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.
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On the one hand, the guy who wrote this blog post is kinda unhinged.
On the other hand, I’m kinda living for it and agree with his views.
So really it all evens out in the end.
There is no place for Fascists within the Open Source and Free Software communities or the society at large. You will never fester your poisonous roots here
So who took the blog post down at Gnome?
Article was taken down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250624214542/https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/23/the-fascist-maggots/
X11 AND Wayland are for degenerates, a distraction at best but mostly just something that wastes CPU cycles and RAM.
THE FUTURE IS TERMINAL!
THE FUTURE IS TERMINAL!
The past and present are also terminal.
obviously the future is shoving the ethernet cable up your ass and dialing in directly
That would explain 70% of the shit you can find on the internet
The future is ARCAN!
Thank you for this new rabbit hole that thanks to my pathological curiosity for software on the far side of normalcy i now HAVE to explore and waste time i should spend working on a project 😜
Oh, your welcome. It’s a great rabbit hole. I remember venturing down it for the first time some years ago. I’ve since been able to build arcan from source and get pipeworld working on void linux. It’s not daily drivable yet, (not for me at least) but it works, and it’s cool as fuck.
Gotta say, his latest post, Sunsetting Cursed Terminal Emulation, really reminded me of some programming woes you can read from The Unix Haters’ Handbook.
terminal emulators aren’t leaky abstractions, they’re quite literally the abstraction being leaked :-D.
\x64k@lobste.rs
YES! i would love it if arcan/durden/lash-cat9 got some mainstream traction.
Kermit or nothing
I have been known to use XMODEM over
screenover telnet for file transfer.
I do think ditching X11 is still slightly premature. For all its more modern features, there’s still a lot that Wayland either hasn’t implemented yet or “can’t do” because of its “security model.”
Can you name something that’s missing? Because I can’t think of anything relevant.
Sure, Autokey doesn’t work.
What’s autokey?
It’s roughly equivalent to AutoHotKey on Windows. It’s an application that can intercept key combos or even typed strings and…do basically anything. Let’s say you type a certain phrase a lot, you could come up with an abbreviation so that when you type an abbreviation it deletes the abbreviation and inserts the big thing you type. Or maybe you want it to fire when you press ALT+ y. Or, maybe you want it to do something programmatic, like insert the date and time. Or do anything you can get Python to do.
This apparently does not work on Wayland systems, something about the way it accessed keystrokes in X11 isn’t open in Wayland for security concerns.
I"ve been experimenting with both Cosmos and XFCE Wayland.
Color pickers, screenshot, and window recording/streaming all don’t seem to work or require Wayland-only packages that are extremely primitive in features and use.
Alt+tabbing out of games, whether fullscreen or windowed, also doesn’t seem to work.
Wallpapers and cursors installed to the standard location where the distro installs all of them don’t seem to be usable. I have to manually copy them to somewhere in the home directory in order to use them.
Screensavers seem to be unusable except for one port of xscreensavers.
I know OpenSUSE plans to eliminate x11, so I’m trying to get used to Wayland, but I do hope it’s more developed before I have to use it full time.
tbf, aren’t both of those still in early stages? I don’t think I’ve had any issues with those on KDE wayland
Do we have a widely adopted aolution yet for screensharing, global shortcuts, and window position restoration?
Screen sharing under gnome and KDE just works. Even in sway that’s solved for quite a while now. I would call that widely adopted. I haven’t encountered the other two as problems yet. Global shortcuts work in my sway session. I would expect nothing else from gnome and KDE. Window position restoration is also a standard feature in sway AFAIK. Not sure if gnome or KDE do it.
Looks like I have been an early adopter of Gay™️
Archive link to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20250624214542/https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/23/the-fascist-maggots/
Once on internet, forever on internet :) Thanks.
There is no place for Fascists within the Open Source and Free Software communities or the society at large. You will never fester your poisonous roots here. Go back to the cave you crawled out from where no sunlight can reach.
NAZI! DEVS! FUCK! OFF! 💯
Nazis AND Devs should fuck of?
No. Nazis should fuck off.
Devs should just fuck.
Go back to the cave you crawled out from where no sunlight can reach.
Bro aimed at his foot
Wayland is gay?! I need to get off my ass and finally switch then!
Can confirm, having my different refresh rate monitors play nice with each other is extremely homosexual.
X11 is on/under your ass?
Maybe they were both gay all along, that’s why we enjoy their sessions so much.… Does this imply that Wayland has a penis?
