this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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What's it with fascists and unintuitive, keyboard-based user interaction? Is this a weird "gatekeeping" thing? Because I remember that in the late 2000's, a lot of Linux forums had "let me google it for you" and pirated copies of Windows XP linked instead of getting an answer to your problem.
for them it’s absolutely about gatekeeping and control. keyboard interfaces can be cozy, easy to learn, and accessible — that’s what I aim for on my own computer, but I’ve never released the config because I know I’ve got a long way to go for all 3 (and I need to find a better base distro than NixOS).
hyprland is a fucking terrible keyboard interface. here’s the example config file you’re meant to edit before first launch (good luck if you can’t use a non-graphical editor for accessibility reasons I guess). it’s an awful little inflexible domain-specific language (oh joy, back to the pre-xmonad days where everything complex is a shitty hack), most of the file is dedicated to defining a bunch of shitty animations and graphics, and the keybinding system — the point of a keyboard interface — is threadbare. this is designed by someone who cares very much about how their interface looks in a screenshot and not at all about how it feels to use.
and all of the above is on purpose; if you can’t handle the intentionally regressive shittiness of hyprland, they want you to think it’s a skill issue. we know from the receipts that if you ask any of their core community for help, they’ll call you a slur. but even prospective hyprland lovers can’t stand this early-2000s compiz-brained shit, and that’s why they’re all very excited for omarchy, which is just arch linux bundled with DHH’s hyprland config that you can’t change.
the developers of interfaces like hyprland claim to give you more control over your own computer, but hyprland does that very poorly compared with almost any other modern keyboard interface. the actual control they care about is over the ecosystem. hyprland is one of your only choices for a keyboard interface on Wayland; otherwise, you’re stuck with gnome or KDE or something unmaintained (e: I guess there’s sway? none of these options entice me to be honest) that doesn’t work with any applications cause Wayland is a goddamn mess. that’s a position of power in an isolated subculture, and fascists fucking love that.
the hyprland developers were notoriously kicked out of contributing to FreeDesktop for being too toxic and disrupting the Wayland protocol design process (and I can’t imagine how toxic and disruptive you’d have to be to get kicked out of FreeDesktop of all orgs), and their push for popularity and the appearance of having distro support might be an effort to regain control there. Wayland protocols are an almost ideal way to create intentional incompatibilities and network effects. see also xlibre, which is building a weird fucked up ecosystem around itself even though it’s broken and pointless.
I used to use Sway. I found it tedious to configure several different things via config files. Kanshi in case you plug in a monitor, Waybar, Swaylock^[Also there was a bug that allowed people to bypass your lockscreen by mashing keys. Sort of made me hesitant to try anything Sway again, although I believe the problem has been fixed.], etc. And, I may be misremembering, but you had to edit the Sway config to launch these programs at startup. There was just friction everywhere.
I have been daily-driving COSMIC for about six months and it works pretty well, although there are infrequent crashes (less so since the beta release, I think). I like it as my tiling WM, but also occasional crashes don't affect my workflow too badly.
Would you be willing to elaborate or follow up on this? I checked out the core protocol but think I'm way too out of my depth to relate it to what you wrote.
for Wayland, the issue is unfortunately outside of the core protocol. the core protocol doesn’t implement everything you need for a functional desktop, and some of the omissions are utterly obvious things. the ecosystem makes up for that with protocol extensions, but some (all?) of the important ones are proprietary to a particular compositor and considered part of its internal API. also, because Wayland has a frankly pretty broken security model (everything is utterly locked down and as far as I can tell no exceptions are possible via permission modals or any other mechanism), some types of applications are only possible via fragile hacks. gnome has many of these proprietary protocols because Wayland is essentially under the same umbrella and so it has a privileged position; KDE is in a close second. every other compositor has severely reduced functionality.
for more details, see jwz’s recent blog posts where he failed to port xscreensaver to Wayland because some of the utterly basic functionality he needed was compositor-specific. the hyprland wiki’s compatibility page is also relevant because all of those problems tend to be rooted in this too, though I of course don’t recommend trusting them as a source. Asahi Linux also has a ton of issues on their github around hyprland that I believe boil down to protocol issues. unfortunately these issues tend to be hidden from public view because they’re spread out across a hundred rants and a hundred discussions in FreeDesktop’s Wayland protocol committee; a properly formatted Mastodon search might also be informative.
(counting down the seconds until some Wayland dev wanders in and tells me I’m completely wrong about everything because an uncharitable reading of one of the paragraphs above reveals I’m wrong about some minor point and besides what am I saying, everyone should be on xlibre? toxic little fucks)
I collected some mastodon links so you know roughly what to look for:
in conclusion: how dare I. don’t I know these are just poor, mostly corporate-backed volunteers
So in other words, they're just cargo-culting "network effects" that they heard about in second-hand YCombinator propaganda and Zuckerberg biographies, and assuming that's both a road to riches and a necessary part of a technical culture
yep! unfortunately we’re fucked if they succeed, and the fascists and those funding them don’t particularly care if the resulting ecosystem is broken nonsense.
What's unintuitive about creating text files
config.yamlandinput.tomlin$DESKTOP_STANDARD_INCONSISTENTLY_FOLLOWEDwhich hopefully resolves to/home/username/.config/but probably resolves to/usr/bin/go_fuck_yourself_with_1s_and_0sand then editing the text files according to confusingly documented syntax?To answer the question, the most unintuitive part of that is YAML.
There's nothing more cursed than unquoted strings.
It’s 4chan /g/ culture at large
I love googling something, and the top results are from reddit or other forums, and most of the comments are telling the OP to google it.