TechTakes

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.