It'd be odd indeed if we'd banned something we hadn't heard of.
After looking into it, I think what happened is that a few submissions were flagged by users, for the cromulent reason that the articles weren't very substantive.
Edit: There also seems to be an aura of flamedrama around it. I didn't look closely, so I may be wrong, but if that's true, it's another reason why HN users would (cromulently) flag it.
Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?
I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself.
That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.
I have an RTX 4060 Ti with latest drivers installed, KDE on Debian. On the login screen, I can select X11 or Wayland. Selecting X11 lets me log in fine, selecting Wayland and logging in results in a black screen and the only thing I can do to get any video out at all is switching to another TTY.
I have an RTX 4060 with latest drivers, KDE, and Arch. Wayland works perfectly for me. Maybe Debian has some outdated packages that haven't caught up yet?
Wasn't suggesting at all that you use my distro or that you can't use X11 as your solution. Debian is great and I use it for all of my servers. I'm just responding to the assertion that Wayland doesn't work with NVIDIA today, which is really only true if you are using older packages for a more stable distro. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not accurate to represent the current state of Wayland based on a distro known for using older packages.
Listen, I run Debian too. But I'm not going to get online and complain out X Y Z not working when I'm running a package from 3 years ago. Please, be for real.
You don't have to preach Debian to the choir man - I run Debian.
We're talking about very new developments here. You're running years old packages. Okay? That's not going to work.
When you're running Debian, it's expected you're going to be 3-5 years behind the Linux userspace status quo. So it's absolutely fine you're on X11. I have a desktop on Bookworm running X11 on Nvidia - works great, I love it. I also have a very, very new laptop running Tumbleweed on Wayland and kernel 6.15. X really struggles with new hardware in a way Wayland does not. For me on that computer, Wayland is better in a plethora of ways. I am a bit forced to run a very new kernel and Mesa and all that due to running bleeding edge hardware.
I've been totally breaking Linux installs trying to get Nvidia to work for 15 years now, and that's on X11. On the other hand I recently did the first OS upgrade that I've ever done successfully without breaking Nvidia and that was running Wayland.
Nvidia is just really really bad on Linux in general, so it's always a coin toss if you'll be able to boot your system after messing with their drivers, regardless of display server.
Nvidia under Linux has had a long and hard history.
For most purposes, including gaming, it is best to avoid Nvidia hardware. Using Intel for laptops and AMD for dedicated GPUs is kinda the best general approach if you are planning on using Linux.
Of course if you have a need for CUDA then Nvidia is the only game in town, but that is a different issue then Wayland support.
For a while Nvidia was fighting the Xorg/Wayland devs over GBM vs EGLStreams which has delayed Wayland support. This has to do with the API extensions that allowed Wayland to manage application output buffers.
Gnome was the only Wayland environment to try to support EGLStreams for Nvidia, but it really didn't do them any good.
A while ago Nvidia eventually switched over to GBM and EGLStreams is dead, which helped out a lot of people running non-Gnome Wayland desktops. But there are lots of problems with Nvidia drivers besides that right now.
The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
So right now if you are running Linux on your personal workstations/desktops/laptops you are essentially beta testers for whenever Enterprise Linux distros make the switch to Wayland.
> The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
What does this actually mean in terms of technology? What is Nvidia providing that works for RHEL but doesn't work for Fedora, or whatever?
Wayland is a ridiculously simple protocol: I could run it on pencil and paper. It doesn't require anything I'd describe as a "hardware backdoor". What are you on about?
> Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?
YC moderators are hiding the articles from the front page.
x11libre got 2 active discussions here according to
A highly controversial guy making controversial patches to a somewhat heated topic around these parts is going to get flagged by users too, how are you so certain it's the admins doing the hiding? Even when not flagged the score to comment ratios will drag those off the front page quickly.
Both threads devolved into politics, and that's likely the reasons why they got flagged. There's no evidence these were hidden by moderators, as opposed to because regular users flagged threads.
Having seen some of your comments on one of those threads, there's a decent chance your comments contributed to getting those posts flagged.
The [flagged] indicator on a submission usually indicates user flagging. Moderators and algorithms just quietly downweight submissions without any visible indicator. So this isn't an HN moderator position, the question to resolve is why users would flag it.
In this case, I'd have flagged them too if I saw them. The "long live" post is an aggressive tirade that reflects poorly on the author and led to a poor-quality discussion. The second is a link to a git commit history, which is weird in its own right and provides no explanation, and the context provided in the comments shows that a generally dislikable figure with extreme political views is now leading a fork of X11 that has yet to prove itself viable. So I'd probably have flagged that one too as pointless drama until proven otherwise.
It's a fork of x.org that's trying to keep actively developing it more than the x.org developers are interested in doing (because they are working on wayland and see x.org as basically obsolete). That in itself is a reasonable goal but given the person responsible for it I would not be too optimistic about it.
XLibre is a fork of Xorg X11's codebase started by a developer who got kicked out of the Xorg project because he was making lots of changes that broke everything and had a hard time getting along with the other devs.
Another dev blindly applied his MRs assuming he had tested stuff before submitting the request and they had to go back and revert a bunch of stuff.
Broke nvidia compatibility, broke xrandr extension, and a bunch of other stuff.
This is false, he we the sole person submitting large amounts of code for about a year and was widely praised, until he forked and red hat went nuclear on his account for opposing their corporate goals, he was not kicked out for bad changes or anything of the sort. Trying to revise history on this is malicious.
The people like OA are spreading misinformation because the developer stated everyone was welcome to contribute and would oppose excessive politics. Keep in mind red hat is currently getting sued 3x over for blatantly racist policies which they used to ban other contributors and forced on their managers, they are evil people.
