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On X11 and the Fascists Maggots (blogs.gnome.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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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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[–] 37 points 1 year ago* (12 children)

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.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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."

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I am definitionally incel, wanna say that does not make me a nazi. In fact, I despise the entire tenets of nazism.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago

    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.

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