Freedesktop Bans Hyprland

Hyprland maintainer Vaxry has been banned by FreeDesktop. Meaning he can not report or patch anything in FreeDesktop which is a sad state of affairs for the Linux Desktop community as a whole, especially the wayland side of things.

What happened?

In 2022, the Hyprland Discord had a mod bully a transgender person by changing their nickname removing pronouns to (who/cares). Vaxry also made some off the cuff remarks about this, but I couldn’t find anything worse than above. A transgender person that works for redhat and is part of the freedesktop leadership heard about this and demanded Vaxry respond to it on March, 19th 2024.

Why Now?

Sometimes it takes a while before these things gain traction. Hyprland is now the biggest tiling window manager on Wayland and Hypr Cursor was recently recommended to replace XCursor which is badly out of date and frankly a terribly coded cursor system. Vaxry has become incredibly popular as he is a gifted programmer.

Who are these people?

Vaxry - Hyprland and Hypr Project Maintainer
Drew Devault - Sway Maintainer (Author of article: https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html)
Lyude - Redhat Employee and Freedesktop member (Contacted Vaxry inquiring about discord incidents 2 years old.)

Where to go from here?

Banning Vaxry means he can’t contribute to wlroots and keep putting patches which were very beneficial to wayland. He will still maintain and produce hyprland.