Six days ago, upgradeable laptop maker Framework tried to convince its fractious user community to live in a “big tent” after a Debian developer objected to the company’s sponsorship of Hyprland and its social media promotion of Omarchy, with both projects associated with politically polarizing viewpoints.
Antoine Beaupré, aka anarcat, demanded that Framework clarify its political position with regard to these two projects.
Hyprland, a Wayland compositor, is led by a “toxic and hateful community,” Beaupré observed, and Omarchy, a Linux distribution, comes from David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), a controversial figure in the Ruby and Linux communities.
The problem here isn’t that Framework failed to keep track of the ideology espoused by every major developer on the projects they contributed to or endorsed, which, to be honest, isn’t something I’d expect of them. The problem (as usual for a corporation) is how they handled complaints. Trying to sweep stuff under the rug in the Internet age just results in someone setting the rug on fire. If instead, Framework’s response had been “We’re sorry, we didn’t know, we won’t give money or free advertising to any projects this guy is involved with from now on,” the whole mess would have died down by now except for a few people grumbling about how they should do more research before sending money out.
Context for those OOTL
DHH Is Way Worse Than I Thought
DHH: “London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.”
Author: It turns out that when DHH says “native Brits”, he’s specifically referring to white Brits. That’s why it’s “a statistic as clear as day when you walk the streets of London”: it’s his coy way of saying that too many of the 59% of Londoners born and raised in the UK are not white.
So if David means “white Brits”, why doesn’t he just say that? Why bother with the innuendo Because complaining that there aren’t enough white people sounds weird and racist! David bristles at that label, but there’s a reason he’s hiding behind euphemisms rather than just saying what he means. Most people don’t go around thinking “boy, all these Black and Asian people make this city so much worse.”
not “polarizing”. nazis are unacceptable for all reasonable people, right?
hate this manipulative language.
There’s a scene in The Good Place where they find nobody goes to heaven anymore because every act they do, no matter how much they’re trying to do good, has a lot of negative baggage attached which nobody could track and that counts as a sin of the person anyway.
That old dude getting bullied by the kid was pretty impactful for me. I felt like going full TJ Miller in silicone valley and slapping the little shit and telling him to get me some Adderall.
DHH is such a shit heel.
I don’t even understand what the article said! Bro we are cooked so bad with politics.
Yeah, cause people like you want to pretend that everything isn’t political.
Enjoy your modular laptop with the Nazi takeover. So glad you’re above it all. Tell us the aromatic profile of your flatulence again.
Relax men! I put limit on politics and where I use it, because on the end I will have no life.
Politics in my [insert literally fuckin anything]? It’s more likely than you think!
everything is political. anyone who says different is shitting themselves or selling you something.
That was literally the point lol
i wasnt disagreeing with you
being kind is actually not political. By definition if someone hates people for anything other than what they do or say… then its the person who creates the political cloud.
I’m amazed that they haven’t backtracked this yet. They’re just cool losing all those customers.
TL;DR for just updates since the initial story: Basically say that they believe Hyprland cleaned up after having an initial problem and totally ignores all the stuff about DHH, despite that seeming to be the biggest problem people had with what they’ve been doing.
The weird thing for me is the financial support coming from Framework to Hyprland. It would be one thing if Framework was working with Hyprland to test compatibility and functionality on their machines and do specialized bug testing. They could kind of justify that from a purely technical stance.
But the fact that they picked a very niche project for no apparent reason to support with a significant monthly financial contribution is so strange. There are numerous other niche distros/projects that aren’t mired in controversy that Framework could have worked with, (Alpine, Void, ElementaryOS, etc.) so why Hyprland/Omarchy?
Very disappointed. I’ve been pushing Framework computers very strongly for friends and family over the last year, plus I’ve been planning on getting one to replace my aging Thinkpad. Now I am going to hold off until the dust settles on this.
Omarchy uses Hyprland, so I guess they started by promoting Omarchy and maybe DHH asked them to sponsor Hyprland
Supporting Hyprland definitely looks like a mistake, they weren’t aware of what went on around there.
They probably should have gone with supporting Niri and maybe Cosmic instead.
I agree, but then why would they not retracted their support? If it really was an honest mistake and they weren’t aware of the situation, I would think they would apologize, explain that they didn’t know, pull their support, and issue a statement about the kinds of values they want to promote in the FOSS world.
But instead, they have doubled down, the CEO himself. It’s very strange and concerning.
