Hyprland BANNED from FreeDesktop: Why. 

Using Discord as a communication channel is the real crime here.

This is informative, and unfortunate -Louis Rossmann

It's a shame that it's turned out this way. Community moderation absolutely matters when collaborating on software.

every time i see someone talk about people being "too soft" they always end up crying about being excluded from spaces for toxicity

The only thing that bothers me about this is the moderator changing the user's pronouns. It is fine to say we would not have a code of conduct because it is too much work. But changing someone's pronoun is an active action to offend people.

"everyone can moderate their communities however they want....just not freedesktop apparently"

11:42 Ehm, using a company email automatically means that you at least partially represent that company. If you do non-work related things with a company email, don't (at least not without explicit consent from your employer). It doesn't matter if your employer agrees or disagrees with whatever you used it for. You used it for something you were not supposed to and you had a public stance in a way which makes it seems like you represent that company. You can very easily get fired for that.

Here's to the truly 'first' people who were here to see the entire squad, vaxry included, enter the live chat for this one.

For those who don't want to use hyprland, ragnar wm is advertised as a xorg alternative for it, or just use whatever you want, you don't have to take away others choices for they use because of what happened in a discord

Yup. You're free to be disrespectful. Others are also free to not welcome you. It's as simple.

This video earned you a new patreon subscriber

Thank you for a clear and detailed summary. I really appreciate it

Vaxry is young and skilled, yet socially inept and raised off 4chan. He is a very unfortunate person to be in charge of such a great project, and I hope he's capable of change.

I think Vaxry is pretty difficult person and I personally wouldn’t want to be on their discord. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to ban someone from a project where they complied to all rules (and had a positive impact on that project by contributing code) because of how they moderate their discord server. That’s like imprisoning someone in Europe because they own guns in America.

I just switched to Hyprland 2 days ago 😭 I'll probably keep using it, but just stay away from the community. Shame about the community though.

It seems being a hyprland user is the same as being a tesla driver: it has good stuff, but the guy behind it has some uncomfortable skeletons that would require a lot of downplaying and mental gymnastics to defend the dude. As a result, you quietly enjoy your product and hope you won't have to justify yourself for giving capital to that person.

As a person that use Hyprland and was around that Discord I just think it boils down to two things : Using Discord and the too young age of the people of BOTH SIDES. Yes, Vaxerski and his goons end up on the wrong side because they are the biggots, I'm not arguing against that. But the Hyprland "core" community, which were/are mainly teenage shut-ins, deserved a bit more pedagogy IMO. They were quite young linux enthusiasts that built a social community around what should have just been a development cooperation hub and were exposed to tough issues to handle (especially at their age), issues brought up by people that frankly critically failed at applying before-mentioned pedagogy... Add the elitist toxicity of a group of young talented dev's and god-only-knows what kind of previous culture they might have. They were progressively ostracized over the last two years and I don't think it helps. Vaxerski specifically needed someone more mature and socially skilled to handle the community management work and definitely also teach him a thing or two about how to handle other's personal choices, but I don't think any of the critical attention and partial explanation to the issues will help making him change in anyway. And that's sad because Hyprwm is an amazing suite of software and Vaxerski a very very talented programmer.

I know you say these are "angry rants that will make me no friends whatsoever". But like, these videos existing actually make me feel much more at home in the Linux community. I can't say it has made me friends with you because I don't know you irl, and I liked your RU-vid channel anyway. But I do think making videos like this does legitimate good. I certainly wouldn't want to see the linux community get all wrapped up in right vs left nonsense, but it is really nice that there's someone with a platform helping make me more at ease here.

