Just putting this here cause I found it a good overview of a pretty confusing situation I had no prior knowledge about
Why does everything have to be a video these days ffs. What’s the tl;dr?
Cast:
- Vaxry: Hypr, Hyprland creator, contributes to wlroots and Freedesktop
- Lyude: member of X.org board, Freedesktop.org, Red Hat employee
- Drew DeVault: Sway and Hare creator, self-proclaimed Zig hater
- FDO: FreeDesktop Organisation(?)
Warning: Not lore accurate
TL:DR;
Vaxry’s Discord server for Hyprland was filled with edgy kids, calling each other LGBTQ+ related slurs - maybe they were from the community themselves, maybe it was a boy’s locker room. It was toxic.
From what Vaxry said, a trans user was misgendering his mod staff, so their pronoun was changed to “who/cares”. That was two years ago. Drew DeVault wrote a blog about it, Vaxry was pissed, shit happened. They discuss but could not come to an agreement; however there were a few changes. Vaxry apologized later about the incident, but he was not in agreement with political correctness.
Vaxry’s policy according to him is that he does not discriminate PR on the basis of people. He also created a CoC (mentioned earlier), but not many were happy about it being vague. But then, he also made a blog against inclusivity in FOSS, and calls them SJWs as a pejorative.
Vaxry lost his marbles when he got a mail from Lyude. Lyude used a Redhat mail, which was seen as unprofessional, and tried enforcing FDO’s CoC on Hyprland and other related project.
He sent back a passive-aggressive mail, which said “fuck off” in short. He also share Lyude’s toots in the blog about how Lyude supports bullying people for missing T in LGB, as a justification that Lyude tried bringing their past unnecessarily. Lyude sent another mail. Vaxry said that they don’t care, basically another formal “fuck off”. Finally, FDO yeeted Vaxry.
That’s it. Maybe I’ve missed a few details here and there. I did not read other’s blog, but Vaxrys’. And it isn’t looking good. In a way, this is also the abuse of power by Lyude, but looking at Vaxrys’ indifference, yeah, I wouldn’t have a positive attitude about that.
Source:
- How Freedesktop/RedHat harass other projects into submission
- Freedesktop/RedHat’s CoC team is worse than you thought
- Inclusive community activists are harming FOSS
Extras:
Edit: After watching Nico’s video, I’m convinced that Vaxry is a living, breathing turd. He crossed every limit. Good on him for getting banned.
I’m looking forward to when the Linux community, and society at large, has forgotten about noninclusive Transphobic assholes like this fuck.
I honestly don’t care if the work you’ve done saves the planet and proves you’re the smartest human to ever live. If Vaxry can’t understand why being sympathetic to the LGBTQ+ community by adhering to their conventions around identifying pronouns is a good thing, then he’s simply chosen to align himself with those who don’t care, i.e. Transphobic hate groups.
That’s the company he keeps now, and it might as well be who he is.
don’t care if the work you’ve done saves the planet
It’s not even that in this case. It’s a Wayland compositor not the cure for cancer. You have to be very socially tone-deaf to imagine people will overlook you being an asshole because of that. You have to be a billionaire for that to happen.
I agree, I’m just not one of those people. I’m personally very unforgiving of Nazis, Trump supporters, White Nationalists, homophobes, and transphobes, etc. etc. All the lefty wokisms right wing assholes like to dunk on you can apply to me (I don’t care, come at me bro).
And when people say, why use their products then? Like this whole boycotting of Hyprland shit. No, use Hyprland, AND make such a big deal about it on their discord server that the toxic community is shouted down. Is told THEY are not welcome. And if you lose, then you straight up call them a Transphobic right wing community. That’s what they will have become at that point. That is who they will have proven themselves to be should they be willing to turn a blind eye to hateful rhetoric.
Ignoring hate speech is endorsing hate speech. I invite anyone to prove me wrong.
I agree but what I find weird is the fact that they treat humans like this. I mean I get missgendering or refusing to call someone by their pronouns but dehumanising someone for who they are is fucked up.
Misgendering someone by mistake is just a misunderstanding. Misgendering someone on purpose is a form of hate speech or at best, willful ignorance. It is a not so subtle way of dehumanizing them in not recognizing them as who they are.
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Why would it be hate speech? I’m not doing it because I hate anyone, I just don’t have enough fucks in the bag.
