This is a truly WTF moment about messed up responses to X11 session removal in Gnome.
2 weeks ago I published a blogpost about the upcoming plans of GNOME 49 and the eventual removal of the X11 session. Since then, instead of looking at feedback, bugs and issues related to the topic, we all collectively had to deal with the following, and I am not exaggerating one bit:
- Fascists and Nazis
- Wild Conspiracy Theories that make Qanon jealous
- “Concerned” Trolling about the Accessibility of the Wayland session
- A culture war where Wayland is Gay, and X11 is the glorious past they stole from you
In my wildest dreams I could have never made this shit up. You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on.
All these “concerned” comments about systemd, wayland, etc, always seemed dog whistling to me. I have critiques about these projects, but the specific things this specific type of people says always comes coded in some form of racism/transphobic/mysoginistic rethoric. Just changed from gamergate to linuxgate.
So i’m not surprised that they turned mask off like this.
Look at any anti-systemd channel, the comments are always the worst thing ever. Some lkml reading channels have these comments too.
The systemd and the Wayland debate both feel very similar.
At the end of the day the old method of using init scripts was becoming inadequate and needed to change
Wayland debate seems the same, switching to Wayland has been talked about for over a decade. The change has been coming and frankly I was expecting it a lot earlier
Whats neat about linux though is if you have nothing better to do and are knowledgeable enough to bitch about all of this; then you also have the technical prowess to standup an install of your favorite distro and get it to use X instead of Wayland and init scripts instead of systemd
For me as an enduser I hope Wayland enables more modern features to be delivered more easily as X has felt old for a while.
I’m just confused. Like, how would someone even connect Linux software to those topics?
I totally believe you that they do, and I’m not actually interested in hearing messed up shit, I’m just…
If you asked me which topics were unlikely to have bizarre vile messaging I would have listed window managers and init systems pretty high in the list.
“How am I going to be racist today? OOH, the parallel command is pretty woke”
it’s always been there. the most influential voices in the open source software world have always been overtly political. heck, the entire movement is inherently political. just read any of stallmans or raymond’s rants from the 90s.
and while stallman is mostly just creepy because he’s not house trained, raymond is genuinely disturbing.
Oh, I totally know there’s been a lot of politics in the Foss community and that some of the people are nasty, I’m just flabbergasted that someone would try to connect such disparate things.
I can comprehend a Nazi Foss enthusiast having opinions on race and on window managers. It’s when they start having racist opinions on window managers that it all flies out the window. It’s like being opposed to copper plumbing because it’s too Norwegian.
Just a case of seeing irrational people who act irrationally act irrationally in a new way and being shocked that the irrationality doesn’t follow a pattern or stay in topic.