Context: X11Libre is a fork of X11 aiming at preserving the X Server (fair enough, right?). One of the creators got permanently banned from freedesktop.org for apparently violating the Code of Conduct (no info on that, they just blame Red Hat), see themselves as hunted by both Big Tech and “toxic elements” who “took over the X11 project” They want to “make X great again”.
The issue about their highly political README (which they wrote due to the original project “becoming too political”, lol) also contains the usual red flags like transphobia. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/40
X11 was never great.
(Like seriously, it’s nothing but config files you have to edit from the local console shell and and proprietary stuff from nvidia that misbehaves, all the way down. Always has been.)
To be fair they made a lot of strides to the point where config file wrangling went from mandatory to almost never done.
But yes, Nvidia would have quirks driving people back to wrangling config file, but they got better too.
Though I’m not particularly interested in X11. The biggest thing they had was trivial application forwarding, but the architecture didn’t scale well to modern resolutions and UI design that was largely bitmaps being pushed, as well as not handling higher latency networks too well.
Some people seem to love that, as well as the total lack of any kind of access control or security. I mean, look at how many people are still arguing that “Systemd is destroying Linux”, clinging to initd with all its bash scripts and no nice way to prevent race conditions and such.
To roughly quote someone from a talk (not sure where I heard that, was about systemd as well I think):
“We nerds are very good at change when we’re the ones proposing it, but very bad when it comes from the outside.”