You’re unwillingness to do the bare minimum of simply addressing someone by their preferred pronouns means you’re either okay with misgendering people or you intentionally want to.
If, however you mean what you say in that you don’t intend to dehumanize those who wish to be called by their preferred pronouns, then I highly suggest you find those fucks and give them.
Removed by mod
Vaxry lost his marbles when he got a mail from Lyude. Lyude used a Redhat mail, which was seen as unprofessional, and tried enforcing FDO’s CoC on Hyprland and other related project.
Given that the context was Hyprland possibly becoming a formal part of FDO, expecting Hyprland’s developers to abide by the FDO CoC in that event was a completely reasonable expectation.
So basically a cancerous organization meets a toxic community?
Awesome entertainment for hours!
*grabs popcorn*
Trying to remain unbias, the super TLDR;
- FDO decided that they didn’t like vaxry’s community and told him to fix or action will be taken against him (Banning from FDO) for violating their (FDO’s)
- Vaxry said, This is my community, It’s not an FDO project, and is not under control of FDO, Doesn’t fall under purview of FDO’s COC, I will not be bullied. And posted the interaction.
- FDO’s COC committy didn’t like that and banned vaxry from FDO.
Time for my personal bias Im not sure how I can hide this other then spoiler, but ignore it if you don’t want my very bias opinion;
spoiler
FDO for sure over stepped their bounds. FDO did wrongfully invoke their COC against hyprland’s community, Their COC is extremely clear on it’s “scope” https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeOfConduct/ under which hyprland absolutely doesn’t fall under. That being said, OFC FDO retains the right to ban anyone from their services as they please (I’ll explain why this is extremely bad below). But they invoked the COC which is extremely important here.
Vaxry absolutely acted unprofessionally in publicizing this, on the other hand, I’m really glad he did because it’s insane that FDO is attacking the hyprland community in the first place, which is an extremely self isolating community. It’s very much “what happens in the discord is a discord thing”. Outside of the discord, hyprland community is perfectly fine. I’ve not seen a single “Hyprland fan” go around shitting on anything else (granted this is hard to judge since you need to be given context of someone shitting on something, to be a hyprland fan), on the contary, I have seen many people publically shittying on vaxry on multiple forums.
FDO was in their right to ban Vaxry for publicizing the emails, but I don’t think it was a good idea at all. They essentially punished Vaxry for airing their dirty laundry. Proving him right in the end. It’s important to note, that given context, Drew’s articles on Vaxry are insanely biased against him, with the intent to drum up hate towards vaxry (going so far as to imply Vaxry would call people the N-Word when giving support to people by using extremely misleading and cherry picked context)
The original emails are best explained by vaxry himself so check out his blog.
In the end, Vaxry acted unprofessionally and got banned for it, but FDO acted equally unprofessionally, and their actions greatly overstepped the rights they had (as far as enforcing COC goes, their original email)
Now WHY is FDO banning vaxry so important? Pretty much everything that matters in terms of linux gui development is on FDO’s services. Wayland protocol discussion, Mesa, Wlroots etc. by banning vaxry from these services, he is pretty much no longer able to directly interact with the wayland community. (At least not without ban evasion or someone else acting as a proxy)
EDIT: I forgot my conclusions.
I strongly feel like FDO is using their position as the people who control linux to push their politics unto others. Hence Vaxry’s original blog post
How Freedesktop/RedHat harass other projects into submissionFrom Vaxry’s second blogpost:
However, it was brought to our attention apparently you have decided to take to posting about this to your blog.
I have full rights to do so, just like you apparently had the right to post it to your mailing list.
I didn’t dug any deeper, but it seems like Lyude also published the communication between her an Vaxry, if I understand it correctly.
What is Vaxry and FDO? Not like you can google FDO…
And Vaxry is the maintainer of the Hyprland project if I got my bearings right.
FDO is FreeDesktop dot Org, the XDG people
Vaxry is an asshole (the Hyprland maintainer)
So is the FDO person
The discord did change
it has changed and what annoys him is people taking that one incident and speaking like it happens daily
People change
Thanks! lol
Thanks. A lot of drama then. I’ve been in the discord and on github for a while and from that I can tell vaxry has a bit of a “personality”, as many good developers have. Nothing wrong with that. I like Hyprland a lot, I have been using it daily for 2 years or so and any bugs I reported got fixed really fast. In the end it is a solid project and that’s what really matters.
