XLibre - a fork of Xorg

[GNUser]

I just saw this today:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XLibre-25.0-Released
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xserver-25.0.0.0

I hope this extends the useful life of X into the distant future. But it's also possible that it peters out after an initial wave of enthusiasm. Time will tell. I wish I could help the initiative but I know too little about graphics.

[nick65go]

If it would be a one-man orchestra then it will fail. I also hope it will not.
Maybe a better future will have if it will be split in two pieces (with maybe a common code/part):
1. XlibreX11 - for compatibility with ALL old GPU devices. The job will finish soon as no/few new devices /quirk/patches.
2. XlibreX12 - cut the old stuff compatibility, concentrate only on Actual + new GPU devices. Plus No xWayland etc.
Without a split like this, it is too much work, limit in API advances + extensions, to keep pass with innovations in GPU cores.

Anyway, for a long time from now, still will be apps using X11, but under Wayland. What matters, for users of an OS, are the applications. As long as speed is good enough, it should not matter the "insecurities" of Xorg in a container/VM, or isolated machine.

[neonix]

The Xlibre case brings out the worst in the open source community
https://en.ubunlog.com/The-XLibre-case-brings-out-the-worst-in-the-open-source-community./

[mocore]

+
https://forum.tinycorelinux.net/index.php/topic,27679.0.html - xlibre_new_xorg_fork

[Vaguiner]

It took me a while to digest the basics of X* but here's what I've discovered so far, through http://tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86_64/tcz/src/xorg/:

xorg-server_fbdev.patch
xorg-server-21.1.16-tearfree_backport-1.patch

These and, supposedly, many others are already included in XLibre.

The xlibre xserver only concerns Xorg, not X11, xlib, etc.
Compiling wasn't hard:

Code: [Select]

wget -qO- https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/archive/refs/tags/xlibre-xserver-25.0.0.7.tar.gz | tar -xz
cd xserver-xlibre-xserver-25.0.0.7/
mkdir build
cd build
CC="gcc -flto -mtune=generic -Os -pipe -fcommon" CXX="g++ -flto -mtune=generic -Os -pipe -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti -fcommon" meson --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc --libexecdir=/usr/local/lib/xorg --buildtype=plain -Dsuid_wrapper=true -Dxkb_output_dir=/var/lib/xkb -Ddefault_font_path=/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc,/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF,/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF,/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Type1,/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100pdi,/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi -Dsha1=libcrypto -Dlog_dir=/var/log -Dsystemd_logind=false -Dglamor=true ../
sudo ninja install
However, I was unable to execute it successfully. It seems that it tries to run, the screen goes black, but nothing appears. Perhaps it is necessary to recompile the video drivers?

[nick65go]

For future TC17, the stop of Xorg development/patches maybe will force use of Xlibre    to avoid Xorg "vulnerabilities" which A.I. will discover. This will be a challenge (I guess) because many applications in TC were focused to run Xvesa/Xfbdev/Xorg for smaller size storage/RAM gain. But Xlibre is not yet large tested (is work in progress) and corporate money will push Wayland development and the crowd of developers will develop for future wayland type apps (firefox, libreoffice, mpv, KDE).

Compatibility with (very) old structure could have the fate that DSL / Slax distro suffered.

[Juanito]

I wonder if it might make sense to keep Xvesa and Xfbdev, but drop the rest of x11 in favour of wayland.

With flwm-1.4 and labwc the tinycore flwm gui applets seems to work well in CorePure64.

[Vaguiner]

...wayland.

It looks promising. Without an NVIDIA graphics card, Wayland has become easier on TinyCore.


However, I find all the dependencies that are loaded hellish, not to mention being forced to load everything related to Xorg, when I could have a Wayland environment without Xorg. I think the Wayland-related packages could be restructured.

[nick65go]

Wayland without Xwayland (an extra layer to run X11 apps) is just a dream for now, because many applications still ask for X11 (ex: gnumeric). The difference between Xorg and X11 is that Xorg asks for all X11 dependencies PLUS its drivers (xf86* input/video) + its video firmware(<5-10MB). And some Xorg drivers (AMD/Nvidia) pull big size files (+ LLVM libs of 20-30MB).

Ex: if you just want a small distro (tinycore?) with only Firefox, then bad luck; it drags GTK3+deps, all X11 + video firmware + ffmpeg (for decode acceleration). Oh boy, the diff between TC/ AplineLinux and other (relative bloated) distro then becomes smaller and smaller; and if you then want some libreOffice or libreCAD or graphics/audio editing software then is game over.

[Juanito]

Wayland-only test versions were made for aarch64 and x86_64, see http://tinycorelinux.net/15w.x/

Anything that used gtk3 or gtk4 should work without any x11 libs, but I seem to recall that one or two apps had direct deps rather than via gtk3/4.

[nick65go]

"Anything that used gtk3 or gtk4 should work without any x11 libs".
Thanks Juanito! this is news for me, I am still learning (sometime bad/wrong things, it seams) using official docs (which is misleading if they are old).

[Vaguiner]

Wayland-only test versions were made for aarch64 and x86_64, see http://tinycorelinux.net/15w.x/

Hello, Juanito. This is exactly what I need right now. Is there any chance of updating to 16.1? In addition, taking advantage of this shipment, please consider using -O2 -s instead of -Os, as it is extremely beneficial for x64.

[Juanito]

"Anything that used gtk3 or gtk4 should work without any x11 libs".

Note that I’m referring to the Wayland-only versions of gtk3/4 in the test repos.

[Juanito]

This is exactly what I need right now. Is there any chance of updating to 16.1? In addition, taking advantage of this shipment, please consider using -O2 -s instead of -Os, as it is extremely beneficial for x64.

Maybe you could try the 15w.x version first to see if you like it (labwc-config will set up the tinycore menus)?

[Vaguiner]

This is exactly what I need right now. Is there any chance of updating to 16.1? In addition, taking advantage of this shipment, please consider using -O2 -s instead of -Os, as it is extremely beneficial for x64.

Maybe you could try the 15w.x version first to see if you like it (labwc-config will set up the tinycore menus)?

Worked: Firefox

I couldn't run any terminal.
Foot says: err: main.c:436: setlocale() failed