2d ago

Framework goes full fash, supports Hyprland and Omarchy

In case you haven't heard the news, Framework went and publicly sponsored Hyprland (the most toxic part of Wayland by a country mile) and openly shilled Omarchy multiple times (the pet project of fascist shithead David Heinemeier Hansson) recently.

In response to well-justified backlash against this, founder Nirav Patel responded with FOSSbro platitudes about "[creating] a big tent" for open source".

If you've got any more updates on this self-inflicted shitshow, put them here so they can be collected in one place.

(In retrospect, that AI-pilled Framework Desktop should've been a major red flag they were gonna pull this shit.)

EDIT: Found a solid summary of the situation in the wild - recommend checking it out.

63 comments

I had a pre-order of the next gen framework 16, but have since cancelled... Came back to see if there had been any updates since the first day for forum discussion, disappointing that they are doubling down.
So can someone tell me why hyperland is fascist now?
- omarchy, a set of configuration files for arch, is curated by a well-known white supremacist named heinemeier-hansson^[also known for his other works]; as to hyprland, it's a project led by an edgelord arsehole who doesn't shy from insulting a blind programmer, and happily allows queerphobes in his community.
  
  Like I know DHH. What makes him a white supremacist? Asking in good faith. I know he's a douche.
  As for hyperland, you said yourself the guy is a douche, why are we mentioning him in the same breath as fascism? It's really important we don't dilute that term with "people we don't like".
  EDIT: I just want to say I found the post that substantiates DHH's bigotry, and I understand the accusations of being a white supremacist https://world.hey.com/dhh/legacy-without-nostalgia-b19708c9
Big tent ?? At this point even neutral are better. Oh wait, Lunduke is so..... gonna react to this
This reply is worth quoting at length:
With all due respect, I think you profoundly misunderstand the nature of my concern here.
This is not a “I do not like this distribution” kind of argument.
This is a “the people you are sending my money to want me and my friends dead or deported” kind of argument.
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I have no problem with Fedora, Bluefin, Bazzite, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Linux Foundation, LVFS, Debian, KDE… What I have a problem is with Framework consistently, repeatedly encouraging and now sponsoring individuals that have shown to be absolutely destructive to the open source community.
Claiming that this “increasing the adoption of open source software” really misses the core part of the narrative here, which is that those people have been excluded from open source communities because they were so hateful, so destructive, that their mere presence was more harmful than beneficial.
DHH is a threat to the free software community as a whole at this point. The damage he ended up doing to the Ruby community might end up outweighing entirely his contributions to Rails, which is no small feat.
Vaxry (from hyprland) was banned from freedesktop.org, wrecking havoc in standardizing Wayland protocols that the whole community could have benefited from.
If you believe helping and sponsoring those people helps the open source community, we have quite divergent views on the best way forward and, perhaps, it is best if you concentrate on making hardware and leave the open source community alone.
In any case, thanks for your quick response, @nrp, and thanks for building those awesome products.
- “[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.
  They’re not sponsoring Asahi Linux or FOSS Nvidia drivers but DHH’s fucking Arch setup and Ratpoison but worse and with rounded corners.
  
  “[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.
  Not to mention, actively welcoming Nazis into the open source bar is gonna achieve the exact goddamn opposite of increasing adoption, by driving away marginalised users, introducing unnecessary security risks, actively rotting communities from the inside, and God-only-knows-what-else.
  
  @mii @cornflake
  "We did not realize the ethics of the individuals that were behind these organizations; we're sorry we should have investigated organizations better prior to donating to them. We will better research organizations in the future and we have stopped funding for these two groups".
  That. Is that so fucking difficult for them to say?
  I've been checking the thread over the last couple days expecting something like that from them, but nope. Nothing yet.
Quick update: Nirav is posting through it on Twitter
Oh for fuck's sake
MNT are still good, right? IIRC, all firmware is open-source with no binary blobs, and they’re a small group of queers in Berlin. (Please tell me they’re not antideutsche tankies or something.)
- looks good!
  i would LOVE them to get an actual designer though. If ever a laptop looked like open source ...
The absolute shitshow that's been some of the most visible open source projects recently just reinforces my thoughts that one cannot establish trust (and therefore support) with any project leads unless they show their political affiliations upfront. The same way we demand to see a Foss license, we should expect to see what kind of person someone is before we use our community support to elevate them in any position of technical authority.
- Yes this completely sucks. I assume most open source projects are run by leftists of some kind and hate finding out I'm wrong.
  I have a framework 13 that I planned to use for years to come.
  Really wish they would have at least corrected this shit when it was pointed out to them.
  Guess I'm just going to run this thing until it breaks but they won't be getting any more of my money.
- Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said
  Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.
  
