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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Seems interesting but unfortunately might be a bit political?

> It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.

Complaining about DEI is a marker for a specific ideology. I see this and think great, a project of people who want to be allowed to "just crack jokes" but then get super defensive when they get called out on it.

It also makes me instantly suspect that their ejection from the project from which they forked had more to do with how they composed themselves rather than the fact that they were considering a fork.

If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...

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They were ejected because they submitted some seriously broken patches, which triggered kind of a panic re-review of their previous patches, which concluded that they had been careless the whole time (Chesterton's Fence type stuff).

The political stuff is just an extra bonus.

So another grifter pandering to the ultra-conservatives? Where have I seen that again?

I keep hating this but nobody has ever linked to the supposed broken packages. With how political RedHat is I would not be surprised one bit if it was completely overblown and exaggerated just so they could use it as an excuse to kick out someone who's politics they didn't like. Same thing has happened multiple times in the last few years (Hyprland is just one notable example)

They're also explicitly pro-DEI, given the next paragraph.

"It doesn't matter which country you're coming from, your political views, your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether you're furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just a boring average person. Anybody who's interested in bringing X forward is welcome."

That's Equality not Equity.

That's Inclusion

No, it's not. It's a statement opposing explicit exclusion, but that's not the same as inclusion.

EDIT to make this comment a bit more useful and productive: When people talk about "inclusion" in a DEI context, they typically mean making an active effort to include a diverse set of people. Outreach programs, looking at the community to identify things which drive away groups of people, that sort of thing. It can mean cracking down on "jokes" which make fun of some groups of people, or discussions of topics which make groups of people uncomfortable, etc.

It's a very different beast from just having a policy against explicitly disallowing contributions from people based on their group identity.

This. Inclusion for everyone who adheres to any kind of code is really just a cabal with different feathers.

"We don't care who you are, anyone can contribute to our project as long as they're good enough."

That's not diversity, nor equity , nor inclusion.

It's the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" of contributors agreement.

Good, that's the one we want. Don't tell me whether you like gravy, don't tell me your favourite colour, don't tell me about anything not related to the project unless it happens to be in a discussion totally unrelated to it. It is not that I mind knowing whether you like gravy or prefer green over red, it is just that I'd rather not have to think about whether you're in the gravy-faction or the green camp and have to tailor my communication to those preferences just in case I insult someone by stating that just like K.D. Lang [1] I can't stand gravy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXqPjx94YMg

Yet here you are sharing preferences no one asked to hear about.

[deleted]

I don't see how they are any of those things either...

Huh huh, he could have just said "PRs are welcome" then. This is a window manager, no need to be weird by being this specific.

It's an abortive attempt at parody. Could've just said "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" and we could at least enjoy the throwback.

Yo, thanks for the throwback [1] XD

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f8/Interne...

It isn't DEI. The problem with modern politics is that one side is DEI and other side is racist and they are both bad. Xlibre specifically says they are neither, and therefore it is better.

I think you're using the American right wing definition of DEI which describes a bit of a strawman. In reality, a leader establishing a rule that people aren't to be discriminated against based on e.g. race or gender, is an example of a DEI policy.

So when I said anti-DEI is a marker for a specific political ideology, it's really because it's a marker for the kind of media a person consumes, which informs the definition of DEI they're using.

Not just politically bad but I read through the authors contributions to X11 that got him banned and they were full of random renamings and irrelevant refactorings that seemed to have no reason to be there other than to look like he was changing lots of things. That’s why he was kicked out, because he kept making really technically bad pull requests, not for political reasons

I think it is good that they are free from DEI, as long as they are not racist instead (and the next paragraph after the one mentioning DEI says they are not racist, so that is good). Avoiding one does not mean you need to have the other one, even though some people seem to think that it does.

> If the dev was hoping to keep their project "apolitical," they should probably leave out the two paragraphs of politics...

That might have been a good idea, to avoid mentioning such things if they are unnecessary to do so, but now it is done. It can be changed (and maybe it should be changed), but I do not really care much if they change it or not.

Both being for or against DEI is a marker of specific ideologies. I would argue being against is less indicative because the position is more free and less driven by bias but thats just like my opinion man.

DEI = Not political

Anti-DEI = Political

That’s not a fair standard. Both are politics.

I'm not sure I agree, a DEI policy could easily be about de-politicizing a work place by e.g. cracking down on racially insensitive jokes.

Whereas anti-DEI is all about politicizing people's race or gender or whatever.

It’s literally the oldest trick in politics: Call your side the apolitical one.

I don't think it's unfortunate, I think it's inevitable. The wayland vs x11 debate always had undertones of tradition, self-determination, and collectivism. Nobody without a fringe anti-"woke" mindset would create somehing like this.