I figured enough people just flag the submission, because they don't want to put up with the Xlibre guy's specific category of shit, or that of his inevitable hangers-on. Are they right? Are they wrong? Well, it's their decision. I've seen enough stuff I've flagged myself disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with more surprisingly reasonable discussion than I at least had predicted), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.
(Of course, admin intervention in the other direction is always a possibility, and that's fair enough too. If you want unmoderated discussion, you'll need to go somewhere else.)
> I've seen enough stuff I've flagged disappear quickly, and then reappear later (with surprisingly reasonable discussion), to suggest that the admins will retrieve any popular discussion that was unreasonably assigned to the naughty step.
That's the whole point.
The default for everything that has at least a small hater base is to disappear, until for manual reenabling by moderators. This is not community moderation, it is de-facto pre-moderation. Which, in this case has a strong bias against xlibre despite it having literally nothing wrong with it (like the other stuff reappearing). It's gross censure (for the sake of a gross, user hostile corporate), and the moderators should be called out for it.
While I find the moderation on HN a bit heavyhanded at times:
When the originator of the XLibre fork decided to push a heavily partisan political stance right there in the README, he made a choice that ensured that the project will be controversial.
He can fix that very easily if he wants to.
As someone who detest Wayland, I would very much like to see Xlibre be sucessful, but I'm not surprised a lot of people will reflexively downvote or flag stuff about it given the circumstances.
(EDIT: Having seen some of the other stuff he's said, I'm now not convinced he can do anything to salvage this as long as he's the figure-head for this new project)
He stated everyone was welcome regardless of their race or politics. This is only a strongly political stance if you contrast it with Red Hat, whose extremist, racist and illegal discriminatory policies they implemented under the banner of DEI now has them in hot water with 3x workplace discrimination lawsuits. Honestly i don't understand how people can call xlibre political but abide by red hat's active evil.
You left out that he contrasted this with DEI. That is a strongly political stance that to a lot of us is extreme. You're not convincing anyone here. If anything being defended with rants like this is likely to make people even more unwilling to consider this project. I certainly won't touch a project that attracts this kind of defence.
I directly mentioned DEI, obviously i didn't leave it out.
If you support red hat's DEI program then you are defending systematic discrimination on the basis of race and other immutable characteristics. This is an ultimately indefensible position, and one that will come back to bite you. There is nothing extreme about this position unless you are a racist extremist yourself.
You are as a human being morally bankrupt if you're willing to touch a company with multiple active discrimination lawsuits that has shown zero remorse or policy changes, but are pretending that someone mentioning DEI is a real problem (the tool which was used to implement that illegal discrimination, which he personally had to deal with.) People have an inalienable right to defend themselves in every case.
I don't think it is a good reason or even an acceptable reason to actively censor the news about the project, and prevent people to communicate about it. While XLibre is unfortunately political at the moment, this is not an excuse for what the HN staff is doing.
You keep assuming that it's HN staff, but HN articles very often get flagged by regular users when they get political, and having seen some of the comments on one of the other articles, including some of yours, I'm not the slightest bit surprised they got flagged.
If people want Xlibre to have a shot at HN at all, those are things to fix. Making unsubstantiated claims about HN staff is not going to change anything - if anything that too is likely to attract flagging.
No, a project or a project leader having haters (just this thread there are 3 distinct people jumping in with various insults or fake news on normal questions) should not be enough for something to get censored. What kind of 'Why are you hitting yourself?' logic is that?
> You keep assuming that it's HN staff,
It's HN staff, and I've already explained it. Read back.
It's quite possible that there are just people flagging things without commenting. I do this all the time if the discussion looks particularly stupid, unproductive, bad-tempered, pointless, and so on - or some combination thereof. (I haven't done it in this case, but only because I was silly enough to comment. This thread has been quite reasonably flagged, I'd say.)
This is part of the how this particular site works. If you don't like it, that's fine, but you will have to go elsewhere to avoid it. And even if it is indeed the admins working away behind the scenes, a committee of shadowy puppetmasters directing their every move, suppression of X11 forks just one probing toothed tendril of this multi-armed octopus - well, this place was never a democracy anyway.
> It's quite possible that there are just people flagging things without commenting. I do this all the time if the discussion looks particularly stupid, unproductive, bad-tempered, pointless, and so on - or some combination thereof.
Huh? Wait, really? I never ever once considered to flag an article based on the discussion. I've flagged some articles, which I think are bad (as articles).
What's the reasoning behind doing that?
edit: hmph, probably the same reasoning as my reasons to flag, but considering the submission with comments as a whole, instead of the article.
Still, I don't think that some bad comments made by some haters should be enough to remove a good article with several separate good discussions.
edit2: the news guideline[0] is pretty clear about what is a good submission and what is not:
> Hacker News Guidelines
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
XLibre having haters that flag it, or randomly appear calling the creator jerk, arsehole, nutjob and more should not be connected for it to be hidden--according to the guidelines, that is. The only remaining option is deliberate censorship I believe.
> XLibre having haters that flag it, or randomly appear calling the creator jerk, arsehole, nutjob and more should not be connected for it to be hidden--according to the guidelines, that is. The only remaining option is deliberate censorship I believe.
You can dislike it as much as you like, but it is how HN works, and have worked, for many years, and complaining about it is not going to change that.
You have assumed it is HN staff, without evidence. I've read what you've written.
You've then further demonstrated exactly why these threads gets flagged by being hostile and making unsubstantiated allegations.
If you care about this project, the best you could do is to stop pushing this.
I'm pretty much the perfect audience for this project, and at this point not just the project leader looks like a problem, but supporters of it like you as well.
If you're intent on pushing away potential supporters, this is the way to do it.
