Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!
Unfortunately, the effect is spoilt by an incredibly toxic and hateful community. I cannot recommend Hyprland to anyone who is not prepared to steer well clear of its community spaces. Imagine a high school boys’ locker room come to life on Discord and GitHub and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like.
I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean. I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt. What motivates us to build and give away free software if not bringing joy to ourselves and others? Can we be proud of a community which brings more suffering into the world?
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As someone on HackerNews said:
I’ve never felt the need for any “community” for my window manager of choice
Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?
I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.
It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.
“You shouldn’t use this window manager because their community is toxic”
“I’m not going to interact with the community”
Seems fair enough
For real. Not everything needs to be a fucking subculture. Next they’ll be saying, “The WinRAR community is toxic”. Like no, your discord server is poorly moderated. The problem starts and ends there.
I do not know about that, chief. WinRAR people are the most wholesome people.
I just wanted to point out that it’s ridiculous to form some kind religion¹ around a wayland compositor.
Also, I don’t want anybody to think I’m supporting what’s happening there. I just don’t really care about Hyprland’s community because I’m not part of it.
¹Hyprland’s discord server is named “Church of Hyprland”
This is a pretty old joke. See “Church of Emacs”.
Another toxic community founded and maintained by the socially inept. Yep, checks out.
Hmm, I feel like there’s some nuances around Hyprland (and it’s kind of window managers) that makes having a place for discussion valuable.
- Plugin development discussions
- Configuration recipes and troubleshooting (Configs for tiling wm’s often are like 500-line software projects)
- …and sometimes its just fun to chat with like-minded people who share a similar philosophy on the tools they use on their computers
I’m not a hyprland user, but I find it valuable to lurk around SwayWM communities on Discord and Reddit.
the moderators of the Discord server engaged in a harassment campaign against a transgender user, including using their moderator privileges to edit the pronouns in their username from “they/she” to “who/cares”
Well, apparently those moderators care. Why else edit it?
[A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of their pronouns […] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a big deal out of them because people were referring to them as “he” [misgendering them], which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default.
Damn I didn’t know women didn’t exist on the internet! Also “making a big deal out of ones pronouns” is almost never the case, it’s always just a normal request for the respect of addressing someone properly.
Does drew not know about the existence of singular they? I use that unless i know their gender properly
These are not Drew’s words, he is quoting something said by the project dev. The context that the previous commenter ommitted is:
Following my email conversation with Vaxry, he appeared on a podcast to discuss toxicity in the Hyprland community. This quote from the interview clearly illustrates the attitude of the leadership:
[A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of their pronouns […] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a big deal out of them because people were referring to them as “he” [misgendering them], which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default. And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”. […] Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.
I use y’all also, it’s can be singular or plural in practice
Unclear if you’re referring to the meme or if serious, so I’m gonna leave this here just in case: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet
given I am a woman who is currently on the internet, I am aware there are women on the internet.
thanks for explaining that for me 😉
Your first mistake was joining a Discord group for a software product. Github pages / bug-tracker or GTFO.
Fucking right? Let alone a open source project.
this guy just learned about discord general chats lol
they’re all this bad, and also they’re absolutely dogshit for open source software so I have no idea why people make them
I stopped using it because of a couple shitty interactions on Discord. I don’t know anything about the developer himself but the company he keeps sucks. Using the word “cucked” when talking about breaks in dependencies… and being told “see if I care” when pointing out a race condition I found in initialization that caused problems with multimonitor setups.
No thanks. Sway works great. No need for eye candy.
The guy who develops hyprland is a known transphobe, I’m surprised this is just now coming out.
That usually isn’t a problem as long as they keep it to themselves and away from the community. There are many Foss developers who are like that - they don’t cause a controversy. This one seems to be different and openly toxic.
I can personally vouch for how toxic the Discord server and its moderators/admins are. Went there for support (Hyprland was crashing on startup on AMD, sway worked fine), and was told something along the lines of “if you can’t figure this out you’re stupid and you should stop using Linux”. Figured out the issue on my own and stopped using and recommending Hyprland after that.
