Regarding The Hyprland & Vaxry Situation

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.

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;

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.

Its a video sharing his opinion on the topic. If you just wanted to know what happened he linked all of the articles...

It's sad cuz the soft is good tho But I'll be moving from it as well

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"we need to talk" is just a phrase, he's not demanding from anyone

Also called moderators elsewhere. Without those, the internet would be unusable for anyone not a cishet white Christian fundamentalist.

Absurd take lol. Every organization needs a code of conduct and someone to enforce it.

This is a popular opinion outside of Lemmy. You won't find many lowercase "l" libertarians here though.