phoenix - A modern X server written from scratch
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    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
      51·
      7 hours ago

      *sigh* Thanks, I guess. The comment is short but completely unambiguous, even in context. I was hoping to be proven wrong, but they clearly belong to the same gang.

      I just went down a 30min rabbit hole - mostly to figure out what really went down with Enrico Weigelt (metux). Chronologically, and extremely shortened:

      1. In 2021 he was spreading antivax disinfo. L Torvalds told him off
      2. Somebody else forked X to Xlibre already in 2020
      3. metux apparently took it over in 2024. That is also when he added the anti-DEI line.
      4. Only after that did Freedesktop kick him out.

      We can easily imagine what other toxic stuff he spouted to make freedesktop go down hard on him, but in his mind it’s all because “Big Tech” wants to kill X.org, and he is X.org’s knight in shining armor.

      His own spins on the narrative are sickening, petulant, and all-too-familiar. I refer you to the History.md of his fork. I found a couple of interviews, and he just repeats the same shit, down to the phrasing, notably: “The journalist who must not be named”, vaguely hinting at even more conspiracy. I guess he means Liam Proven from The Register, who wrote at least 3 articles about him and his fork.

      Here’s an excerpt from some other article, which tries to praise the project while staying neutral, but really just spells out what is really going on here:

      The README of Xlibre does not mince words. It claims that X.org has been infiltrated by “toxic elements” aligned with Big Tech. It accuses them of intentionally stalling X11 to eliminate it as competition to Wayland. And, most controversially, it declares that Xlibre is free of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—policies and the Codes of Conduct that have become standard in many modern open source projects.

      That one line sent shockwaves.

      Within 72 hours, Red Hat purged Weigelt from the X.org repositories. His GitLab account was banned. His merge requests were closed en masse. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, went further, announcing they would remove X11 (edit: I guess this means Xlibre - if not, this is unrelated to Weigelt’s tantrums) support entirely from future releases. What had begun as a technical fork became a cultural lightning rod.

      Cultural my ass.

      Thanks again; so far I had refused to get into this topic, now I know beyond any reasonable doubt that it’s bullshit.

      And BTW, I am using X.org (regular) myself. I never felt the need to switch, and I never felt the need to take part in all those Xorg/wayland discussions. But for completely unrelated, uncultural and unpolitical reasons I have recently considered switching to wayland myself.