Not the person you're replying to, but years ago Metux used to send PRs to a different project that I maintain. He was difficult to work with, insisted that his way was the right way when I wanted something else, and his code quality was usually middling at best. Some of his PRs were of the annoying "tidy this up" form, where it felt like someone who just wanted more commits in a repo and lines in `git blame`.

I hope his xlibre project is successful, but my opinion of the project is certainly tainted by my past interactions with him.

I don't doubt you. I think it's a good way to look at it. I appreciate what he's trying to do with Xlibre but I would never work in that environment with or without him.

As I said to the other guy I just hope this is better than what we have and I'll take about anything at this rate. I don't care to deal with people on that level anymore, which is why I stopped developing OSS over 10 years ago; everyone has their opinions about the code, if they can't solve that they fight over politics to "justify" forking and the downward spiral ever goes downward.

That's quite a disingenuous response to something I said with citations and no direct stated opinions on the person.

Be better

> Be better

What year are we in?

...Did we suddenly abandon bettering ourselves in 2026?

The "be better" comment was used exclusively by the worst people i knew for 4 years straight. So for me, absolutely.

It's condescending, unnecessary, and it is a polarizing comment people who are miserable leave to annoy the rest of us.

Sorry that self-improvement hurts you so

Sorry that you are incapable of seeing how others perceive you

Citations from people who want the whole platform die. (Actually they get paid for that, it's their dayjob to kill X11, but it can be their personal belief as well)

Yep, it is important to remember Metux was a sole guy supporting Xorg for many years while everybody else outright refused to touch the codebase. Then they blamed Metux for "breaking compatibility." While this sounds like a plausible reason, long time Linux users could recall that every major X release broke something in one way or another. It's just how it is, there is no way around it. They blamed Metux for doing something that cannot be avoided while maintaining the project, and claimed that Xorg must burn.

They also claimed features like namespaces would be impossible to implement in Xorg, which was later proven false as Xlibre brought XNamespaces -- as well as HDR and seat management. :)

I'm personally a Wayland user because I have AMD iGPU and use whatever comes by default, but I couldn't imagine Nvidia users having the same experience as me, even with their new drivers. I know it sucks because I used to own Nvidia. Removing Xorg while Nvidia users make up the majority is insane.

IIRC they blamed Metux for unnecessarily breaking BC, e.g. renaming & moving around symbols when it wasn't necessary and didn't improve features or fix bugs.

When you're working on something this foundational, BC breaks should always have a good reason, and he repeatedly didn't give any. This causes churn for all downstream consumers.

> It's just how it is, there is no way around it.

There literally is a way around it: not doing unnecessary BC breaks.

What applications?

> Ah yes, [...] some nothing burger about Metux pushing code that could break things.

Not could break, did break. Multiple times. When a contributor repeatedly submits broken and untested PRs, the correct solution isn't to let him keep trying as often as he wants.

idk man, it seems like a bunch of glass houses.

In context if you read what I said I didn't imply Metux was the best out there; I was highlighting how absolutely terrible Wayland is and how I will take anything at this point.

You can do that without misrepresenting the issues that got him banned. This happens almost every time there's a discussion on Xorg-related stuff, and I'm tired of seeing the maintainers getting slandered over and over.

So, here are a few direct links to the comments/issues/MRs (in chronological order), some very minor stuff, some bigger. I also didn't cherrypick examples where the maintainers acted perfectly, but IMO metux is far more difficult as you can see. Note I didn't search very long, so keep looking if you want to see more before you're sure:

- Small procedural issues: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

- metux being difficult regarding work with nvidia: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/095e8ee...

- metux causes regression & it stays unaddressed for weeks, even though he was pushing on other branches: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

- metux is marking threads as resolved when comments are unaddressed: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

- metux causing unnecessary API breakage in commits marked trivial: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/176...

- metux isn't properly testing his PRs: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/work_items/179...

- metux breaking downstream again: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

None of these are terrible on their own, but IMO taken together I can't fault the maintainers at all.