Hope this situation improves

12:06 It says ".. hearsay .." but I heard ".. heresy .." BURN THE WITCH! BURN THE WITCH! 🤣

Very good take. But I think the characterization of merely 'unprofessional moderation' needs a strong rebuttal. Allowing participants to harass & insult seems at least unprofessional. A moderator joining the harassment *as a participant* is certainly *very* unprofessional. But Vaxry *acted as moderator* & changed a nickname w/out consent & *that* is abuse of authority. (if Vaxry *really* didn't care he would have just said & done nothing.) I was running Windows & Linux Mint on a lap top that imploded. I've recently purchased a refurbished a Windows machine & am preparing to install Mint again. But it is disheartening to think that in order to flee a big impersonal corporate bully I might be joining a world where *very* personal bullies feel that everyone else should just "man up" in exchange for using their software. I think freedesktop's response was appropriate.

It sounds as though Vaxry needs to read up on the Paradox of Tolerance, as proposed by Karl Popper. tl;dr - if we're going to have a tolerant society, we must be absolutely and unequivocally intolerant of intolerance. If we allow that kind of thing to take hold, it quickly dominates the discourse.

Hyprland is the first thing that has made me feel I've found the DE/TWM/compositor that I won't want to hop away from. If that's what its community is like, it now makes me question whether I even want to have anything to do with it.

These videos are awesome. Keep up the good work!

It is kind of funny to me that the Linux community seems to have both lots of people on the far left and lots of people on the far right. I have no idea why this might be (perhaps people who are socially unpopular are both drawn to tech and angry at society, just a guess)

Vaxry needs a volunteer Comms/PR person.

Wow, thank you for posting this, i was pretty much completely unaware of this whole situation, kinda glad that i switched to plasma 6 recently to give it a try since i don't wanna implicitly support that kind of behaviour

"Words are just words" is highly dismissive. Words are one of the major ways we use to communicate. If they didn't matter - if they didn't carry meaning - why would we use them?

I don't like Vaxry, but I agree with him on this one; Codes of Conduct apply to conduct in relation to the project in question. By the way, getting fired over behaviour unrelated to your job is actually frowned upon unless you're _primarily_ a PR representative, and it's plain illegal in many countries. Not that it matters much, since employment is a poor analogy for participation in freedesktop, but this was a very strange claim to hear from a socialist.

This situation finally gave me the kick i needed to try Niri. It has a few big showstoppers for me - in particular, no VRR (or at least, I can't figure out how to turn it on), and it lacks rootless xwayland. Xwayland rootful mode isn't really that bad though, and in all honesty it's starting to win me over, just having a workspace dedicated to X11.

So is the CoC team actually following and enforcing the CoC by the letter or just their feelings?

i mean, it's not wrong to say that people are getting weaker, ever since twitter, people are getting more and more offended at meaningless sentences, like bruh

After being immersed in the inclusive side of the Linux community for so long, I kinda forgot about some of the socially backwards troglodytes who managed to find their way here. I really hope that Hyprland doesn't go down the wrong path.

I have one question: Is just Vaxry banned or Hyprland developers in general? If it's just Vaxry (or people who behave like that in general), I would be ok with that. If on the other hand it's a developer who didn't behave like that, but behaved respectfully inside and outside of , I wouldn't be a fan of that.

Thank you so much for this video. This "angry rant" definitely got you a new friend (or follower at least) XD I love the open source community - love the fact that it gives me choice. I'm going to exercise that choice and stay away from a shitty project run by a toxic individual. I've done the same before - wrt a couple of privacy oriented custom Android ROMs.

This was very educational.

Without going into the issue of what was said, I do have a problem with this normalization of people being thrown out of projects for what RU-vid and Twitter used to call "off-platform behavior". What he did was still on his own platform. As far as I know he did not do the same thing on the Freedesktop platforms. It used to be that as long as you behaved according to the rules where the rules were applied, you clearly knew how to respect different sets of boundaries and that was enough. In this new way of thinking then as long as you can find behavior _anywhere_ which does not comply with your rules then they should be excluded. I think this is a large part of why we're having a growing issue with polarization on the internet. The people who are now being isolated to not cease to exist, they just go somewhere else where they meet other people who have also been isolated and build this idea of being unfairly treated. When that group becomes large enough it becomes a real issue of those people against the rest, which inevitably results in an "us vs them" mentality. In other words, polarization.