Let’s hope this thing blows over quickly.
Well, having read his blog for a while Drew DeVault could certainly also be described as “having a bit of a ‘personality’”. Seems communities tend to form around people who have strong opinions on many things and sometimes those opinions clash. That in itself isn’t really an issue though, mostly it becomes more of a problem the larger the scope of opinions discussed becomes as there is more potential for conflict that can not be resolved because it touches on core world view aspects of one or both people involved.
It’s extremely important to watch all points referenced, Devault very intentionally picked things that vaxry did to make it sound a lot worse then he is. That’s not to say vaxry is a saint, he sure as shit ain’t. But he is no where near as bad as drew wants people to believe. Drew has outright lied multiple times in his posts about Vaxry, and what isn’t lied abput most of the context is manipulated to make it seem way worse then it is
I’ve been in the discord and on github for a while
Oh a real life member of the hyprland community, let’s see if the rumors are true.
has a bit of a “personality”, as many good developers have. Nothing wrong with that.
Well, that’s some first-grade bigot apologia. I guess that discord really is bigot central.
Let’s hope this thing blows over quickly.
Is it because your little clubhouse is drawing too much negative attention?
You sound like you would be an awesome addition to any community really. I take it you went all in on this thing?
I’m not picking sides, defending anyone nor do I give a flying fuck about all this drama. I only shared my observations. As long as I can keep using Hyprland I’m happy. And if not, another cool tiling wm will popup. Bye!
TLDW: read all the blog posts, all the discussions and make your own opinion. I lost 15 minutes of my life and didn’t become any more informed or smarter.
I did a quick search but only found a deleted reddit post lol.
Its a video sharing his opinion on the topic. If you just wanted to know what happened he linked all of the articles…
Damn, I had no idea what a shithole the hyprland community was :c
I quite like the feel of the WM, but it seems like I’ll be moving on
It’s sad cuz the soft is good tho But I’ll be moving from it as well
and it’s too niche to have a reasonable chance of creating an active fork. but the stuff happening in their community is simply vile, and as a queer person I won’t feel comfortable to use software developed by open bigots
Same
Yet you use Javascript if you use a web browser. People need to separate personal life from the work or professional one.
Yeah, I think I might also switch from Hyprland to something like SwayFX or Plasma 6 (with Polonium for tiling, I heard it’s gotten better).
edit: welp, the background is black, system settings crashes and i have searched and searched for what this issue could be but i’m too lazy to make an actual support ticket so i’m complaining on lemmy instead.
thankfully i made a separate git branch in my config for plasma, i’ll use hyprland until i figure out how to get plasma to work properly. then i’ll configure it, if i don’t like plasma i might go back to swayfx as i said previously in my comment.
It’s a shame, I really enjoyed the look and feel of it
Thanks for pointing out SwayFX though, that looks pretty good! I hadn’t heard of it before
Wow is it this hard to not be an asshole
I absolutely love Hyprland but have no respect for Vaxry beyond his coding ability.
I really hope someone starts a good fork of it, I haven’t found another wm I like as much but I hate to be seen as supporting that awful person.
It’s FOSS, just don’t donate to the project or promote it and keep using it anyway. That’s the beauty of FOSS, the devs dumb opinions shouldn’t effect your personal use of quality tools. Imagine if you stopped using hammers just because “communism”, it’d be a pretty stupid self inflicted inconvenience.
If the project itself goes to shit and he starts using it to push his stupid agenda, then abandon it. But until then it’s completely understandable to keep using it for your personal workflow. Everyone uses GNU utilits, that doesn’t mean we agree with everything Richard Stallmen has ever said.
Hopefully Vaxry will learn and clean up his act.
nicco loves linux also apparently made a good video, I just saw this one first
It is so stupid… Why make drama instead of making linux better as a whole. A sad thing to see in general.
American culture warriors have decided that their ideology is more important - you see this a lot where their ideology’s goal becomes the “greater cause” worth sacrificing the mission: e.g. in journalism.
Oh those dang culture warriors, amiright. *shakes fist*
Unlike say you, who would never post an article about how NPR isn’t right-wing enough (lol) on a Linux forum.
I sorta agree, but the “greater cause” doesn’t exist.
Totally agree. Started with the Me-Too movement where we saw people accused and convicted without due process. It seemed to spin out of the Jian Gnomeshi acquittal.
