This is a truly WTF moment about messed up responses to X11 session removal in Gnome.
2 weeks ago I published a blogpost about the upcoming plans of GNOME 49 and the eventual removal of the X11 session. Since then, instead of looking at feedback, bugs and issues related to the topic, we all collectively had to deal with the following, and I am not exaggerating one bit:
- Fascists and Nazis
- Wild Conspiracy Theories that make Qanon jealous
- “Concerned” Trolling about the Accessibility of the Wayland session
- A culture war where Wayland is Gay, and X11 is the glorious past they stole from you
In my wildest dreams I could have never made this shit up. You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on.
As a commenter on that post says, this sort of talk is also common in the comments of Phoronix articles. The commenter says they’ve completely stopped supporting Phoronix since it’s clear that Michael enables this behavior by not moderating it (the least he could do is disable commenting; the type of people that are in the Phoronix comments are the absolute worst). It’s been festering for a very long time, unfortunately. Click any Phoronix article that’s older than a day and check the negativity. Worse, click an article about a controversial topic like X11/Wayland/Systemd/bcachefs/KDE/GNOME/etc. and it’s just a shitshow.
I’ve been seeing it to a lesser degree here as well. I don’t know what it is about X11 that really riles up the conspiracy theorists.
The only thing I miss about X11 is xscreensaver. I hope the dev makes a port for wayland one day. I dont care if it ever has screen locking, i just want bouncing cows.
YES. Phoronix articles are good but the comment sections are insane. There are a few very vocal users that would have been banned on any reasonably moderated forum, and they largely chase out the reasonable people.
Also, occasionally there is an article about CoC or something that is obviously going to bring the loonies out of the woodwork. The comment section will get closed, but not until after the giant flamewar has gone on for a bit. Michael has to know that’s going to happen and make the decision not to close it immediately when he makes the post.