Why people are mad at Framework
On October 26, 2025 by Sosthène Guédon
This 9th of october, Hyprland's twitter account announced that they had received a financial contribution from Framework, a company building modular, repairable computers. Given Hyprland's messy history of being a toxic community people started publicly questioning Framework's decision. People also noticed that Framework's twitter account recently promoted Omarchy, a "distro" by DHH, a very controversial figure from the Ruby community. In this entry I will explain what happened, why Hyprland is still a toxic community, and why Framework's response to the controversy was disappointing.
What happened
The initial controversy
On October 8th 2025, Hyprland's twitter publicly thanked Framework for their monetary sponsor.
A day later, on Framework's community forum, starting a thread that reached more than 1500 responses user @anarcat raised concerns with regards to both Framework's choice to sponsor Hyprland and also Framework's repeated tweets in support of Omarchy.
Why Hyprland is controversial
Hyprland is a Wayland tiling compositor. For those who don't know what this is, it is (heavily simplified) a piece of software on Linux that makes application windows not overlap by default, and automatically "tiles" them so that they don't overlap. There are many such software in the Linux ecosystem, and Hyprland is known for being feature-packed, highly customisable, but also pretty complex and unstable. While it has a significant user base, it is still a niche within the overall Linux userbase, but benefits from a large visibility due to its fancy looks, and its very involved power-user community.
The problem that Hyprland is that its Discord community and its creator Vaxry have historically been very toxic, the main publicly known such event being in 2023 when a moderator in Hyprland's Discord forcibly changed the pronouns in someone's username from "they/she" to "who/cares" and prevented them from changing it back, as well as community welcoming hate and bigotry.
In his original post, @anarcat linked to Drew Devault article on this incident.
Why Omarchy is controversial
Omarchy is a Linux distribution made by David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails. Omarchy is essentially an installation script for Arch Linux that configures a bunch of software (including Hyprland), mostly in accordance to DHH's preferences. As such, Omarchy is a very niche and is closely related to DHH.
The real controversy is not about Omarchy as much as it is about DHH. DHH has a very abrasive personality and a blog, where you will regularly find racist, transphobic entries. @anarcat linked to Jake Lazaroff's excellent post on DHH .
Framework disappointing response
Soon after that post, Framework's CEO Nirav Patel responded to the concern. His main point was that Framework wanted to support the Open Source community as a whole, taking an "big-tent" approach that did not exclude people based on beliefs.
Many found this response disappointing. Building a community that includes everyone, including harrssers and racists, is most likely to push out anyone that these people harass and thus end up with a community of racists and harassers.
After many people shared their disappointment and continued to ask Framework to reverse course, Nirav Patel shared on Twitter that he is pro-immigrant and pro-LGBT (unlike DHH). Assuming this is sincere, this is misunderstanding why the people are mad. They don't think that Framework is a racist company, but people rightfully mad that Framework is legitimising and giving a platform to harrassers and racists by publicly supporting and funding them. The "big tent" approach means that being racist, homophobic, and supporting should not lead to a loss of business opportunity. It 100% should.
Framework published the list of their sponsorships
Seeing that the controversy did not die down, Framework published the list of their sponsorship. This led to even more questions, as it showed that RailsWorld (DHH's conference for Ruby on Rails, created after he was un-invited by RailsConf) was receiving significant contributions from Framework, and Hyprland received a lot of support compared to the much more widespread KDE and GNOME desktop environments, which are well established members of the Open Source community, that need the financial support, and don't have such a track record of hatred.
Saying nothing of their promotion of Omarchy on Twitter, they attempted to address the Hyprland controversy, saying that they were aware of the past controversies regarding the community and thought that sufficient moderation was added and that "the community as it currently stands does not represent the one in which the issues occurred".
I will show why thinking that the community is not toxic anymore is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Hyprland is still a toxic community
The original controversy
As I explained before, the original controversy was started after a moderator of Hyprland's Discord server acted transphobic. I will not go again over the details of this incident here. Drew Devault's blog summarises facts well. I will just add one thing. This incident is often talked about as if "the community" was toxic, but I want to point out the singular responsibility of Vaxry, Hyperland's creator and to this day still its number 1 contributor, with 11 times more commits and 7 times more lines of code added that the project's second contributor1.
Vaxry actively took part in the spread of hateful comments in Hyprland's Discord server. He is responsible for the toxicity of the community he created, and still animates.
There was a later controversy, leading to Vaxry getting banned from the Freedesktop project (which hosts a lot of projects and defines standards Deskop Linux). Drew Devault once again resumes the facts, but we can see that Vaxry expects that his behaviour in public spaces he created should never lead to consequences to him outside of said places. He does not care that this kind of history legitimately makes people uneasy to be around him.
