Vaxry, creator of the Hyprland Wayland compositor, writes about Linux desktop problems, FreeDesktop, RedHat and community conflicts.
HN commenters link it for his dispute with FreeDesktop and wlroots, while one calls him edgy and warns about the community's stance.
> Back when I was writing xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland
Ah, yes, XDG "portals". The reason file selection and screencasting is broken on every new Linux/Wayland installation I do, forcing me to try to understand the insane matrix of supported, half-supported, broken, and unsupported features by the dozen+ different implementations, and come up with the magic configuration incantation that makes it work on my system. Brilliant stuff. But it's secure!
> That is why, I've decided to take matters into my own hands. I am writing a new bus.
Oh, goody. The author quotes xkcd/927 as if anticipating the response, when it's exactly appropriate for this situation.
> For example, with wayland, when you switch, you abandon X. You cannot run an X11 session together with a wayland one, simply not how it works.
Huh? I use niri, and had to install both Xwayland and xwayland-satellite to get some of my apps working. I have no idea what either does, and even less interest in figuring it out, but it sure sounds like some X compatibility layer. Please tell me more about how much X, and now D-Bus, sucks.
I switched to Wayland a few months ago, and I'm happy that things mostly work now, but it seems that reinventing the wheel is the M.O. of developers in the Wayland community. Everyone is tired of everyone else's shit, has a superiority complex as evidenced by this ranty article, and has the urge to recreate literally every tool in the ecosystem that works for their own specific use case. Case…
If only the drama stopped there:
* DHH is not only considered racist / fascist due to some blog posts, but also for making Hyprland the default DE in Omarchy, developed by someone who goes by the name Vaxry Vaxerski, who is also considered fascist and racist, and thus banned from contributing to freedesktop projects due to supposed breach of CoC:
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat
* Hyprland and all its contributors are now also considered fascist from taking sponsorship money from 37signals, DHH's company, due to it being an important part of Omarchy.
https://account.hypr.land/sponsors
* Due to the fact that both DHH and Vaxry are both considered fascist / racist, Framework and its CEO (yes, that Framework) are now considered to be supporters of fascism, because Framework is sponsoring and supporting both Omarchy and Hyprland.
https://account.hypr.land/sponsors
* Cloudflare (yes, that Cloudflare) is considered to support fascism because they support Omarchy and the Ladybird webbrowser (which is a project also run by someone considered to be a fascist)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-open-web/
* Last but not least, Tobi (Shopify CEO) and thus Shopify are also considered by many to be supporters of fascism when this drama started to unroll for standing by DHH no matter what when activists wanted to deplatform and ban DHH from his own creation (Ruby on Rails). Which makes the Ruby Central drama due to the involvement of…
It's a bit of a two edged sword but it's something we definitely need. Look at project like Qubes and Secureblue that try to implement this. It solves several issues:
Packaging Apps on Linux has been and always will be, a nightmare. Just giving up and sending whole VMs is basically a variant of what docker does.
Permission Management is also quite necessary and Linux Desktop/DBUS is horrible in that regard. There's recently been a post about this[0]. Especially part 5 is just... GNOME Developers being GNOME Developers...
A lot of Apps also open untrusted files and even run untrusted code. Browsers, PDFs, or Excel Macros? God only knows what kind of exploits and hidden software landmines there are.
And last but not least there's also just badly coded apps that can get pwned from remote sources. Think some game running horrible c++ code connecting peer to peer with random clients. All of them could easily buffer overflow some random function and take over all your files.
[0] https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2025-dbusSucks
vaxry is quite edgy, doesn't believe in structural marginalization and is also part of the anti-CoC crowd.
i think this blog post is all you need to read if you want to know if you specifically want to engage with this community: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists
personally i find it quite obnoxious when people pre-empt that i'll have a miserable time by claiming I just need thicker skin to participate and that it's okay because life is hard, in a project i might want to volunteer time and effort to. just me tho.
ddevault isn't involved with wlroots for a few years now. The tiff between hyprland and wlroots / freedesktop was because of https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat . See also https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-wlrootsRewrite
> Does it miss a spec? Write one.
FreeDesktop-dot-Org would not accept one from the author if he did:
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat
https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat2