On X11 and the Fascists Maggots
11mon 28d ago by programming.dev/u/Mihies in linux@programming.dev from blogs.gnome.org
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.
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.
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.
..... 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
X11 is on/under your ass?
Maybe they were both gay all along, that's why we enjoy their sessions so much.
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
ha gaiiiii :3
avoiding microplastics is now homophobic??!
it can't be ruled out
It also can't be supported
X11 AND Wayland are for degenerates, a distraction at best but mostly just something that wastes CPU cycles and RAM.
THE FUTURE IS 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 TERMINAL!
The past and present are also terminal.
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 screen over telnet for file transfer.
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.
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.
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.
lol Lunduke shot against Michael (Phoronix) and you, which seem to be from the other political side now aswell! xD
i think michael is doing a good job moderating and in his voverage of xlibre.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
That's a pity, I guess some people direct their grudge to women instead of the faulty society which forced no-life lifestyle..
"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.
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.
Wait, does that mean xmonad will get to live a tiny bit longer?
Article was taken down. Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250624214542/https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/23/the-fascist-maggots/
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.
Honestly that sounds like a security nightmare and its probably a good thing that doesn't work anymore.
Honestly if pressing some buttons to get the computer to do something you programmed it to do is a "security nightmare" I think we should probably just give up, tear down the electric grid and go back to dying of smallpox at 17 like nature intended.
That's not problematic part. The reading all my inputs is.
There's software on the computer that does that anyway, otherwise the keyboard won't work. Feels like an arbitrary line to draw.
Keyboards send commands through drivers. There is no 3rd party software reading it out.
Autokey is software written by someone.
Drivers are software written by someone.
Have you vetted every line of code running on your computer?
Not sure if you understand threat models.
Condescend further to me. Explain it to me like I'm a woman.
I'm sorry miss but I'm not sure if you understand threat models.
I don't know autokey, so I can't speak to whether they replace all its functionality but there are 'xdotool-like' programs for Wayland. So it is at least very possible to replace functionality like the latter you mentioned (press button/button combination -> do an action, like inserting date/start a program/do something programmatic). Some examples I know are:
ydotool is a perfect replacement for dmenu based password managers.
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.
Perhaps I should take another look now that the ecosystem has had time to mature...
Try the big ones. Gnome or KDE just works.
I use Plasma on my server, but I don't use my server's UI very often
Why does your server need a UI?
I wanted to try plasma and my server is a laptop so I installed some widgets to display stats on the main screen
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
I"ve been experimenting with both Cosmos [I'm assuming you mean Cosmic, System76's upcoming DE?] and XFCE Wayland.
So the only Wayland implementations you've tried are ones in Alpha or Beta?
Tbh that seems like an unfair comparison. You're comparing alpha and beta software to production-ready software, and complaining about it not being as stable.
Wayland is a lot more mature on Gnome or Plasma. I started using Wayland on Gnome in 2019, and aside from when I briefly tested with an Nvidia card a number of years ago, the only issue I've ever had was screen sharing on discord, which was 'Discord are pathologically against updating their electron version' issue, not a Wayland issue.
Use NVIDIA as primary GPU on laptops (not offload)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-R575-Wayland-Plans
Currently you can only set NVIDIA to offload some of the rendering, but not as primary GPU like X11
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus#Use_NVIDIA_graphics_only
Yeah nvidia is always a pita. But even that gets better.
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.
Haha what the hell did I just read
Is it so surprising that the mindset that makes people unable to face changes in one area of their lives also makes them unable to face changes in other areas?
I use X11 over Wayland on KDE Neon for RustDesk compatibility. The Wayland support for that application is still in Beta from what I understand.
Are there other reasons why I should keep X11? I am on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X paired with a RTX 3090 FE on 570-open drivers, for reference.
I'm fairly sure there's no way to do remote Wayland from Windows, yet without X11. But what do I know? I'm running ububtu 22.04 still
From my weak Linux knowledge, Wayland has problems with screen sharing.
I know there's dozen ways to screen share but I mostly care about discord and discord screen sharing doesn't work on Linux, curiously enough if you get obs to create a virtual camera of whatever you want to stream it will stream it flawlessly. Use the default way of streaming anything and it craps out
Ihey fixed this, it should be working
as of when ? using what method of using discord, browser or the electron app? ? under x11 or Wayland?
I'm on x11 so I guess I'll have to find out tonight if it works or not
I don't know of any screen sharing issues tbh. I've unfortunately had to share my screen through google meet for more than a year now :(
Now I hate Gnome
But:
- Harrassing the creators is cringe, even if they make (undeniably-very-competently-made-but-by-virtue-of-dumb-choices-rendered-into) bad computer programmes
- Wayland is good actually, Gnome or otherwise.
