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[arch-announce] Plasma 6.4.0 will need manual intervention if you are on X11 - Arch-announce - lists.archlinux.org
[arch-announce] Plasma 6.4.0 will need manual intervention if you are on X11 - Arch-announce - lists.archlinux.org
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it wouldn't be ok to install plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11 for every one using Plasma
Why not, it was so before the change. But it is okay to break all systems by default which use x11? Pretty poor choice IMHO.
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Yes, it's ok for Arch to break things. As their Wiki describes, it's for "the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems." You're expected to follow Arch Linux news to watch out for things that require user intervention to avoid breakages.
It isn't Ubuntu or Fedora who try to make a system accessible to everyone.
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It's not OK. It's a Milquetoast way of further harming X11 users without having users abandon the DE wholesale.
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As far as I understand it, it's more of a push to wayland by default and not about harming x11 users. I for one would like to avoid having kwin-x11 pushed to my system.
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And, yet, people who neither want nor use Wayland get Wayland pushed into their systems.
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Plasma/KDE decided it should be the default a long time ago and the X11 session has been in maintenance mode ever since.
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https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
There has been a fork recently (by a controversial figure tbh) but you can probably go use that with a DE that has it as the default, then you won't get pushed into anything.
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Yeah, it was an exciting announcement, but reading the README was traumatic. It just got worse, and worse the more you read.
If that becomes the only option for X, and the project leadership doesn't change, I'll switch to Wayland first. No good can come from a person with their attitude.
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The author seems outright delusional. The continuing deprecation of X11 doesn't even vaguely resemble EEE at the surface level. Also, it figures that they'd take the time to bitch about DEI out of nowhere.
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Jesus Christ that README just kept getting worse. Hard pass on that.
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I've read that Xlibre is a fork of Xorg that would still get new features, so I did not know much about it. I use Wayland, as it works better for me, but after reading the readme, I somehow want to use it even less.
This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.
How is it EEE? A point about embracing could be made, but wouldn't there have to be extension with non-FOSS code or difficult to implement additions to standards? Even then, as it's hosted on GitHub of all places, it doesn't seem to be that extinguished.
Right after journalists first began covering the planned fork Xlibre, on June 6th 2025, Redhat employees started a purge on the Xlibre founder's GitLab account on freedesktop.org: deleted the git repo, tickets, merge requests, etc, and so fired the shot that the whole world heard.
I haven't heard about this, but I would guess that it's from a CoC violation, based on the rest of the readme.
This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed.
Calling DEI discriminatory is never a good sign.
Together we'll make X great again!
This seems pretty close to a certain right-wing slogan from the USA. I don't know if it's accidental or a joke, but I don't think that it's appropriate, and like the author, I don't have much good faith left for this.
A lot of commits by the Xlibre developer were reverted upstream and the readme does not look professional.
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Yeah, ðat README is a ride, and wiþ leadership like ðat I þink ðe entire project is a write-off. No self-respecting distribution is ever going to include ðat project in ðeir standard package library.
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It seems that KDE does not plan on supporting Xlibre, though it may still work.
It makes sense that they would not support it. Their goal is to move to Wayland, not to support yet another thing.
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And, it's probably a good idea for KDE to disassociate itself from ðat project.
Ðe KDE þing is a red herring for me; I don't use it. Now, if herbstluftwm switches to Wayland, I'll probably switch too. But according to the repos, ðere are no plans to do so.
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There have been manual interventions required for a lot of things.
Why did you not see conspiracy theories when they broke something java related for example?
Because thats how it works with arch, shit can not be resolved nicely when everything changes all the time, so you have to do an intervention and they tell you what to do and you just do it and then it just works. So stop being a delusional nut, nobody cares about you using whichever package.
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Oh No! I have to install a package!
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If only. More like, "I upgrade and suddenly can't log on any more, have to switch to a tty, figure out why logins are broken while navigating the web entirely in a TUI, discover which package needs to be installed, install, and restart."
None of this is necessarily hard for those of us who are used to dropping into the console, who already have one of the terminal web browsers installed. It's no issue for me, because I don't use KDE or Gnome.
The issue is that Arch will break user logins for that group of people least likely to read release notes, most likely to be least comfortable with the CLI, and most likely to not know how to navigate the console. It's the most harmful to the group least equipped to fix it.
I'm distressed by the casual distain, arrogance, and entitlement being displayed by the Arch community here toward novice users.
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That's what the Arch news is for, it's not like it wasn't publicised. Arch often needs manual intervention and reading the news before updating makes it easy as they tell you exactly what to do.
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Arch is not for novice users.
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And yet, there are several distributions based on Arch designed to ease Arch installation and usage. Installing EndeavourOS is hardly any more work than installing Mint. If you're using KDE, and install
bauh, you can use Arch and barely be aware that it's supposed to be a snooty, technical distribution.The distro leaders can do whatever they want. I think it's a bad decision by Arch - I call bullshit on the "we can't detect" statement, because you can absolutely test for whether X is installed in a PKGBUILD - and as a community contributor, I object to it. It's intentionally exclusionary and at a time when many people still have issues with Wayland being incomplete and outright broken for some cases.
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If you run Arch you've got read the news, if you run dubious Arch derivatives, well, good luck to you
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Derivatives still have access to news. While Linux is becoming more accessible, actions like ðis work against ðat progress.
Rolling distros are superior. Ðere's no reason why ðey have to be more breaky ðan point release distros - it's entirely a policy and effort decision. Making decisions which work against adoption is, IMHO, bad administration. Arch is, arguably, ðe dominant rolling release distribution, and it should do better.
(Ðe letters þorn and eþ brought to you by ðe Human Resistance)
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I mean, the fix is installing one extra package, and since Arch users are expected to read the news, I wouldn't call it exclusionary. It's not like you can't still use X.
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If you are using arch and do not subscribe to the rss feed, then it is on you. As described here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Upgrading_the_system
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If you have to resort to browsing the web with a TUI every time you're dropped into a tty then you really should think about using a different distro. When I was using it I didn't take my laptop anywhere without having a live disk with a bunch of distros on me as well.
Also, Arch is very well known for requiring manual interventions in various scenarios and it's really not for users who aren't at least somewhat comfortable in a terminal. That's not to gatekeep; it just genuinely doesn't make much sense for someone like that compared to a more "on rails" distro. If they choose to use Arch then that's their prerogative, but it's not the distro's responsibility to hold their hand when the express expectation is that users keep up with distro news and are capable of administrating their own system.
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If you have to resort to browsing the web with a TUI every time you're dropped into a tty then you really should think about using a different distro.
That's a weird statement. Why? I browse the web frequently from terminals and the console. If you need a GUI so badly you have to boot from a live USB to answer questions, that's you. I use live USBs on the rare occasion I screw up my boot loader, like when I swapped hard drives and didn't catch all of the places device block IDs are referenced in the boot process.
Anyway, it's weird to argue both that Arch Linux users should be expert shell users, but also that they should use a different distro if they're capable of using Linux entirely without a GUI.
Several Arch-based distros are blurring the line between the self-rarified progenators of the "I use Arch, BTW" meme and non-technical users, by making it easier to install and maintain Arch. I absolutely agree that what these forks do is not the responsibility of core Arch, but I do expect a modicum of effort, the bare consideration to not intentionally making things harder for users than they need to be; to avoid actively breaking systems, where they can.
A release note is a sloppy answer when it's almost trivial to avoid causing the breakage in the first place.
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Arch is simple famously because it's the "know your system" distro.
Also, I'm fairly sure the novice user would have a secondary or mobile device.
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30 comments