(Woah there buddy, I see that finger hovering - before downvoting, read it 2x more times and see if I'm actually agreeing with you)

The problem is:

* The people who make XFree86/Xorg, GNOME and KDE are all part of the same FreeDesktop.Org club. They have a (not so) secret plan to completely ditch X11 and replace it with the thing they've been dicking about with for 17 years: Wayland.

* Wayland's still nowhere near X11 replacement quality, and in several cases, they actually think they've done you a solid by taking away useful things X11 can do, like the ability to reliably take screenshots with third-party software, or get a reliable list of screens and pick the one you'll open on. They exhibit worrying levels of phone-brain or "platform"-brain. My computer, my rules, you dipshits.

* To ensure they achieve their goal of killing X11, the developers of Xorg are _intentionally_ going to stop supporting it, to scare you over to Wayland. "Who'll support your precious X11 if we, its own developers, abandon it? Muhahahahahaha!" they might ask.

* What they didn't count on was the batshit conspiracy theorist who'd been submitting hundreds of patches to Xorg that they'd just been ignoring. He's escaped the asylum, he's anti-woke, and he's the saviour of X11. God help us all. And if you dare take him up on his offer to keep using X11, the X11-haters club (FreeDesktop) will call you a Nazi to delegitimise you so they can move forward with their plan to kill X11.

It's a side-issue that the FreeDesktop/KDE/GNOME folks have gotten more divisive and confrontational in their politics and have no problem milking their tech projects to further their political goals. If you want someone to blame for this, blame the general increase in divisiveness that came from social media weaponising disagreement to the point the orange shitbag got elected and all the tech corps kow-towed to him. The GNOME developers have always been officious pricks who seem completely deaf to user feedback and actively fight you in the bug reports, but they haven't previously been banging on about "Nazi bars"; that's a recent development.

> What they didn't count on was the batshit conspiracy theorist who'd been submitting hundreds of patches to XFree86 that they'd just been ignoring

It's worth noting that a bunch of those patches are just straight up broken and seemingly untested.

Thus your choices for who will maintain Xorg:

* The people who made it who also want to murder it

* The crazy guy, who knows enough to be useful, but dangerous

* Yourself

None of these choices are good, and the Xorg developers know that. They're super-stoked about how much compelled Wayland adoption they're going to get.

What I see in freedesktop is a loose association of people trying to make the best libre display server ecosystem they know how to make, and they've collectively come to the conclusion that they're able to make better software by starting from scratch than by patching away at the X11 code base from the 80s. And otherwise it's just a boring standardization committee for protocols.

It sounds like you're seeing something much more sinister for some reason, and I don't understand why.

I think, rather, they've collectively come to the conclusion that brownfield development sucks and greenfield development rules. Which is true, if you're a voluntary developer. It's so much fun to play in new developments, and be involved in making history (that some other sucker will maintain in future) rather than maintaining someone else's past glories.

Unfortunately, this means for third-party developers and users that the ecosystem they've built on top of is going to get thrown away, because the first-party developers have prioritised their own fun, over the utility and effectiveness of what they built.

It did not have to be like this. The early freedesktop initiative managed to massively improve XFree86/Xorg without fundamentally throwing out X11. They threw out X11 so they do stuff like this: argue with developers that wanting to know the "primary" screen so they can open on it, is fundamentally, non-negotiably, not allowed, and fuck you for even asking for it (BTW it's standard on Windows, macOS and X11): https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...

This is what they live for. This is why X11 has to die.

GNOME has form for this. In describing the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" (CADT) development model in 2003, JWZ says:

> I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.

> It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8?

> But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again.

He managed to predict Wayland, or at least the causes of Wayland, back in 2003.

It seems like you're mixing up your dislike for some of the technical decisions made in Wayland (some of which I share, FWIW) with some weird conspiracy theory about how Freedesktop's main mission is to argue with developers.

It's more a lament. It used to be that no matter how crazy GNOME got, all GNOME-specific apps still worked in vague harmony with KDE apps, Motif apps, etc., because the common substrate was X11, and backwards-compatibility was a key concern. Coupled with FDO trying to bring more harmony and standards (XDG), times were good.

But FDO seems to have morphed into the replace-X11-with-Wayland club, or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.

I despair at how unfit Wayland is to replace X11, but the big guns are going to force its adoption anyway. People who wrote X11 applications will be compelled to rewrite all their work too, or their users will have to use them in the locked down X11 emulator that can't do anything more than Wayland lets it do, which will make some X11 applications become fundamentally useless, e.g. xwd will not capture your screen.

