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Anti-Wayland-horseshit.md (2886B)

---
title: I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit
date: 2021-02-02
outputs: [html, gemtext]
---

What do anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers, and anti-Wayland activism
all have in common? All of them are characterized by a blithe rejection of facts
to embrace a narrative of victimization by a vague authority. In the case of
Wayland, the "vague authority" are a bunch of volunteers who have devoted tens
of thousands of hours of their free time towards making free shit for you.
"Wayland sucks!" is a conspiracy theory with no basis in truth, and its
supporters have spent years harassing Wayland maintainers, contributors, and
users. And it's time for it to fucking stop.

Maybe Wayland doesn't work for your precious use-case. More likely, it *does*
work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have
been correct 7 years ago. Regardless, I simply don't give a shit about you
anymore. I've tried appealing to reason and rationally debunking each lie that
some Wayland detractor flavor-of-the-week is touting to tow the party line, but
it didn't work. So my new approach is "fuck you". None of the Wayland detractors
have a clue. They don't understand Wayland, they don't understand X11, they
don't understand Linux graphics or OpenGL or Vulkan or anything else in the
stack. They don't even understand what it's like to use Wayland, because at most
they might have spent 5 minutes installing it, realized that something was
— gasp — *different* than X11, and then uninstalled it and wrote
their angry Reddit comment.

It has a real cost, you know, being a dick to maintainers. It's not good for our
mental health. We're out here trying to make things better. Wayland fixes
unfixable problems with X11, and might have invented some new, fixable problems
in the process — most of which have been fucking fixed already, and years
ago! We've sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn
around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories,
then you're a fucking asshole.

If you really want to live in your propagandized world of Wayland lies, then
fine. You're gonna maintain Xorg yourself, because we're not going to volunteer
our time, sacrifice our weekends and evenings staying up late for your sake,
just to maintain that broken pile of shit. You know what, if you fork it and
prove that you know what you're doing for a while, we'd probably just give you
the keys to upstream so you can maintain it yourself. If you do know what you're
doing, though, you'll soon realize you want nothing to do with that shitty
codebase.

Wayland works for almost everyone, and works for *more* people than is even
possible with X11. Most of the lies you've heard about ways that it's broken are
just that: lies. And if you insist on living in that fantasy, then keep it to
yourself, asshole.