It's so strange that a lot of people don't take harassment and discrimination seriously, especially when it comes to queer and neurodivergent individuals. (I include neurodivergent because of that "brain damage" message from early in the video) I especially hate the victim blaming that's done to people who experience harassment or discrimination, acting like they're the problem if they don't like it. Calling people "weak" for not wanting to be harassed or discriminated against is just shifting the blame from the abuser to the abused. But what do I know? I'm just someone who has empathy for other people.

I personally think Freedesktop banning him is not the right move. I could understand a project not wanting to work with someone owning a Discord with some notoriously terrible moderation, however as a group working towards common standards. I think the amount of crap, you should tolerate should be higher. I don't think this whole affair reaches that point. I am a firm believer in not excluding people for their believes, or lack there off and separating the art from the artist. So personally would be very reluctant to bar someone, even if I find their believes repulsive, as long as their conduct is fine in interacting with them, I have no real problem.

Imagine being so socially inept that you get triggered over someones having a bit of extra text in their username. Like, how is that even something worth spending neuron cycles on 🙄

The thing most right-wing folks don't understand about this is collaborating is a social contract not a requirement. Just like inviting someone into your home you're allowed to kick them out for any reason. If you act like a bigot or allow those communities to develop people aren't going to want to work with you. It's simple as that. FreeDesktop isn't telling Hyprland how to run Hyprland's home, they're telling them they can't come into the FreeDesktop's kitchen and start making breakfast because of some heinous stuff they seen while they (FreeDesktop) were visiting.

I think this ban was a little too extreme but I kinda get it. Using different pronouns against one's wishes is bad but it is another thing to harass someone just for having them in their username. I can see why someone would do everything to distance themselves from someone that downplays this kind of behavior.

Great video Nicco. The outro was fantastic.

Vaxry is a smart programmer, but very immature.

9:54 as i said in the other comment, thats just wrong, its not like a maybe, its just not true because of context, you can be "offensive" just because you know you are not offensive and because if you are, people is encouraged to talk about it and then they stop, its just talking shit in a non serious context, talking freely with vulgar terms for example in a closed environment where you just use it like we use "fuck" very often in vulgar context but not in formal context its like the difference between formal and informal, some things are ok to say on informal talking, but not on formal... well, the informal part is deeper, so the context is a keypoint because "fuck you" is not always with offensive intentions and its for example something sometimes said between friends, just as other "bad words", as just part of the informal/vulgar vocabulary the only problem is in my opinion with the mod who changed the prefix to who/cares, but given he was not vaxry, well, why should vaxry get all the shit and not the one who actually was the only obviously transphobic person in all of this?

Everybody should just do what they are good at. There is no need to involve any politics or religion or any ideology in the workplace that is not a political campaign. As Morgan Freeman once said, when we stop talking about racism, we truly get rid of racism.

Hyprland is really my favorite since Plasma dumped 5.27.

The fact that any toxicity can happen in a server about a DE is insane. Stop crying about people using pronouns you don't like, find something actually worth getting annoyed about

Vaxry is a skilled developer with a massive ego. He believes that the world should conform to his view and that he should not be bothered to change in order to participate with the broader community. The transphobic thing is just a small part of the overall picture. This incident is not enough to affect him in any way, he will continue as he is. This is especially true considering that there are people in the community that humor him and tell him that he did nothing wrong, enabling his behavior.

But Nicco, did you consider, at least he didn't say the n-word.

Let’s see if Brodie does a video, and if so how much he is downplaying this.