Vaxry’s themselves does this all the time. He’s an asshole. Like I get OSS developers don’t owe anyone anything, but some people think that means they can be an asshole to their users for no reason too.
Just look at this for example. Someone asked a clarifying question and Vaxry basically said “stop making noise”. Ironically producing more noise instead of just, idk, answering them? https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/1817
Sorry to be dragging a comment out of the aether as I read into Hyprland controversies, but its absolutely wild this guy was rude across the span of an entire week about a pretty typical issue request, and then later down the road was like “it was one bad comment I might have been having a bad day” and its like… Dude it was 7 days
I empathize a lot with this comment.
In tech (though I would guess as in many other technical domains), many people do seem to easily bully people for not knowing things or making mistakes. I’m guessing it’s just people having high insecurities themselves, it’s even more of an ego thing when considering that computer things are considered as a “nerd” pastime (a group considering itself “smart”). Not knowing things - even things that we would have thought are really simple - should be OK on an help channel as long as you’re not abusing the helpers’ patience.
I’ve been a witness of these situation countless times, the sane way of handling this for me have been to just consider that these are mostly people externalizing their poor self esteem and to just continue conversation (at worst with the other people) as normal.
I wonder if this comes from the only help / discussion being on Discord which has an infamously horrible search feature.
A forum could even be indexed by search engines so no need for:
- A discord account
- Annoying the developers with frequently asked questions
From Vaxry’s response:
opinion - has no place in a serious blogpost
Sir, what do you think a BLOG is for?
It sucks that cool projects like hyprland are usually riddled with toxic weirdos that ruin it. It also sucks that there’s not much to choose in the wayland space that’s usable and actively developed but I refuse to use hyprland after seeing this.
I just switched to hyprland and although the discord general chat isn’t for everyone, they have been helpful when I ask stupid questions and need a little help.
This is a good enough reason to fork a project and establish a new community with new norms.
I mean if he is the lead dev, then I doubt this makes much sense.
Hyprland is itself a fork of wlroots, a project that the author of this post created, so this has happened before and they definitely have the skills to bootstrap a new project.
Hyprland is itself a fork of wlroots, a project that the author of this post created
No, it is not. wlroots is plumbing containing parts a compositor commonly would need to implement, and many compositors - including hyprland - sit on top of that to avoid reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Ah yeah I had it wrong. Thanks for the correction.
It’s not a fork of wlroots. wlroots is a library to assist developers in creating Wayland compositors.
Yeah my mistake. Thanks for the correction.
People like you are insane
Wow, this looks awesome!
Does not anymore
Take every opinion from Drew DeVault with a grain of salt.
All this over some discord server drama. I cant blame the dev for wanting to code and not waste his time moderating.
Then don’t run a discord instance?
“Hey, the server is getting pretty toxic and I can’t be bothered moderating it - this is no longer an official communication channel, I’m not going to be hanging out here anymore, if you need help ask in the GitHub discussion forum”
That douchebag can’t even moderate himself. I wasn’t considering trying out hyprland, but after this I wouldn’t feel safe running his code on any of my computers. I can imagine that it would do some “prank” if it found out that I’m thinking differently
It’s the developer’s responsibility to moderate the discord server properly.
It’s the moderation staff’s responsibility. Sorry for nitpicking, I understand in this case it’s likely the same people.
I just get triggered when I hear that an open source software developer should have any responsibilities at all (maybe apart from some extreme examples), and I wouldn’t like this idea to stick in anyone’s head.
He doesn’t have the responsibility to open a discord server for his project, absolutely agree.
But if you open a server, you do in fact have to moderate it.
The developer owes you nothing.
The developer doesn’t owe us anything, but if they’re creating an online community like Discord there are inherent responsibilities that come with that. If they don’t want to moderate, then they shouldn’t create a Discord/Matrix/Whatever server.
Just like how even if the developer doesn’t owe us anything, that doesn’t mean it’s fine for them to push malware as an update to their previously fine code after they’ve established trust.
