" stuff - that's, simply, ie, accessibility efforts.

They're not worried about free speech and free code, they're just (look the irony) weaponizing the cause for their agenda. They claim to be against discrimination, but in their concept, discrimination is, in example, lectures attempting to give female contribution visibility in their own community of many that thinks women can't code, and they want the community to not have such lectures. Not saying this is the exact case of XLibre, but it's the feeling i got with such projects after reading their README.

I personally would have no issue in contributing and participating to a FOSS project whose creator has such problematic views... Really. I even got friends that would made me get cancelled by my very political spectrum, by simply having them as friends. Thing is, projects like this only seems to be made just FOR that, they were made for such "political" activism (which is just a bubble in the very culture wars), and i have the feeling in long run they'll have a very unwelcoming environment, too, the same environment they claim to be against.

[Fara82Light]

Scenarios benefiting from X Window system

Are there any specific platform architectures that benefit or even depend on the capabilities of the X Window system?

[mibj01]

Forking is violence. Independence is extremism...

...Legacy compatibility is a moral failing. Welcome to The Register, 2025 edition!

Apparently, the only thing more dangerous than questioning Wayland’s readiness is committing the cardinal sin of forking X11 while not genuflecting to the DEI overlords. Enter Xlibre — not just a technical fork, but, if you believe this article, a heresy.

Let’s break this journalistic masterpiece down:

* Mentions accessibility — but only after a performative loyalty oath to the Church of Approved Opinions.

* Admits Wayland is still garbage for basic user needs — but blames older people for noticing.

* Quotes README snippets out of context — because we’re apparently at the “denunciation by implication” stage of open source reporting.

* And yes, tars a developer’s technical fork with unrelated medical and political baggage from four years ago. Because that’s clearly relevant to window compositing performance.

But the best part?

Acknowledging that Wayland is still worse than X11 for accessibility, while attacking the one guy who’s trying to do something about it. Because diversity is important — unless it includes diversity of approach, perspective, or god forbid, forking.

So here’s the plot twist:

Maybe forking X11 is the most open-source thing left in this industry.

[DuncanLarge]

Not trivial

> superficially trivial as the protocols that handle displaying Unix computers' graphical user interfaces

Um, the difference between X.org/X11 and Wayland are not "protocols! and far from trivial.

Wayland moves responsibility about, putting too much responsibility for rendering onto the window manager. Way too much. This is because Wayland is a specification, not an implemented solution.

X11 however is an implemented solution, it is however full of cruft, but basically its no different than OpenSSL. OpenSSL still exists and everyone relies on it, LibreSSL is a drop in replacement for OpenSSL which being a complete fresh project does THE SAME TASKS only with cleaner code. It is a alternative to OpenSSL, and you dont have to learn a new language, or emigrate to Mars to be able to use it. Because it works the same way, you can just drop it in.

Wayland attempts to do that between window managers. But, it totally fails to handle many use cases.

First of all, Wayland has no concept of networking. None. Thus it is more stuck in the past vs X11 as it has no network transparency.

Normal plebs running GIMP dont use X11's networking capabilities. Buy enterprise does. And it so much a useful feature that WIndows 10/11 implemented a layer for WSL2 to allow X forwarding over SSH. Now why the HELL would Microsoft implement that unless people were asking, BEGGING for it?

The Wayland develops however think that the solution is to go back to 2001 and use RDP or god forbid: VNC! :O

Remote desktops? Are they kidding?? No. Here where I work we have windows machines where I have to use RDP to open a massive oversized window showing a whole desktop environment just to edit GPO on a domain controller. IT's clunky and old fashioned. The windows doesnt fit my screen, resulting in me scrolling scrollbars about to use a desktop? I mean WTH it's 2025 and I'm using remote desktops still. But its windows, so its "just what we have to do".

But I, in IT, and the designers, the coders and programmers here where I work, expect to SSH onto a linux box and FORWARD X GUI's. WE DONT USE REMOTE DESKTOPS. Nobody here thinks they want to, they hate the idea. They groan if nedit wont appear on THEIR DESKTOP. The only annoying thing is we have to use old X11 software for windows called Xming, but thanks to WSL2 we can now uninstall that and use MS' native X client instead.

Do do network computing you need to focus on many transparencies. This is even more important in 2025 when looking at "the cloud":

1. Network transparency is increasingly important in a modern computing environment.

This means that users should ideally not have any clue or care generally of the following:

a. Where the files are on the network. UNIX like systems do this by mounting NFS etc into a single tree. Users and programs have no clue that the files are on a different server.

b. Where the programs are running. Although only Plan 9 manages to do this fully, users should not need to know where the program is running when they interact with it. UNIX like systems get most of the way there, the users SSH in and forward X11, their LOCAL input and output devices then become attached to that "display" and thus X11 programs on the remote server appear local to the user. Plan 9 can realise that FULLY, Linux cant but thanks to X11 it gets much of the way there. Users still know they are running an app on a remote machine, but it doesnt FEEL or LOOK like it.

WAYLAND BREAKS/IGNORES NETWORK TRANSPARENCY. In the cloud age where distributed computing is really starting to get off, you really think that anyone is going to VNC onto machines just to run a text editor or view a 3D model on a powerful server running blender? Well, Wayland think you should, and the thing is in 2001 this wasnt a problem either, Wayland is developed by wiondows/mac based laptop users who totally have no clue about the need to improve on X11's network transparency.

Instead they say "you can cobble something together in a Wayland compositor". Well, perhaps that will happen, lets hope that no thanks to Wayland those doing it make it a standard... Talk about re-inventing the wheel.

Other examples of transparency in a modern OS (UNIX is a modern OS, Windows isnt even if it is younger): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/books/ods/ods/node18.html

One example is, Windows STILL relies on drive letters. Windows has no unified path tree (but it can have one with NTFS mounts) so users are still required to know they have a C and a D drive and that the files are on each etc etc. The only time it makes sense is with removable storage.

Considering the attitude young developers have these days where instead of building on to of and improving the old standards to be better but still working towards the same goals, they simply throw it out as they havnt a clue and implement the crap from crap OS's they grew up with (systemD), well I bet it wont be long before there is a pust to having Linux use driver letters as well.

So welcome Xlibre! Lets hope you can toughen up X11 enough to bury the obsolete bty design Wayland system that cant even let you take a screenshot. I mean it's great to consider the security etc but c'mon, not being able to let the user snap the screen WHEN THE LOCAL USER WANTS TO is just brain dead brokenness.