Edit: I conceed when it comes to the part of not involving politics in FOSS projects, since being open sourced is an inherently political subject. That said, I dont think one should involve certain topics into FOSS projects that have nothing to do with it, like for example religion in the kernel or something like that. When it comes to this specific subject, I personally am of the opinion that I dont have to know certain personal details about a person, especially if they dont matter to the interactions I'll have with them. If you belive yourself a woman, then introduce yourself as a woman. Unless its part of the project, I dont have to know that someone has transitioned or what their sexuality is. Personally, I tend to be agnostic when it comes to things like that and simply tag people to avoid any confusion, be it at work or privat conversations. I do not wish to be forced to use a specific language, but I'm not going to go out of my way to be disrispectful. I know I'm going to be downvoted to hell for my opinion, but I dont think stuff like politics and sexuality should be discussed in a Foss project that has nothing to do with it. Pronoun's are a none issue when you can simply address a person using their user name and there is no need to share personal information on the net about your sexuality, especially when no one asked for it. Its not a right to be called the correct pronoun or name, its a privilege. Ofcourse this doesnt mean one shouldn't extend common human curtesy to anyone we interact with IRL or online just cause you feel protected by a thin vail of anonymity. Insulting someone out of nowhere are sings of bad upbringing and in general a waste of energy, same thing with getting insulted by the comments of a random person on the net, when you can just block them. The ability to have a healthy and civil discussion on contentious topics and being able to leave in good terms is a vital skill thats severally lacking. Just cause I disagree with your stance on topics, doesnt mean I'm allowed to insult you. I dont understand why people cant get that through their head.

Banning the discussion of politics, especially LGBT makes absolute sense. It never goes well, and always ends with some massive schism in the community. Your status among, or without even, the LGBT community is irrelevant to open source. It's best to just leave it to the relevant discussion boards and servers.

I really hope he will change, I think he's in his early 20s so there's still hope for him. Would be a shame to lose such a nice project because the lead dev's immaturity.

Incredible how basic human rights and decency are equated to politics - or even require to be the topic of any discussion whatsoever. Shame about Hyprland, let's just hope Vaxry does indeed learn from this. Guess I'm sticking with KDE for a little longer then!

We're at least getting a fork of hyprcursor taken seriously, right? Like, people aren't gonna just bin the idea of having a vector based cursor because of internet drama, _...right?_

You have freedom of speech or freedom of expression. It's a dog whistle to say that you don't have those rights because you decided to discriminate against another individual over characteristics that are out of their control, that violates human rights laws in the US, Canada (CHRC and OHRC), UK , EU (ECHR), Australia, New Zealand and more. Just because you have freedom of speech or freedom of expression doesn't free you from consequences

These people really do need to go outside and learn some social skills smh...

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from its consequences. That is not only true in the United States, but it's even more true when you're working globally.

Reiteration for everyone: Freedom of speech doesnt equate the freedom to evade consequences

While they're banning people over grammar they should also get rid of anybody who writes "would of" instead of the correct "would have"

Well, that is quite biased reporting, vaxry's post where he literally exposed whole conversation with those who decided to ban him should be also covered in detail, showing vaxry's posts that are 1,5 years old and not mentioning that the other side is not "saint" either is very biased, either the author of this video didn't look into the other position, or he did that deliberately, either way it's a bad reporting.

Thank you for keeping the community informed, and for exposing the deplorable attitudes often found in this kind of online spaces

I wouldn't label these controversies "political". They are a matter of culture war. Culture war is a matter of maintaining the status quo. They do not affect the things that truly matter: economy, military spending, housing crisis, geopolitical alliances, etc.

To me it's quite sad that things had to turn this way. Some people need to learn their lessons the hard way, I just hope that Vaxry has the resilience to learn from this fiasco and get back on his feet, or the FOSS community might loose a very talented developer in the long run. I will continue to use Hyprland as I've done in the last 2 years because it's a fantastic project, I just hope to see its communty get better over time. Edit: after reading all of the documents and posts and learning about the relation between Drew and Vaxry, I came to the conclusion that both parties acted very childish, and that both should know better how to behave, considering their position. Honestly, I'm embarrassed by how this situation was managed by FDO. I do not condone what happened in the Hyprland community, nor the toxicity that still permeate to this day, but to me it is quite clear that this situation was handled quite unprofessionally to say the least, because the FDO person was too involved. To everyone involved I'd say "Grew up and start acting as adults"

Is there a fork of hyprland I could use that's mega gay? But like seriously, with the recent news about him Vaxry wanting to step away from the work load, and being quite a gross human, maybe we let him fade into irrelevance.