As an example of why I think this is bad, I'd highlight we're still seeing intense ideological fights on basic capabilities, today. We're rushing into replacement while even the basics aren't settled. IMO, people like Sebastian Wick don't feel the need to yield an inch to backwards compatibility, and Wayland to them is all about these greenfields that they get to control - by fighting on bug reports, or refusing to implement protocols. This is what we're all about to be dropped into.

> or perhaps more cynically I could say Red Hat/IBM and Canonical, who are paying the Xorg / Wayland developers, want returns on their investments sooner rather than later.

Here's the weird vague conspiracy posting again. What exactly do you think Red Hat, IBM and Canonical's desired "return on investment" is with regard to Wayland, other than just a more polished desktop that works better for most people?

Red Hat have been funding Wayland since its birth. Its main goal was not to be "more polished", but rather to ditch 30 years of backwards compatibility (which some might see as cruft), re-architect for a "modern system" (i.e. Linux-specific features), and assume it should offer better performance -- which I accept does matter, especially if you're selling OSes for laptops or tablets running on batteries. If Red Hat succeed in getting Wayland to displace X11, they gain another moat (as they already did with systemd vs initd, PulseAudio vs ALSA, and so on)

Initially, Wayland was an option, unsupported. Next step was offering Wayland as a supported option alongside X11. This is the expensive part, where their release testing and support has to cover both systems simultaneously! The sooner they ditch X11 and start saying WONTFIX to bugs and glitches, the sooner they save money!

I'm sure they're aware of just how much of the software they ship does / doesn't work with Wayland, because users file bug reports. At some point, they've decided that _this_ release is the cutover, Wayland is sufficient, e.g. there's only 20,000 open bugs against it compared to 80,000. I don't know the actual number or metrics they're using, but it worries me given how many things I know don't work for me, today which is why I use Xorg (not that I'm a paying Red Hat customer); they are not waiting for zero bugs and perfect compatibility with existing software before making it your only choice.

What do you mean by a "moat"? Surely Wayland works on non-RedHat operating systems?

Either your conspiracy theory makes absolutely no sense, or you're completely incapable of expressing it.

Snap and AppArmour work on non-Ubuntu operating systems but it's Canonical who pay for their continued development and derive the most benefit from them.

If Red Hat directly employ the main developers of Wayland and/or its most popular compositors and/or KDE/GNOME developers, they can then win customers for having better support for, and for having more access to land changes into these softwares, even if they're F/OSS adopted by other distros too.

Is your definition of "Red Hat's moat" just "things Red Hat has spent money on and made freely available to everyone"? How does that fit into any definition of a "moat"?

Who are the "main developers of Wayland"? It's a set of protocols that plenty of people contribute to; people paid by Red Hat to work on GNOME, people paid by Canonical go work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on GNOME, unaffiliated people who work on KDE, unaffiliated people who work on wlroots and sway, people paid by various companies to work on various graphics drivers, people paid by Valve to work on SteamOS, etc etc etc. It's a process driven by consensus among implementers, not a project "developed by Red Hat".

Small but a crucial correction:

By XFree86, you meant X.org.

XFree86 was the first X11 implementation used by linux distributions from 90's and 00's. Then, in mid 2000's FreeDesktop guys forked it as X.org and convinced all linux distributions to switch to it.

...(now comes the rant part)...

...only to declare X11 as old and unmaintainable and announce Wayland just a few years later.

Also note that they twisted the situation very well to their benefit as part of Wayland's PR campaign saying "X11 developers are the ones who's developing Wayland", making people believe as if they've been developing it for decades even though they've been only working on X.org for the last few years. Unfortunately this myth still persists to this day. Whole Wayland thing was actually a textbook case of CADT [0] looked retrospectively but they fooled us all masterfully at the time.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Thanks, I've changed my comments to say Xorg.

However, in that potted history, let's not forget a lot of progress and advancement that Keith Packard and the FreeDesktop.org initiative did make. Standardising on autotools/make rather than the obnoxious imake, creating fontconfig rather than requiring arcane settings and conversion software to add fonts, creating the RandR extension and supporting hotplugging monitors and autodetection; I can't remember the last time I had to add a modeline manually to a config file!

But the problem is the current Xorg developers want to kill X11, however short their tenure on it was. If they choose to leave, there aren't other Xorg developers waiting in the wings, apart from the crazy guy.

Good point on Keith Packard. He was never seemed keen on Wayland and was still suggesting improvement ideas on X11 'till 6-7 years ago.

Had nothing but problems with xorg every time I tried linux desktop. Screen tearing by default on every install was a given.

x11 is nowhere near replacement for wayland. It's great that people will maintain it themselves instead of relying on others.

What's a DEI in this context, please.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion.

So a German, thinking his work is much better than it actually is blames liberals and minorities for his failure and tries to take over the governance? Wow, that seems familiar.

The only thing familiar here is the immediate knee-jerk German -> Nazi reaction.