Gnome programs, and Gnome itself, is pretty great.
You don't have to shit on a project just because you don't use their stuff or like something else.
Gnome in general is undeniably made competently by competent and talented people. If it wasn't, it would break a lot more.
Those competent and talented people also managed to make extremely bad choices at every turn, and seem ideologically opposed to the idea of customization, resulting in an environment that is fundamentally painful to use unless you very specifically fit the box of what they expect users to be like.
It sort of feels like an Apple product, in that sense. Very well-made, but god forbid you don't want to do things exactly as they say you should
My feelings exactly, stated a lot better than I could have managed.
Those competent and talented people also managed to make extremely bad choices at every turn, and seem ideologically opposed to the idea of customization, resulting in an environment that is fundamentally painful to use unless you very specifically fit the box of what they expect users to be like.
There's nothing wrong with not providing customization. There's a perfectly decent customizable DE in KDE, anyone that wants to tinker can use that.
I don't want to tinker. I want something to just work, and not have too many knobs. Gnome fills this need perfectly. Thus, you saying that they made bad choices at every turn seems rather idiotic.
Sure, but them stonewalling KDE for months with libadwaita theming preventing gnome apps from using the breeze theme properly on KDE is a bad decision - one that should never have happened. They eventually worked it out, but they shouldn't have first told the KDE devs to essentially pound sand, especially given KDE goes out of their way to make their apps use gnome's themes correctly no matter what, so your gnome system looks right when using KDE apps. The same courtesy should be expected from GNOME, at least to provide the scaffolding for that.
That is the kind of bad decisions I thought of when they brought it up. Or heck, why isn't dash to dock built into gnome at this point? Like a quarter of the gnome users (and yes, they checked their telemetry and found this to be true) were using it - that's obviously something that even if it goes against their design philosophy the DE should have built-in at this point. I think if you're not in the GNOME weeds, you won't see the kinds of boneheaded decisions they have made over the years.
Thanks, I was going to post a very similar rant.
The "just works" argument IS a valid one and they would have a point -- IF Gnome's defaults were in any way sensible. They aren't. The entire workflow is a nightmare. (I made the apple comparison -- Well, uhh... MacOS is also a walled garden that doesn't let you change shit, but at least it's got very decent defaults)
Gnome's file manager didn't let you type in FOLDER ADDRESSES until a few months ago, ffs. And sure you could, even then, use an alternative file manager.
.... But at that point you are fucking with the premise of "just works", because you will need to use non-default stuff.
You stay very subjective views as if they are facts. Then you go and add an obvious lie to the whole thing - you could’ve typed directory addresses for years, maybe even since the beginning.
At this point, your post should be taken with a ton of salt, if at all
You're the one lying. Gnome 46. That's when it was added.
"Location entry on click" and "Detailed timestamps for files" listed proudly as "features" as if they aren't default on every file manager that doesn't treat its users like babies too dumb to use their computers.
CTRL-l to type the address has been a thing for years. It’s literally the same shortcut as every browser. What you highlighted made it easier for newcomers, which you supposedly aren’t.
But I guess you just saw this message and got triggered, having not even used the software.
see this wouldn't be a problem if every distro didn't insist on having gnome as the default and main DE
This is objectively false. Distros that care about choice and tinkering will allow you to select a DE during installation. See Arch Linux for example.
Except when I am forced to use a distro that only provides Gnome (looking at you RedHat).
Redhat doesn’t provide KDE rpms? That’s some dump shit
they deprecated KDE as of 7 to 8. Guess how I know? Corporate IT upgraded our development servers.
FFS, what is with this toxicity?
They aren't bad choices. They are choices that you don't like, but plenty of others do.
It sort of feels like an Apple product, in that sense. Very well-made, but god forbid you don't want to do things exactly as they say you should
No it doesn't, because Gnome is completely customisable, and the devs encourage that through the extensions platform.
If you don't like Gnome, that's ok. You don't need to moan about it online and say it's shit. I don't like mushrooms. I don't moan about it, I don't say meals are bad for including them, and I don't tell people they're wrong for liking them.
This read like a story from some fictional universum I don't follow.
I made peace with this forced transition. I went from using one of the available standards (X11) to retrocomputing (X11).
I tried Wayland and what a mess... But I get it. Everything changes, and tech moves on.
As for me and my needs, as long as X11 does its job, I'll keep on using it.