The thing that kinda stands out to me about this situation is that if none of the communications became public and people didn’t hear about it all first, I really don’t think anyone would’ve come to the conclusions everyone seems to be coming to here about the discord moderation and peoples behavior. I absolutely disagree with vaxry’s views on some things and think he handled a lot the situation poorly - but as someone who’s spent some time in the discord and is very much a queer ally, the events and behaviors are being blown way, way out of proportion. In fact, I’d call what Drew Devault has said about it borderline outrageous - the server does not need a “come to Jesus moment” nor is it filled with hatred and nazis.

Vaxry is gonna have to learn how to adapt to expectations as hyprland grows as a project.. i think a lot of the comments here are a bit insane tho 💀

This is bad. Politics, trans stuff should not affect future of a software program. Quality of a program should. Free desktop is going crazy.

aw man, stuff like this is always really hard to watch :c im really sorry for the victim that any of this happened to them, as a non binary person myself, i really wish so many people weren't like this :(

Welp, being a good developer doesn't mean you didn't grow up on 4chan values and knowledge, go figure

Oh well, heard good things about Sway

I'm not even a huge political/social person and I think this is messed up. You're allowed to have your opinions but just let people be, this is just making this worse for everyone.

"y'all sensitive", alright, if someone, who misgendered the person in question apologized and moved on with using correct pronouns, it would've been okay, everyone makes mistakes. But no they took it to the next level by misgendering on purpose and then have the audacity to set their nickname to have "who/cares" and then also making fun of trans people on server. That's the problem here, a completely disrespectful behavior. Using slurs is bad too. Racial slurs are not good, but why do some people think transgender slurs are fine? Btw, I never seen someone saying t-slur with no ill intentions, usually sticking with words trans or transgender, but not slur. In the context he used it is to make fun of them. about FDO actions, its their place to decide who can contribute, they don't police any other places and they based it on behavior in public. I think you can and want to close a door on someone who is yelling slurs and curses at the street if you don't like it. They did not ban them from anywhere else but their own platform. I don't see a problem with that, they done it based on actions, not anything arbitrary. Though, I would say they should've done it 2 years ago honestly, it's very late in general to do it only now.

i haven't heard of all this, but why should i care about the person's pronouns.... can they code? yes? thats the important thing as a coder.

this was the final drop, im ending usage of xdg and freedesktop, administrated by people who is ok with slowing the progress of linux just because someone is an adult able to joke about shit, and to not care about unimportant things like a word if you are offended, its not my fault, if you say it to me, ill try to stop doing it cause im no asshole, but ill say it in the first place because i didnt know you could be offended by that and offensive things can be everything, the context is the most important part, not just the word by itself, not even if its an insult, not even insults are always offensive, depending on the context the only thing i find bad about all the story is the change to who/cares, the one who did that should be banned, because is an intended disrespect summarizing, i dont find a big dial the nonintended offenses, if they are stopped whenever they are brought up, the problem is doing just offensive shit, not in a specific joke context but just straight up doing a stupid shit like changing the pronouns to who/cares, thats just so stupidly unnecessary

As a white trans person I'm not sure I'd say forcefully changing someone's pronouns to (who/cares) is less bad than using the N-word. In either case the message of not being in the slightest bit welcome is very clear. And with the inability to change it back that person is being literally branded as a disliked minority in the community. I don't want to compare harassment of trans people to people of colour, but I think he really underestimated how large of a harassment that was.

As a Christian conservative, I don’t see eye to eye with most Linux projects on politics and social culture things. That doesn’t bother me. Use the project that you like the most, who cares if the dev is disagrees with you.

I don't get people that go out of their way to hate on others about things like race, sexuality, gender, sex, politics, beliefs or even generic things a person likes. I also do not understand people who get hurt by words they see written online, if a community is harassing you just leave, there are millions of communities online that would treat you better. You can't change people in the real world, you cannot change people online.