Does this have any impact on the future viability of Hyprland as a project? Should it affect (on a technical level) whether users should start using Hyprland if they don’t already?
I literally installed it for the first time yesterday to take a look, but don’t want to get invested in something that may fizzle out…
Hyprland itself will still continue to work just fine. What it does affect is Hyprland’s ability to propose changes to FreeDesktop specifications like Wayland. Although I think only the lead dev Vaxry has been banned so potentially they could just get some other dev to do that instead.
I have seen people describing the code base to be ugly. However, the project itself looks like it will sustain. But don’t go to their discord server for support if you belong to any sort of minority group.
It always baffles me why some people can’t just fucking live and let live. If someone doesn’t appreciate your “joke”, then it should be a very clear indicator that you need to STFU, otherwise, it’s obvious you’re a dickhead.
Alright who is in the Discord and can tell us if it’s actually 4chan or not
4Chan is obv worse, as was said in the video, but the discord can be pretty obnoxious. Just a lot of humor you’d expect from the average middle-schooler.
I’ve been there for like 2 weeks in 2023 and I’d say that 4chan is way worse
I am and I got muted for 6 hours for gif reacting when the gif had the soft n word in it.
Yeah, whatever. If you don’t like the community, you leave it. Or make your own unofficial community with blackjack and hookers. As simple as that.
That’s a very low effort way of underplaying the effect of these communities on the broader FOSS communities. There is a good reason why most FOSS developers/maintainers prefer to keep their personal and unrelated politics away from their project communities. For one, unchecked bigotry in isolated communities can turn bad for the general public - for example, 4chan, kiwifarms, etc. I have heard from more than one source that community engages in hate speech and brigading against people outside the communtiy - one example is visible in this video itself. This is why laws specifying limitation to free speech exists.
Now, even if you neglect the brigading, there is still the problem of support and contribution. Hyprland is a widely used project. Many end users and developers are going to stumble into the discord server either seeking support or with intent to contribute. If they belong to any minority group, they might inadvertently expose themselves to bigotry, bullying and harassment. Now you may be compelled to label this as hyperbole and fearmongering. But this is well known, highly underplayed problem in FOSS communities with numerous examples. There are so many cases where women stopped FOSS contributions because they felt insulted and harassed. This problem is why CoCs exist in the first place.
Nobody can force others to follow CoCs. But as Brodie says, it has become very important for end users to evaluate the projects they use - to see if it is a community they want to ever interact with. Similarly, distros need to decide if they want to expose their users to such a community.
But it was the blackjack and hookers that got us into this in the first place.
Great video from brodie, Regardless of where you stand on the issue, This video is an unbiased and decent take.
I honestly, but respectfully, disagree.
Brodie has been playing the apologist lately, and finding himself on the defensive when Nicco criticized Brodie for giving a floor to Lunduk, who is another example of a toxic individual within the Linux community. Brodie basically has played the card , “I’ll hear out anybody because it’s important to get both sides of the story.”
But imho it shows he lacks spine to take a real stand. I get why, he needs to retain his audience which is a mix of people from different political and social backgrounds. I just don’t respect it.
This latest video of his shows exactly his own reasoning. He says something along the lines of, if you take a position, you’re going to lose a lot of your audience. He was talking specifically about the FDO iirc, but he might as well have been talking about himself.
I do have some sympathy for Brodie, I’ve been following him from almost his first video when he was still in Uni showing off his BSPWM configs, etc. And I don’t think he ever thought his channel would become politicized nor do I think he ever wanted to address his own political leanings on his channel. But in my own life I’ve just noticed you can’t avoid that, even in a public platform. Everything is political, and if you don’t show people who you stand with, (like solidly, on one side or the other, you CANNOT have it both ways) then you just are saying you’ll sit on the sidelines while the people you’re supposedly advocating for (the Linux community) burn from within.
Until he’s willing to have Danielle Fore (Trans Developer on the Elementary OS Distro) on his Tech Over Tea Podcast, I’m going to say he’s giving a lot more attention and positive exposure to toxic people than not. And he’s not exactly actually on Both Sides, like he wants us all to believe.
The vast majority of both-sideism is done by reactionaries trying to hide their reactionary politics from their audience. There’s absolutely nothing about him that indicates he’s anything but a generic techbro with the politics of a generic techbro. Just skimming the comment section of his Youtube video just has the usual people whining about politics, which is rich considering that FLOSS has always been political no matter how much the OS part of FLOSS try to pretend that it isn’t so.
Exactly. His channel used to cover interesting command line tools, configuration instructions, explanations on technical topics, but my guess is that those subjects don’t please the YT algorithm enough, and he probably noticed the more he covered Drama that takes place within the Linux ecosystem, the more engagement he got with his content.
Which is fine, but firstly, he’s obviously pretending he hates the very drama he’s engaging in, which is disingenuous. And secondly, he’s playing the apologist for those spewing hate, constantly saying he “sees both sides of the argument”.
To which I’ll always point out, “I see you hearing out the perpetrators of the hate speech, Brodie, when are you going to hear out the victims of that hate? Where is the OTHER side?”
But yeah, he is just repeatedly revealing his lack of a spine, lack of integrity, and most pathetic of all, his lack of genuine empathy.
But imho it shows he lacks spine to take a real stand. I get why, he needs to retain his audience which is a mix of people from different political and social backgrounds. I just don’t respect it.
I really don’t think he should take a stand, This is why I actually like him a lot more then pretty much any other linux youtuber. With him I don’t need to worry about removed distro takes, stupid drama takes. Just information.
Until he’s willing to have Danielle Fore (Trans Developer on the Elementary OS Distro) on his Tech Over Tea Podcast, I’m going to say he’s giving a lot more attention and positive exposure to toxic people than not. And he’s not exactly actually on Both Sides, like he wants us all to believe.
Im not sure who that is, Was there some kind of drama involved here? It never made it across my feed personally and being honest, due to my recent findings of new time, I’m partially suffering terminally online syndrome. Not to sound demeaning, but I genuinely have no idea who Danielle Fore is outside of the small tidbit you just brought up. Can you tell me more about them?
I really don’t think he should take a stand, This is why I actually like him a lot more then pretty much any other linux youtuber. With him I don’t need to worry about removed distro takes, stupid drama takes. Just information.
That’s fair. I just don’t see this as stupid drama. If someone is being a hateful bigot, and that is not an opinion it is simply a fact here, then that is the information Brodie should report, using rhetoric that reflects that. From my point of view, Brodie is either avoiding the certain left leaning politics because he’s actually right wing, or he’s too afraid to admit he’s left wing because he’ll lose a good chunk of his audience. Either way he’s lost my respect.
Im not sure who that is, Was there some kind of drama involved here? It never made it across my feed personally and being honest, due to my recent findings of new time, I’m partially suffering terminally online syndrome. Not to sound demeaning, but I genuinely have no idea who Danielle Fore is outside of the small tidbit you just brought up. Can you tell me more about them?
Danielle Fore is a lead UX/UI developer on the Elementary OS Distro who has documented her transition on Mastodon. She fields both technical and sociopolitical questions on her Mastodon account. She recently received some attention due to SwitchedToLinux spouting anti Trans rhetoric on his channel specifically referencing her, with both Trafotin and Nicco responding very negatively against SwitchedToLinux for that.
Her technical chops are up there with the best of them, especially when you consider ElementaryOS being known for their clean UX/UI design. If Brodie wants to truly take the mantle of an unbiased information only Linux influencer, then he should be covering the facts across the board, including her or at least someone who can speak from experience on the more than occasional occurrences of misogyny and transphobia that crops up in the Linux community.
Unlike Trafotin and Nicco, Brodie has chosen to handwave away this serious problem as drama while continuing to give a platform to those that are the toxic perpetrators of said rhetoric. All I ask is where is he platforming those who offer up counterarguments? People who are going to call it out for the toxicity it is? No? Nobody… Guess that speaks to the company he’s willing to keep and the company he’s not willing to. And honestly that doesn’t appear to be unbiased and willing to hear both sides. And it’s not even just presenting the facts. It’s hand picking them.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=Lm3gLwyjawQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
why do we need to drop hyprland over the lead dev’s views, they are pretty bad, but its an open source project, and I joined the discord server and didn’t immediately see any issues. vaxry even made a point of saying that they will accept PRs as long as they are good quality, regardless of personal views.
Who is that guy and why would he have the authority to demand a talk? From the looks of the thumbnail alone he seems to be super full of himself.
“we need to talk” is just a phrase, he’s not demanding from anyone
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