I've followed some of the discussions around the need to have a more modern framework for current graphical systems. I'm pretty confident devs have their hearts and minds in the right place. It's just that Wayland doesn't work for me.
When was the last time your tried Wayland? I've had no issues with it whatsoever.
Same. Would be curious to know what problems this has caused any actual normal users (not weirdo fascist tech bros).
They probably won’t get specific.
But I will say that the comment here is a quintessential example of an anti Wayland/SystemD complaint.
Nothing specific ever. Just “it’s a mess and buggy and slow”.
This being said by me making this comment the original poster might come up with the some specifics just because they feel called out.
In Ubuntu, Wayland causes my mouse cursor to freeze for about 1 second periodically. Doesn't do that in X11. I'm not about to spend who-knows-how-long troubleshooting this when I can just not use it.
As a weirdo (maybe not a fascist tech bro, but who am I to judge) my personal grudge against systemd and Wayland is that I personally simply DON'T LIKE CHANGE.
The link is broken, unfortunately
Alternative URLs have been posted in thread.
Link is dead
I am not exaggerating one bit:
Wish I could believe you but I honestly don't believe anyone who says this anymore.
I will always be hated for this but fascism is necessary. It is the whip of the owning class. As long as you have capitalism, you have fascism.
In more detail if you wish:
Normal society: Person make chair, person sell chair, person eat
Thats the "natural" way of things.
Capitalism: Person make chair, person get tiny cut of chair because [mArKeTiNg cOsT, responsibility, land ownership and other bogus excuses], person eat less, capitalist eat more.
People dont really accept this because it is not natural or fair. Therefore you need a couple of things, depending on the stage of capitalism:
the carrot (you will have your own house! you will buy cool things! you can be rich!)
the veil (propaganda, telling you why it is the only thing that works, why you just need to comply, because compliance will be rewarded...)
the stick (a militarized police force that will shoot you if you dont comply)
As you can see, all western states are currently going down the "military disguised as police" route. Why do you think that is? It is because the capitalists want more yachts.
And after 100 years of propaganda, we actually believe there never has been a better system.
Have a great day.
And after 100 years of propaganda, we actually believe there never has been a better system.
If you mean the way a medieval village or town functioned, then this comparison omits the improvements of "capitalism" over it.
Person make chair, person sell chair, person eat - that's if they are this village's or town's chairmaker. If not, they are treated as if they stole from the chairmaker. Teeth kicked in, banished. Something like that. The chairmaker's role is transferred by inheritance or by apprenticeship from one person to one other person. Like a noble's title.
The way medical practice works in some countries with English law, I've heard, still reminisces that, and the results are not liked generally.
Choices and social mobility and social lifts are not present in a traditional society. That village remains in one place over many years. It may grow or shrink, but there's simply no need to allow cook's son to become a chairmaker, or vice versa. Or if there's is, the whole village may assemble and talk about such a decision once in 10-20 years. If he has two sons, then one of them works for the other, can't be cook on his own. If he wants to be his own man, he can try and find an apprenticeship, if some other master doesn't have a son or an apprentice. In other place maybe.
In a city it was similar, except, to scale the same "natural order", guilds existed and not small families, but guilds' heads would make such collegial decisions. Or heads of merchant families.
What you feel as oppression now is not really worse than what a medieval man felt, living all his life the same way in the same place.
I blame Marx for this misconception, he probably tried to play the "good old times" typical German card, but his followers, as a result, often believe that industrialization somehow made free people wage slaves. No. Try living in a village, today, in a western country. And then imagine you wouldn't work or travel elsewhere, all your life would be around that small place, with the same few people and families year after year. Social lifts and social mobility, vertical or even horizontal, were simply unimaginable in such a structure.
I've always found it very useful to find the capitalist shills like this early in threads like these to block and clear the air.
Yes, one of the reasons I do this is so that people like you would clean the air.
If only this wonderful opinion were published someplace else than blogs.gnome.org and by someone who's not a GNOME developer who are expected to lie by now.
X11 is not glorious past, it just makes sense.
Of course, when you freeze it in a certain state, only doing bug fixes, you can't utilize its modularity and extensibility to fix problems that can be fixed in an alternative with actual development happening. But it appears the solution of finally making a fork has been found.
I welcome anyone to find fascism, nazism, conspiracy theories (if that's about said freeze and refusal to break backwards compatibility in some things, then, well, that's a fact visible for anyone on the web) here.
“Concerned” Trolling about the Accessibility of the Wayland session
So for actual complaints they just say it's trolling and put quotes. That's not a valid response.
You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on.
Maybe snowflake GNOME devs need that? I don't use GNOME, so - won't really feel the loss.