Hyprland's moderation changes
After the controversy, Vaxry decided to overhaul the moderation of the Discord server. It is beyond me how anyone could read his announcements of the changes and think that they would be applied in a way that could actually make it into a safe space. In his blog posts regarding the moderation changes2, he shows no understanding or remorse regarding the harm his behaviour can do. Even worse, he explicitly states that "calling another person a retard shouldn't really be a big deal" and complains about "how seemingly weak people online, [..], have become". Vaxry was forced to change, but still hates having to do so.
I don't understand how this can be considered enough by Framework.
Still, I had previously never been on Hyprland's Discord, so I hopped in to see how it was. While it's not as bad as it used to be, it's still far from a healthy community. The moderation changes happened in 2023, but you can still find insulting uses of the word "retard" dating well after that. You can also find some very questionable jokes from 2 months ago. I don't think this moderator (sorry, actual chad according to the role names) is mistakenly typing the ISO 639-3 language code for Ngalakan:
Vaxry still shows toxic behaviour
Regarding Vaxry specifically, he still shows very toxic behaviour, especially on Twitter.
Here he is spreading manosphere/incel talking points:
- https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1909936616157942029
- https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1955303295636938866 It seems that Framework's big tent welcomes people that would make a lot of women very uncomfortable.
It appears that he still hasn't changed in private, calling people retard and being ableist:
- https://mastodon.social/@acidiclight/115348200226656321
- Obviously, he regularly tweets in support of DHH, but also promoted Bryan Lunduke, a controversial figure of the same grade as DHH:
Regarding DHH and Omarchy
I don't think I have more to say than what has already been said regarding DHH in the following posts:
- Jake Lazaroff's excellent post on DHH: DHH is way worse that I thought
- Tekin's post: The Ruby community has a DHH problem (this post also has a couple of links worth reading at the end)
- The Plan-Vert Open Letter, which proves at the very least, that DHH fails as leader of a project such as Ruby on Rails and only leads to division in the community.
I will just state a couple of things:
- Banning political speech in a company only means banning speech that challenge the boss's worldview, because the boss's worldview will be the default assumption of what is not political and just the way things are.
- Caring about rape only when it's done by foreigners and when the victims are from a majoritarly white country makes you racist.
If you think that the Omarchy community is not as toxic as Hyprland, this is the kind of "jokes" you can find on their Discord server.
Oh, and also casual racism:
Omarchy is also not a real Linux distribution
Real Linux distributions have standards with regards to packaging, security and distribution, to ensure the stability and security of their users' systems. Omarchy does none of that.
It downloads software through curl <url> | sh regularly instead of using proper packaging practices that can be kept up to date efficiently, and does so even when packages are available (such as for tailscale, rustup and more).
When it does package stuff, it does so without any basic signing, using debugging options to disable package signing.
Omarchy is not a Linux distribution. It's just an installer for DHH's dotfiles.
Arch Linux also does not officially support such forks that include custom repos. The Wiki and code of conduct of Arch Linux specifically states that such arch-based distributions should have their own support forums and documentation, which means that the Arch forums and Wiki will not provide explicit support for the kind of weirdness that arises from Omarchy's configurations.
Framework removed my post from their forums
As I was seeing the controversy unfold, I looked a bit myself and shared some of my findings on the forum threads.
I was not sure what to think of the controversy. What made my mind was when the staff removed my post without justification:
The two screenshots in the message were the one showing Vaxry's homophobia and the White Supremacy joke from Omarchy's server.
Nothing in this post is innapropriate, outside of discussions that come from communities Framework actively supports. This made my mind.
What Framework could have done
In the name of "supporting the open source community", Framework decided to sponsor a niche window manager from a toxic developer at the same rate they sponsor other projects with a much wider scope and many more users, and to promote the poorly implemented Arch Linux installation script of a known racist, who's proven to not be a good leader for the rails community, leading to a split. These sponsors are clearly not for the good of the open source community, and are only going to lead to more division and more people feeling unsafe in open source communities.
I don't think that these using these projects is itself bad, and I don't expect people to hide it. But funding, and promoting their developpers most certainly feels like it is.
After the controversy first erupted, it would have been fairly easy for Framework to calm things down. They could have explained that they did not realise the extent of the harm especially of DHH, and would refrain in the future from promoting Omarchy and DHH. I think the Hyprland sponsorship alone would not have lead to such a controversy (though it still is not a good look).
Given their significant contributions to RailsWorld, which was born out of a DHH controversy, it seems most likely that they were aware of DHH's character and didn't think it was an issue.
It doesn't seem like they will accept that they made a mistake, but they appear to have stopped tweeting about Omarchy. We'll see in the future if they keep sponsoring RailsWorld or not, and if they up their contributions to other players in the Desktop Linux world that don't have such a history of hatred, but I'm not very hopeful.
I don't think piling on with public posts about such topics is a really ever a productive endeavour. Usually I would just not touch such communities and warn people only when the topic comes up, but the fact that Framework's staff removed my post on their forum thread seems significant to share.
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: According to GitHub's statistics ↩
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: There are multiple of them:
- https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandsCommunity
- https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-hyprlandCommunityChanges
- https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists