Regarding The Hyprland & Vaxry Situation

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:

FDO's conduct enforcement actions regarding Vaxry

Hyprland is a toxic community

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.
- 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 submission
- From 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...
- 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.
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
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

nicco loves linux also apparently made a good video, I just saw this one first

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.

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 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.

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.

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.
- 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 retarded 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?

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.

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.

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

You know linux is really going mainstream when it's ridiculous youtube-based drama like this that's getting the most discussion here.

That power-tripping mentally ill furry should have never been given a position of enforcing crap, should just write nouveau and carry on getting paid by Red Hat.

I actually like this kind of light-hearted spirit. I dream of a future when this whole woke culture thing will be a thing of the past.

Code of Conduct enforcement team

Yeah. This sounds like a truly free and open thing.

Also called moderators elsewhere. Without those, the internet would be unusable for anyone not a cishet white Christian fundamentalist.
- That is just nonsense. Without moderators the internet would be unusable for everyone.
- Yeah but moderators are not send over by another project. Regardless of how you stand on the main issue, I don't understand the function of the freedesktop team.
- I can't wait for the rest of the world to he as online as America so we have bigotry of all creed race and sexualities.
- Moderation of illegal/forbidden content is not equal to enforcing arbitrary soft-skill based rules.
Absurd take lol. Every organization needs a code of conduct and someone to enforce it.
- Enforce it against unrelated projects not being part of said organization?
This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won't find many lowercase "l" libertarians here though.