Artix Linux - return to XOrg from XLibre Last updated : 29/8/2026 Changelog : - 30/8/2026 (we stumbled onto Brodie Robertson's take (https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=4Ma2E_Dbt1w); credits to him for this date's changelogs) - Dug deeper onto the Artix/XLibre drama. - Off topic : Also discovered alternative X servers - yserver (https://github.com/joske/yserver) & phoenix (https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix). As far as packaging goes, only yserver (Rust/LLM) got packed in AUR at the moment of writing. - artist > Artist. - 29/8/2026 - Initial entry - Disclaimer : I'm personally aware of FreeDesktop (or Freedesktop?) shilling Wayland (and eventually ending XOrg/X11). This move is only a compromise, at least until we have a desktop environment (along with my preferred programs) whose display components aren't moving targets (like the ideal form of XLibre or whatever X11 fork it will be named (which is NOT what XLibre is right now); gtk2-ng/DTK (or GTK3, or CTK?)) and is just as easy to set up in Artix (or any other sane distros) as I do XFCE. General - Exit currently running X display instance - Enter tty (ctrl+alt+f2 or something like that) - # pacman -Syu - # pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-common xf86-input-libinput xf86-video-$chipset (refer to the amdgpu & intel sections below for $chipset and specific commands) - pacman will notify you about xorg packages conflicting with xlibre, manually approve xlibre's removal. - # reboot (in case of issues) 845G7 (amdgpu/Ryzen 5 4650U) / A475 (amdgpu/a12-9800b r7) - # pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-common xf86-input-libinput xf86-video-amdgpu T470 (intel i5-6300u / HD 520) - # pacman -S xorg-server xorg-server-common xf86-input-libinput xf86-video-intel Why XOrg & not XLibre? - I appreciate XLibre's vision on keeping X11 alive while modernizing it and keeping politics off. The only issue was its execution, which was not smooth. - Enrico Weigelt / metux (the main developer of XLibre) allegedly used AI/LLM for development without double checking them himself (according to Artist in his resignation letter). Skill issues compounded, as the LLM said. - CMTango/cmtango/callmetango (we'll stick with cmtango) (one of XLibre's main developers) went out of their way to attack Artix Linux and Artist (eventually leading to Artist resigning from Artix and the Internet). - Issues and regressions galore, perhaps from the aforementioned AI/LLM overuse. - For me, XLibre turned out to be a bit more of a blunderbuss than I thought. - An update causing my 845G7's max brightness to be its lowest brightness and scaling back one step kicking it back to max. XOrg... at least does not, for now. To note why this is an issue - turning on the 845G7 while it's charging will cause it to enter X11 at maximum brightness and require manual readjustment for ideal brightness. - For the times I've owned my T470, I thought it sucked at getting runnable framerates in Luanti. However, the current owner switched to XOrg and... got rather playable framerates in XOrg rather than the slideshow on XLibre. So it turns out it wasn't a Mesa issue, but XLibre. - No longer officially supported by Artix, following Artist's resignation (and deletion of all of his online accounts, including GitHub and the issues he opened) from Artix Linux (with the letter copied below as personal archive). Currently still packaged, but will no longer be. As such, we had to rush this out so we can smoothly transition to XOrg before we're forced to do so. - That said, the Artix side weren't particularly innocent either. The Artix side provided threads of users having issues with XLibre in response to cmtango's claims of Artist skimping his responsibilities as Artix's XLibre representative and Nous doxxed some XLibre supporters according to Brodie Robertson. A commentator (in defense of Artix/Nous) of Brodie's video claimed the doxxed "users" were AI/LLM spambots and Nous published an IP address from a TOR exit node. - Also take these arguments with serious skepticism as I am only commenting from a guest's perspective the same way Brodie did. I also skipped mentioning SonicDE until 30/8/2026 (which Artist worked on packaging for Arch/AUR/Artix up until SonicDE got a new systemd-exclusive package that forced Artist off and started the bad blood between Artix/Artist and XLibre's cmtango). Not to mention my take isn't going to be as well-updated. - And despite FreeDesktop's Wayland shilling and whatnot, XOrg is still actively developed. Though for the foreseeable future we should look into decent X11 alternatives (or reinvent the wheel on Wayland, something I don't think I would see myself doing). Artist's resignation email/letter as posted by Nous (copied verbatim from Artix forum (https://forum.artixlinux.org/index.php/topic,10283.msg61637.html#msg61637); with no archive.org links because Artix (and/or cuckflare) blocked archive.org crawlers) From: artist To: Peer [snip] <[snip]@[snip]> Cc: Thoralf , , Subject: Re: [snip] Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2026 22:52:38 +0200 User-Agent: Betterbird (Linux) On 8/25/26 20:13, Peer [snip] wrote: > okay, have you left the artix-team or is there another reason? If yes, > may I ask why? Hi Peer, I'm also including Thoralf, Nous and Artux here as I had the privilege and pleasure to work with you all. I have to leave the Artix team. That is my own decision, to protect myself and Artix. I'll explain why. For the past year I was also member of the Xlibre and SonicDE teams, which are run by the same 3 people. I spent months of work improving both and providing them with both xlibre and sonicde in the Artix repos, and even - for the benefit of xlibre and sonicde - a separate public repo for Arch Linux and also all these packages in the Arch User Repository, AUR. I also created wikis for both xlibre and sonicde. This was too much work together with my Artix dev activities and solved that a bit by making the packages for Artix, Arch and AUR identical so maintaining these would give me less work. This 'unification' was a huge amount of work but a good investment it seemed. The 3 devs, Joseph Crowell (smokex), Enrico Weigelt (metux) and 'callmetango' (who never published his real name afaik) new about this very well, and also the fact that Artix Linux is all about keeping systemd out of Linux. Then one day they came up with a new sonicde package for the repos that was for systemd only. Knowing that would break my unification and cause me a lot of permanent work in the future. That is when I told them I would no longer maintain the sonicde packages for arch/AUR. That is when things started to change. They offered to pay me if i would contnue but I never replies to that insult.I gave them the PKGBUILD files for Arch and the AUR account I had. They promised me to make me co-maintainer but that never happened. Apart from that I was having problems with the bad quality of the xlibre code; while xorg is not perfect it is near rock solid stable. Xlibre was not and I spent a lot of work improving that by fixing bugs to keep these away from users in general and even more for Artix. I sent urgent letters to all three about the lack of xlibre quality but never received answers. That's when i decided to no longer hide the truth about xlibre's bad quality - we received many bug reports on it - and explained a few times in the Artix forum about the xlibre regressions and in those cases to use Xorg again. What I forgot to mention is that metux created huge numbers of commits using AI without checking them, but I never published that until here. When these 3 persons learned about my Xorg advices in our forum they kicked me out of the xlibre team and startd to make my - personal - life hell. The know very well I never I do not use social media but they did use theirs - they have many - and also a number of websites for a complete slander campaing to kill me off by painting a bad picture about me using a myriad of lies (I kept being informed by that by Artix users). This looks bad for Artix and is destroying my reputation, effecting my personal life as I have a family and a job in IT. To protect the reputation of Artix I have never replied to any of these accusations, which near drained all my energy and did cause me a lot of hurt. This is why I have to leave the Artix team, for their benefit and mine. The above is not a secret, but so far I have not completely explained it to anybody. If you want to, feel free to publish it. One day I will probably do this myself. [snip] Thank you all guys. I hope to speak to you again, but then from a different - independent - position.