Because there seems to be a deep misunderstanding about why I find Hyprland objectionable, I seek to provide further insight. As with many matters considered by Void, the project maintains no official position. Nevertheless, I suspect that my reasons overlap substantially with those of other team members.
Hyprland has not been disqualified from inclusion in void-packages because its authors maintain contrary views about social issues. Thoughtfully held opinions, rigorously argued in good faith, should always be respected. Disagreements on the underlying nature of the world or our response to it should never be regarded as a reason to avoid collaboration or the use of quality work products. In general, it should not even be regarded as a reason to avoid friendship. I disagree vehemently with friends and collaborators online and in person on many issues, and we have great fun arguing our positions
ad nauseam. Even if we have no power to reconcile the issues, it is a good exercise to strengthen and refine our own beliefs.
This does not imply that Hyprland has been excluded from Void for purely technical reasons. There are a number of socially disqualifying attributes of the Hyprland project. Readers can, with a bit of research, uncover several examples of inappropriate and uncontrolled behavior in official Hyprland forums. The maintainers of the project seem unwilling to reign in content that does not satisfy any reasonable criteria for thoughtful and civil social debate. However, I am also aware of at least one instance where a project representative abused administrative control in a Hyprland forum to modify the profile of another user to express political disagreements. I can appreciate a
laissez faire approach that allows all content to exist unmoderated; I can also appreciate an editorial approach that seeks to emphasize civility and limit discussion to relevant topics. The handling of Hyprland forums is neither; it is the capricious manipulation of interactions in bad faith.
It is the Hyprland project that opened the door to criticism of it on social grounds. People arguing that Hyprland should be evaluated solely on its technical merit overlook the fact that the social commentary many find objectionable on Hyprland forums has absolutely no relation to the project, and never should have appeared there. If the project itself endorses ongoing social discussion, nobody should lament when other projects react to the content.
There are several other reasons behind my unwillingness to consider a Hyprland package in Void. While some of these are of a personal nature, they remain relevant to my view of the project as a whole:
- The principal author holds an unsubstantiated and overinflated opinion of his own abilities. In a personal blog post, he muses that he is uniquely qualified to helm the Hyprland project because his throughput and mastery of C++ are unmatched. At the same time, I have observed IRC discussions wherein he demonstrated a shockingly shallow understanding of the language. While I maintain some professional C++ projects, I am far from an expert. If your lack of understanding shocks me, you may have picked the wrong language for your project.
- In other discussions, I found him immature, impatient and antagonistic. On several occasions, he was quick to indict wlroots for incorrect behavior that ultimately resulted from his own misunderstanding and misuse of the library.
In my experience, projects dominated by single, immature individuals with superiority complexes are often doomed to collapse under their own weight.
Elsewhere, others have noted some of the technical criticisms of Hyprland. Chief among these are thrash as each release brings massive changes to the code base. The announcement for 0.40.0 boasts 15,000 lines of code changed; one month later, the announcement for 0.41.0 boasts 25,000 lines changed. Soon, a new release will yank out wlroots in favor of a newly minted library of core protocol implementations that has been tested for all of three months. These are signs of an immature project; they may reflect a learning journey for the authors, or perhaps just a tinkering attitude that values refactoring for the sake of change. Either way, it inspires little confidence.
Finally, the attitude surrounding Hyprland seems contrary to the ethos of Void Linux. The prominence and emphasis on "ricing" in Hyprland favors style over substance. Even the website reads more like a Silicon Valley VC-funded advertisement than a project seeking to demonstrate its technical merits: "Get the latest features Linux offers." "Automatic tiling that just works." All that is missing is a
.dev TLD. Void strives for function over form and heavily favors pragmatism and natural selection over sales pitches
