The Linux X11/Wayland graphics conspiracy, for non computer geeks. TL;DR: There’s a weird conspiracy going on in Linux with how pixels are drawn, and we don’t know why yet, but corporations are acting BIZARRE. As they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The way graphics is commonly done on Linux is undergoing radical change. For over a decade X11 (we like weird names) was the standard way to draw the user interface elements on Linux. About a decade ago this all changed with a new way-of-doing-things called “wayland”. An app written in wayland is not compatible with X11. Still with me? This caused havoc in the app world. I know, because my fellow engineers at Google bitched about how wayland graphics was totally incompatible with X11 but being forced anyway. Fast forward a decade. X11 has essentially be choked to death. Red Hat (a linux maker who now is the caretaker of X11) is refusing to accept fixes for known bugs. Essentially software donations. And not just refusing one or two fixes, but over a 1000. Obviously this causes our spider senses to tingle. But let’s not jump into a conspiracy right? Well late last week that all changed. One of the prominent engineers decided to fix all the problems of X11 by: (1) forking the project and (2) accepting 1000+ bug fixes. This is all pretty standard stuff on the open source world. However there was a twist: the X11 fork would be DEI free and gone too was the toxic woke “code of conduct”. What came next is shocking: RedHat and Ubuntu went APESHIT Red hat banned the software developer from the original X11 repo. But went further with Purging 1000+ community fixes that hadn’t been merged yet. Too late though, it’s already been forked!! Ubuntu (the most popular flavor of linux) in the span of 72 hours announced that they were purging the X11 graphics driver from every future release. The amount of coordination and pressure being applied to kill this boring legacy graphics driver is absolutely bizarre, and no one knows why. But oh boy, can we speculate… Profit? Control? Surveillance? This would have been a fringe conspiracy a decade ago. Now it’s becoming clear there is some agenda in play: X11 must die and must be replaced by the wayland graphics driver. I’m sure it will become clear. We are in the age of whistleblowers and leaks. If you are a country outside the United States my advice is this: audit wayland and be hyper vigilant. It’s starting to look like wayland is some sort of intelligence backdoor/trojan horse to compromise your system.