Sort of.
They basically said they didn’t know about the issues with hyprland, they recently looked into them and to them in looks like hyprland has changed enough to be supported.
But, they were silent on the DHH. That part is the serious concern.
Yes, them not saying anything why they support that hiterlite scum is quite concerning. I think the CEO is just mad he got caught trying to startup a Nazi bar
I’ll admit I’m not up to date on the hyprland/vaxry lore – but I don’t understand the level of outrage based on this article…
I’m also not sure why the sponsorship of a software project is necessarily being treated as a 100% endorsement of both the maintainers and their alleged views.
I’m also not sure if infighting and purity testing will help the movement(s) right now. Once it’s the norm, sure, but it’s still a relatively fringe movement within the industry.
Edit (2025-10-15@20:14): At the time of writing my comment, I was both unaware (and uninformed) on the DHH side of this topic. While I still think the level of outrage is maybe a melodramatic, the push back seems more warranted than it initially seemed to me. I still don’t know much about DHH beyond Rails (and even then, not much); but from what I’ve seen since my comment, the response is more understandable.
Most of the discourse was about Omarchy/DHH, not just Hyprland, though that was a part of it. It is not purity testing to block people who don’t work well with others or are hateful like DHH from a community. If you want to bring people who want us dead into a community then everyone else is going to leave
The main problem is
- Np contributed to and glazes Omarchy
- People wonder why DHH was sponsored with hardware
- Generic response about “big tent” ideology to include everyone - including racists and transphobes like DHH
- People are upset because they don’t want to be in a Nazi Bar
- NP makes twitter post about how people want to ascribe values to him he doesn’t hold, that he’s pro immigrant and pro lgbt
- Np responds in forum thread that they reviewed hyprland and determined that theyd improved their moderation and were ok to sponsor (monetarily)
- Framework responds they’ll make a blog post clarifying their sponsorships
- Blog post coincidentally excludes omarchy
- People question it and basically just get a “we will get that updated” response
- I still dont see it there
You cant claim to be pro immigrant and pro lgbt when you actively invite white supremacists and transphobes into the community and then try to avoid responsibility for that by not commenting or not retracting support or not clarifying how you’d avoid it going forward
The project may not be political (it is) but the people who use and support the project definitely are. If you want to kick out the community by inviting Nazis, then all that will be left once those people leave will be nazis. And if you knowingly collaborate with Nazis, you are a nazi.
The main problem is […]
I’ll admit, I only vaguely know of DHH by name and Rails, vaguely remember the Omarchy announcement, and that’s about it. I seem to recall Prime referencing DHH’s controversial opinions, but I can’t say I’ve gone any deeper than that.
If the discourse really is primarily focused on DHH/Omarchy, then I guess I just misunderstood this post/title & the article…or just don’t have the full context regardless.
You’re right, we should let it build up fascist momentum and then change it from within later
I love how they always portray projects like this as “politically polarizing”. You look inside and it’s always just plain old not-polarizing misogyny. Really shows where this “news” outlets stand.
I don’t buy from fascist supporters if I can help it. Screw Framework
People here complaining about purity testing even though really it’s just poison testing.
The standard isn’t even if it’s pure in ideology it’s to test is not poisonous.
Here‘s my take as a relatively tech savvy guy with no introspective into the Linux scene and its political affiliation: I’ll buy framework products because of the repairability and upgradability as long as I can run whatever I want on it.
Most consumers that are sustainability minded (like myself) have no clue what hyprland or omarchy is.
I’m sure it’s a big deal within a small niche but the average consumer won’t know or care.
But now that you are aware but you choose to bury your head in the sand. Okay…
We already know people like you already made up your mind. What’s the point of this comment? Was this post going to stop you?
To be honest i just read some abbreviations and terms i dont understand and I really do not have the time to go down the rabbit hole.
I just wanted to add a viewpoint to the discussion that the potential commercial target group larger is than the bubble in which some of the people here seem to be. I find this legitimate.
I would agree if they weren’t FUNDING Nazis. That’s coming out of the cost of your laptop buddy
Wait is Vaxry really a fascist? I always got weird vibes over on discord server( I was one of the earliest adapters to Hyprland). I did hear some transphobic allegations, but I thought that was it and Vaxry went on to implement stricter moderation?
If so, that really sucks. Hyprland is probably the best Wayland Window manager.
Cool well if they did lmk if this is a fake controversy