I'm in 2 minds on the subject, on the whole I think politics should not really be included in FOSS software or its spaces. On one hand hand I definitely agree that Vaxry seems like a massive asshole when it comes to the moderation of his project and other projects don't have to interact with him if they don't want, on the other hand I have seen screenshots of Lyude actively saying that they bully people who disagree with them on LGBT issues and I also think that's wrong too. Also for clarity, the reason people are putting redhat into the mix is because they used their redhat email address to send these emails, if I used my employer email account to send emails to someone I would definitely think that would be tied to my employer. If I didn't want their clout or them to be involved I would use my personal email account. At the end of the day I think it's wrong for people to be harassed in his project, but I also think it's wrong to exclude people for wrongthink in other projects too.

Disgusting to see the online abuse that person received just for sharing their pronouns. What a load of immature harassing fools.

if he doesn't want to make an effort to run his project professionally then he can't complain getting banned from a professional project. Not to mention his recent whining about being the only dev on his project: when he pushes people away like this with transphobic, right wing BS. Good riddance. Dont care if you do good work for the open source community we have enough shitty people who ruin their communities whilst getting upset that they dont get more credit for the privilege. Kudos Niccolo, I know it cant have been easy to make this video while also not getting EXTREMELY pissed off.

Just my thoughts - he hasn't changed since the incidents from a couple of years ago. He's learned to deflect enough and whine about it. He isn't the first asshole in the Open Source Software community and this playbook is quite old now. The email he got only had words. Maybe he should grow stronger about dealing with words that form sentences and stop whining about things 🤷‍♂

"It's not like calling someone the N-word" except it literally, exactly is. you could not come up with a more perfect comparison. you're saying to this person, "shut up, you aren't allowed to be free, get back in the closet, get back in your chains." it's literally identical to calling someone the N-word. "he said he didn't know he wasn't supposed to use that term" LMAO, yeah right. he knows exactly what he's doing.

Heshe has no place in computing sorry, it’s the wrong interest group

Honestly, I find both parties equally insufferable on an interpersonal level, but I would also 100% throw out of my house anyone spewing hateful words against someone else.

Nothing I've read about Vaxerski statements seems like serious stuff, it was just juvenile banter... A ban seems completely unmotivated.

Is it wrong to ask to keep your politics, beliefs, and personal interests out of any community? Not toking in relation to this video/topic, but in general. Not only we have double standards, but things change all the time to whatever is popular for the day. Just don't talk about things that might be controversial, don't insult other people for any reason whatsoever, and don't demand for others to treat you are their friend.

I completely agree with the sentiment of keeping politics bs out, I do that in my discord channel too, I just don't care about it and if people want to discuss that there are many venues outside of the discord channel to do so. The difference is that Varxy ACTIVELY engaged in politics and then when people complained that he was talking about politics he came with "don't talk about politics here" LMAO

Your English is very good for a German

I agree that people can be real a*holes online and that bullying people based on the way people look or who they are is not right and should be dealt with but some people also need to grow a thicker skin and stop being offended by anything.

Don't stress yourself too much. Some peeps aren't even worth mentioning. Love your work, don't stress too much over some jerks who live from drama.

Well it clear what must be done. Time to rewrite it in Rust.

I don't like Vaxry as a person. I don't agree with they/them's (get rekked vaxry) opinions or politics, and I don't agree that his Discord is not toxic. But I'm not sure how I feel about the whole situation. Honestly, I'm just disappointed

any pics of who/cares ? i'd like to decide for myself

🌬❄

snowflakes gonna melt

He's making changes and doing a little bit better but tbh idc about the situation. Vaxei should end the conversation with instating a rule that EVERYONE must use "they/them" and there is no further discussion about this stuff.. so we can focus on code

River WM looking real good right now

Misgendering someone is not a big deal. That's ridiculous. It's no more a big deal than calling someone a mean name. Being mean or uncouth on the internet is not harassment. JFC