The developer posted literal WW2 Germany apologia on LKML.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...

Being free of DEI (et. al.) is a good thing, it is just sad that something like that is a noteworthy policy. It comes down to stating that you don't care whether contributors happen to be left- or right-handed: well, duh, of course you don't care and it would be silly to insist on having 'equal handedness representation' as a policy for a project.

A community can not care whether contributors happen to be left- or right-handed. But if the community keeps making jokes about how left-handed people are inferior, there's probably not gonna be many left-handed people in the community.

Or maybe the project's infrastructure or documentation is somehow more difficult to use for left-handed people, or assumes shared experiences that's common among right-handed people but which is foreign to most left-handed people.

And since roughly 10% of the population is left-handed, if only 2% of your community is left-handed, it could be worthwhile to ask why. Maybe that difference is due to a broader societal issue, but maybe there's something about the community that repels left-handed people. Worth investigating, no?

Ironically, X11 supports "diverse" people better than Wayland does.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...

So this is a funny example you brought up, especially in terms of a GUI related project. You know what a system like that should take into account? People with non-standard handedness! For that to happen, you may want diversity in at least your test team, and inclusivity for people with different or limited physical abilities. Because swapping the mouse buttons around or making different keyboard mappings useful and other accessibility features are often pushed by people who have some real life experience with diverse population. For good design, X should explicitly look for various ways people differ and how to include them in ways appropriate to their situation.

Nope, I do not want the UI to be tailored to left-handed people, I want it to abide by whatever standards there are so I know where to find whatever element I happen to need. I'll learn how to use the right-handed version because that is what I will be confronted with in this right-handed world. I'm in the minority and I don't expect the world to accommodate me. I'm left-handed and I will use whatever tools I can get my hands on to the fullest of my ability.

Accessibility is a different matter, not related to handedness - being left-handed is not considered to be a handicap. Adding accessibility features does not mean the team needs to include people with whatever handicap those features are tailored to though, they just need to gather enough input from people who need these features so they know what to implement. This does not mean the team should not include someone who happens to be blind (etc.), if that person is willing and able to contribute he's as welcome as anyone else.

> Nope, I do not want the UI to be tailored to left-handed people

> I'm left-handed and I will use whatever tools I can get my hands on to the fullest of my ability.

I'm not sure I can get you to look beyond what you yourself can do, but try to consider these groups: older people who will not learn precise right hand movement anymore, people with temporary or permanent right hand injury, people with no right hand, people with missing right hand fingers, etc.

And consider what do you actually lose from your side if the UI can be tailored to dominant-left-hand usage.

> but try to consider these groups: older people who will not learn precise right hand movement anymore, people with temporary or permanent right hand injury, people with no right hand, people with missing right hand fingers, etc.

Perhaps, but that does not seem to be a software issue, at least, not a software issue with the X window system itself. If you want to consider such things, it is probably more important if someone who is concerned about such things wants to design hardware specifically for such people.

Allowing you as long as you want to type something instead of adding a time limit can be helpful for such people (since having less fingers or only one hand might make it take longer to type) but it can also be helpful for any other people for whatever reason (e.g. you have to answer the telephone before continuing to type on the computer, etc).

Accessibility features are for everyone.

I am not sure that it matters; you can already remap the keyboard and mouse in X windows, and if it helps to design input devices differently for left-handed people, then that would be managed by someone else.

However, if they add the possibility to use touch-screens (although I don't like touch-screens, some people might want to use it), then considering being left-handed vs right-handed might potentially be significant when designing a GUI library or a GUI program, although even then it is not certain that it will.

Still, if something does affect the users in this way (with accessibility, which involves other things too; and accessibility is not only for people with the relevant disabilities, but is for everyone (including people with those disabilities)), then it is true that having people who use those accessibility features (and whatever other features you might add or change, even if they are not accessibility features) in the testing team is helpful, so yes, that is a case. However, it is FOSS and does not necessarily need a dedicated team for testing. They do say anyone who wants to and is able to work on it is allowed to do so, so if someone is concerned with this then hopefully they can help, too.

et al. should refer to people, not things

"It comes down to stating that you don't care whether contributors happen to be left- or right-handed: well, duh, of course you don't care and it would be silly to insist on having 'equal handedness representation' as a policy for a project."

that's how DEI works in X11?

> Complaining about DEI is a marker for a specific ideology.

Which ideology ? I find that DEI is a very ideological position specific to the America left (and to the America political situation). Not everybody wants to have to deal with it. Judging contributors just according to their contributions to the project (in general, not just code), is inherently anti-DEI because it would be about equality, not equity.

> specific to the America left (and to the America political situation)

It's not. It's not called explicitly DEI in other countries, but the ideas are in no way limited to the US.

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