It took some effort for me to get xlibre functional for myself, and with a few caveats. My first attempt failed because I forgot to deinstall or pkg remove the former xorg-server and xf86-drivers. Once I had all the old things removed, I was able to mostly install xlibre. The trouble with how things in the github readme describe the process is that by following it, you will have everything installed. There is also the small flaw with the git clone command provided, it should be "git clone https://github.com/b-aaz/xlibre-ports.git" instead. I cloned the xlibre-ports repo and did a merge request to correct it. As far as the remaining instructions, I mean that regardless of how you may choose to configure each sub-group for what it might install, the meta install will not honor it. I could have suffered through this long process of installing everything, installing things I would never need, except that a dependency for one of the esoteric video drivers failed to install.
My solution was to ignore the meta installer, to go through those sub groups instead one by one, individual by individual as needed, in order for me to get the whole set of essential ports built and installed. After I finally was sure that I had installed everything, I quit my session of FVWM3 and started it back up. It seemed like everything was working but to be sure, I rebooted, got back to a shell prompt and tried to startx. I shouldn't have been too surprised when it failed, but instead of the issues I had when I first switched to 15-stable, it turned out to be that the amdgpu driver was unable to load or with it X was unable to find a screen.
Back to the old standby I suffered recently, scfb? Actually no, because it has not been adjusted in whatever arcane ways to make it function with xlibre. I am now, until I choose to revert to xorg-server and not use xlibre, stuck with the even worse vesa driver. I am at present editing this post with bluefish after doing as much as I could to get many things adapted to the dpi vesa permits. Even after that effort, bluefish seems to have a minimum window size or I didn't discover how to squeeze it into the screen I am allowed.
When I investigated the amdgpu driver situation, I found that when I was using xorg-server, the driver was 22.0.2 but the xlibre amdgpu driver is 22.0.1 and I expect that the slightly updated version would solve my issue. Since it seems like the xlibre driver must be obtained from the xlibre-drivers repo, I cannot simply swap from one to the other with a small edit, as far as I know. For now it looks like I will be revisiting xlibre at a later date when I might have noticed the amdgpu driver modified for it is updated. The vesa driver is also much too slow to use for the one game I play most frequently, so that is another reason to go back to xorg-server for the time being.
Since that editing session, my blog post was saved in bluefish, I reverted to xorg-server, and tried many times to get the amdgpu driver to be used. I am baffled at the moment about what is wrong but surely I will eventually solve the issue. Regardless, I am now back to xorg and using the scfb driver. My various adjustments to attempt to make the desktop fit everything while using the vesa driver now permit things to fit quite nicely with scfb. I look forward to hearing more about xlibre and its future commits, future updates, and will be watching the xlibre-ports repo somewhat closely.
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I've realized after publishing the above, that if this blog post were taken by itself, you may not know that I use the -stable branch shortly after it is cut from -current, and this means I am using 15-stable right now. On my present box I have mostly tried to use just pkgs but when the one-size-fits-most defaults conflict with my desires, I build my own from ports, especially xorg-drivers. My post about scfb shows that I generally avoid it, since oddly it will deny the amdgpu driver from being used. I try to keep very current on a number of things in my github repos, particularly luanti and fvwm, but also feh and flameshot. My system has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with Radeon Vega Graphics (3800.08-MHz K8-class CPU) and 128GiB RAM.
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