Asking… For science, or something, I dunno what is going on.
given how wayland relies on extensions i’d imagine it’s a strap-on
Haha what the hell did I just read
This probably has a lot to do with the new DOA XServer fork being “anti-DEI” (pro-discrimination). When these slimy shitweasels go out and vice signal about how bigoted they are, they congregate around it and form a new harassment campagin because they have no life.
Sorry you’re getting harassed. I hope you can take solace in the fact that these little pissbabies lead miserable lives.
It’s not like X11 will disappear immediately after that. People who need it just have to switch from Gnome to a cooler window manager 🤷
It’s really not a big deal.
From my experience, I guesstimate X11 will be around for another 20 years after that and maybe some hillbilly will even make a Gnome fork that still supports X11. Then there will be X12 one day 😆
Wait, does that mean xmonad will get to live a tiny bit longer?
Wayland is basically X12 in many ways
switch from Gnome to a cooler window manager 🤷
I think that’s easier for us to say, who actually do use something cooler. But for those whose workflow is messed up by this, I understand why they’re upset. But yeah, it’s time to move into the future, for real. High time.
You’d think they would be used to it since every update ruins their workflow too.
What? The last major change to the gnome workflow was going from vertical to horizontal workspaces, and that was several years ago.
going from vertical to horizontal workspaces
Do you mean vice versa? Or did they go back to horizontal again? 😅
They were vertical during all of Gnome 3, then changed to horizontal.
Oh wow, so they did. I have missed that 😅 I’ve been using i3 for like the last 10–15 years. Gnome being back to horizontal workspaces again like in GNOME 2 is wild to me. It’s a great change!
Mostly just trash talking how so much basic functionality is in add-ons that break frequently with updates.
You can disable version checking and have them run if you want to, although that’s probably not advisable.
Is this an effect of the microplastics in our brains?
It’s the effect of a persistent decades-long disinformation campaign perpetrated by those who wish to destabilize western democracies which has been signal-boosted by naive (or maliciously designed) recommendation algorithms on social media platforms.
So far they have only made me more gay
avoiding microplastics is now homophobic??!
ha gaiiiii :3
it can’t be ruled out
As a commenter on that post says, this sort of talk is also common in the comments of Phoronix articles. The commenter says they’ve completely stopped supporting Phoronix since it’s clear that Michael enables this behavior by not moderating it (the least he could do is disable commenting; the type of people that are in the Phoronix comments are the absolute worst). It’s been festering for a very long time, unfortunately. Click any Phoronix article that’s older than a day and check the negativity. Worse, click an article about a controversial topic like X11/Wayland/Systemd/bcachefs/KDE/GNOME/etc. and it’s just a shitshow.
I’ve been seeing it to a lesser degree here as well. I don’t know what it is about X11 that really riles up the conspiracy theorists.
The only thing I miss about X11 is xscreensaver. I hope the dev makes a port for wayland one day. I dont care if it ever has screen locking, i just want bouncing cows.
YES. Phoronix articles are good but the comment sections are insane. There are a few very vocal users that would have been banned on any reasonably moderated forum, and they largely chase out the reasonable people.
Also, occasionally there is an article about CoC or something that is obviously going to bring the loonies out of the woodwork. The comment section will get closed, but not until after the giant flamewar has gone on for a bit. Michael has to know that’s going to happen and make the decision not to close it immediately when he makes the post.
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.
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.
You need to think of the kind of people that are interested in nerdy computing topics. Regular people that just want to make something nice to share with the world, sure, but also incels, toxic masculinity proponents, etc.
They’re mostly able to hide, because like you point out, computer science and related topics are mostly apolitical; when you make scary changes, however, those same latter people can’t help themselves but to blame the villainous “They.”
I am definitionally incel, wanna say that does not make me a nazi. In fact, I despise the entire tenets of nazism.
Incel means more than the state of not being in a relationship, these days. Some very sad and terrible people turned it into a subculture that revolves around imaginary grievances directed at women.
Ugh. people can suck sometimes. I can comprehend the concept of bigotry and all that, but it just deeply does not make sense to me. And I think I’m ultimately okay with not being able to empathize with actual hatred.
It makes me sad that some of the “nerdy” people in these spaces would join with the very people that would gladly throw them under the bus or use them as minority fodder, but as I’ve seen with experts in science, high intelligence in one area doesn’t mean you are capable of critical thinking.
ETA: to be clear, I’m not saying we should ignore scientists and experts, just that specialized expertise ≠ general expertise.
The two people I trust least on matters of science are some person who reckons it’s common sense and someone with a doctorate in something vaguely similar.
The third and fourth are every engineer and every physician that isn’t actually an expert on the thing, but that’s because we think we know everything.
“How am I going to be racist today? OOH, the parallel command is pretty woke”