  They're very based.
  And if you click on the star (desktop only), the background becomes a pride flag :D
  I'd love to use gleam but I don't think it's production-ready yet, so I'll stick with elixir.
  
  Nice, the language itself also looks pretty cool, which you love to see.
Is this the same Framework that develops very promising modular and repairable laptops, one of three companies to do so? If so.. Fuck.
- I am so sorry to tell you this, but its the exact same Framework developing modular and repairable laptops.
- Who are the other companies?
  
  https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform
  
  Shift, an ecoconscious, as-yet untainted tech brand from Germany
  I thought Lenovo, but I seem to be wrong - they were playing with concepts, nothing on the market yet.
  If you wish to buy from Shift you might need to enable a translator, as I believe their store is only in German.
  The only by me some people have picked at in terms of Shift's ethical values is that they manufacture in China, but they maintain that their labour standards within the factory are kept high
  
  HP launched modular laptop, and Dell did a concept.
  Of course, this is largely in response to Framework. Not like they'd do it on their own.
- Yeah....
So they need my money to make their tent bigger, and inside that tent they let racists and toxic fuckers in?
Very fortunate that I have not given them a cent.
- I was so close to ordering a framework 16 the other day, but got a strange feeling in my gut and backed off just before paying. maybe I'll just settle for a used lenovo. it was food poisoning btw.
What's it with fascists and unintuitive, keyboard-based user interaction? Is this a weird "gatekeeping" thing? Because I remember that in the late 2000's, a lot of Linux forums had "let me google it for you" and pirated copies of Windows XP linked instead of getting an answer to your problem.
- for them it’s absolutely about gatekeeping and control. keyboard interfaces can be cozy, easy to learn, and accessible — that’s what I aim for on my own computer, but I’ve never released the config because I know I’ve got a long way to go for all 3 (and I need to find a better base distro than NixOS).
  hyprland is a fucking terrible keyboard interface. here’s the example config file you’re meant to edit before first launch (good luck if you can’t use a non-graphical editor for accessibility reasons I guess). it’s an awful little inflexible domain-specific language (oh joy, back to the pre-xmonad days where everything complex is a shitty hack), most of the file is dedicated to defining a bunch of shitty animations and graphics, and the keybinding system — the point of a keyboard interface — is threadbare. this is designed by someone who cares very much about how their interface looks in a screenshot and not at all about how it feels to use.
  and all of the above is on purpose; if you can’t handle the intentionally regressive shittiness of hyprland, they want you to think it’s a skill issue. we know from the receipts that if you ask any of their core community for help, they’ll call you a slur. but even prospective hyprland lovers can’t stand this early-2000s compiz-brained shit, and that’s why they’re all very excited for omarchy, which is just arch linux bundled with DHH’s hyprland config that you can’t change.
  the developers of interfaces like hyprland claim to give you more control over your own computer, but hyprland does that very poorly compared with almost any other modern keyboard interface. the actual control they care about is over the ecosystem. hyprland is one of your only choices for a keyboard interface on Wayland; otherwise, you’re stuck with gnome or KDE or something unmaintained (e: I guess there’s sway? none of these options entice me to be honest) that doesn’t work with any applications cause Wayland is a goddamn mess. that’s a position of power in an isolated subculture, and fascists fucking love that.
  the hyprland developers were notoriously kicked out of contributing to FreeDesktop for being too toxic and disrupting the Wayland protocol design process (and I can’t imagine how toxic and disruptive you’d have to be to get kicked out of FreeDesktop of all orgs), and their push for popularity and the appearance of having distro support might be an effort to regain control there. Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects. see also xlibre, which is building a weird fucked up ecosystem around itself even though it’s broken and pointless.
  
  I guess there’s sway? none of these options entice me to be honest
  I used to use Sway. I found it tedious to configure several different things via config files. Kanshi in case you plug in a monitor, Waybar, Swaylock^[Also there was a bug that allowed people to bypass your lockscreen by mashing keys. Sort of made me hesitant to try anything Sway again, although I believe the problem has been fixed.], etc. And, I may be misremembering, but you had to edit the Sway config to launch these programs at startup. There was just friction everywhere.
  I have been daily-driving COSMIC for about six months and it works pretty well, although there are infrequent crashes (less so since the beta release, I think). I like it as my tiling WM, but also occasional crashes don't affect my workflow too badly.
  Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects.
  Would you be willing to elaborate or follow up on this? I checked out the core protocol but think I'm way too out of my depth to relate it to what you wrote.
  
  Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects. see also xlibre, which is building a weird fucked up ecosystem around itself even though it’s broken and pointless.
  So in other words, they're just cargo-culting "network effects" that they heard about in second-hand YCombinator propaganda and Zuckerberg biographies, and assuming that's both a road to riches and a necessary part of a technical culture
- What's unintuitive about creating text files config.yaml and input.toml in $DESKTOP_STANDARD_INCONSISTENTLY_FOLLOWED which hopefully resolves to /home/username/.config/ but probably resolves to /usr/bin/go_fuck_yourself_with_1s_and_0s and then editing the text files according to confusingly documented syntax?
  
  To answer the question, the most unintuitive part of that is YAML.
- I love googling something, and the top results are from reddit or other forums, and most of the comments are telling the OP to google it.
Man fuck that. I dont expect a tech company to be great. But I have a 13” and was excited to see these keep getting better. But that response is just bullshit. There are legitimate business reasons aside from all of the many moral ones not to support bullshit reprehensible creators and by doing so publicly connect your company to them. If they can’t even see the dollar signs there… well… fuck em.
Maybe I’ll start quoting the Hyprland fucks in the framework forums and see if that language flies or gets taken down.
I feel like like I've seen the phrase "hyprland is the most toxic part of Wayland" more than once now and I'm not sure why it's being phrased that way. Hyprland is not part of wayland, right?
- Yeah I think this is hyperbole. I'll retract this if proven otherwise but supporting douches is not supporting fascism. It deteriorates and normalises the accusation by calling it so.
- you’ve seen it from me as “the most toxic part of the Wayland ecosystem, and that’s saying something”
(In retrospect, that AI-pilled Framework Desktop should've been a major red flag they were gonna pull this shit.)
I am still not completely sure why this product should exist in their lineup. Their laptops have always focused on being more repairable/upgradeable than most competing laptops, but the Framework Desktop is actually less repairable/upgradeable than a standard desktop that you can build yourself however you please. Though if you instead compare it to a mini PC form factor like an Intel NUC, it is actually a very attractive alternative. Either way, at the end of the day, no one asked for this device. People enjoy Framework for the things that they are doing to make the laptop industry more consumer-friendly. But apparently the reason that the Framework Desktop was developed is just because the CEO saw AMD's new CPU platform and thought "I want to put that into a Framework product." And after they tried working with AMD to get standard memory modules to work with it, instead of saying, "Oh, there's no way to make it repairable/upgradeable? Never mind, we just won't make a Framework product out of it," they went ahead and did it anyway.
- Maybe they're competing with the old Mac desktops, the cheesegraters before they were made completely proprietary. Now, I've always dissed Apple consumers for buying a phone that's 50% more expensive and 20% less powerful or feature-filled than the competition, but once I learned the going price of Mac desktops are 300% more expensive than the most capable custom, my mind was blown.
  And yet Apple's success and following is proof that Framework's desktop might follow suit.
From the stubstack: https://awful.systems/comment/9014362 https://awful.systems/post/5853532/9014330
While I agree that the Hyprland community is toxic and led by an open conservative (if not fascist), citing Drew DeVault's opinion piece is hardly better; he's known for being a tankie with biases of his own and the way he manages sway is toxic in its own way (though, admittedly, not in the same manner that Hyprland is).
- tankie?
- oh yeah totally, open transphobia and fascism is just as bad as being
  known for being a tankie with biases of his own
  the fuck is wrong with you. this is what centrism does to a motherfucker.
  (and for the record, devault’s firmly wedged in my brain as a particularly dramatic neoliberal with a checkered past, but the fucker brings receipts (yes this is the same link in the OP that our guest decided to complain about, go read it because it’s fucking damning))
  
  If you've written about it already feel free to link it, but is there true evidence of fascism beyond him being an absolute douche?
  
  Critical support for comrade DeVault in his struggle against western imperialism?
  The real problem with leftist infighting is that if you call a different type of leftist a mean word, some ignorant liberal is going to call you the same word. And then a reactionary will call a liberal that.
  
  And Vaxry's defense of the community was "actually, we harassed a transphobe a few months later." Yes, great, you're shitty to everyone. Yay.

63 comments