Framework under fire for Omarchy/DHH/Hyprland support?

You might’ve noticed Framework, the laptop manufacturer, embroiled in a controversy as of now. The Discord server is on lockdown because the volunteer moderation team has gone on hiatus, and the Framework forum post about the controversy has been gaining unsightly amounts of steam from people disappointed at actions taken by Framework.

live Framework community reaction

A little context about my involvement - I’ve been in the Framework community since 2022, doing third-party hardware development and helping others’ projects in the same vein. I’ve also been using a Framework since then, recently upgraded to an AMD board from the 11th gen offering. In general, I’ve been an advocate for Framework’s laptops and mission, in both professional and private circles, given my Framework to others for test-drives, contributed to documentation, and have been the cause for multiple people getting their own Framework laptops.

As of end of 2023, I’ve had to shutter my general electronics work, and Framework third-party hardware dev, due to burnout exacerbated by health issues. Thankfully, that seems to be at least partially behind me, and I was looking forward to rejoining the community in full force. This expectation is one of the most disappointing things for me about the current situation.

Recently, I’ve noticed consistent support for Omarchy on Framework social media, specifically, Twitter, as forwarded into the Framework discord channel #social-media, which is one of the few Framework Discord channels I follow. I didn’t know what Omarchy was, so I thought it must be yet another user-friendly distribution, and paid it no mind.

As Framework social media support for Omarchy ramped up, I started seeing Omarchy mentioned in negative light, both on the Framework Discord server, and on unrelated servers, brought up often in connection to Framework. Given that I’ve been vocally pro-Framework, I’ve also had multiple people derisively mention the Framework’s affinity to Omarchy to me personally. Surprised, I eventually started asking people and looking up myself, what’s the low-down on Omarchy, and was puzzled to learn that Omarchy is more or less a set of dotfiles/scripts for Arch, the main and biggest problem about them being the loud and visible “by DHH” label.

Now, I’ve also heard that DHH is a despicable person, but people say all sorts of stuff, you always gotta check for yourself. The problem was, I’ve already heard about DHH before, and I did check back then.

The DHH (D-HH?) part

Without mincing words - DHH is prolific at espousing white nationalist and eugenicist views with a pseudointellectual slant, while trying to pretend he’s doing something else. There’s been no shortage of posts where his views and behaviour are either detailed, or mentioned as playing a major role in events destabilizing the open-source software community. Mind you, I’ve learned about him from an unrelated incident on my social feed months before it, because his views seem to have been splitting the Ruby community apart that badly, too.

Being opinionated isn’t a virtue, and it’s easy to fall into hubris, as DHH’s posting demonstrates.

I want to get something out of the way first - DHH’s writing is not just espousing white nationalism, transphobia, or eugenics, although from what I and others have seen, it’s doing all of those things. To my eye as a writer, it also appears to be written for a gullible audience.

I decided to check the quality of his writing on matters like ADHD, a topic I’ve recently intensively looked into. The best way I could describe it is shlock from a high-horse viewpoint that hits ideological points without attempting to engage with reality as scientifically observed, diagnostic standards as applied by medical professionals, or the large variety of tangible markers that led the scientific community to designate ADHD as a specific condition with specific symptoms. It boils down to “ADHD gives me the ick, and these few lines from DSM-5 seem sus to me. Differential diagnosis? Brain chemistry differences? idk, stop taking drugs lmao they’re bad mmkay”.

In modern terms, DHH is a yapper, parroting topics currently in circulation by a far-right media machine, and I say this because as much as his ADHD views are bullshit, they are not novel, I’ve heard them before, as far as 20 years ago for the ADHD one, and it just so happens that it’s getting reheated and served as of semi-recently. Being a yapper isn’t a crime, neither is saying lots of bullshit, but it does tend to earn you large amounts of derision. Given the radical stances DHH outwardly takes with no care in the world, this is exactly what has been happening.

The Framework part

If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-right-political company like Framework. Does it get worse from here? Sadly, it does.

There has been an outstanding amount of Omarchy highlights on Framework social media within the past month, if not longer. No other distribution seems to have received similar amounts of social media support, and for all its obscurity, Omarchy was all the more noticeable. From a quick check, the Omarchy-DHH links were extremely visible.

Naturally, it does not help that Omarchy is very visibly branded “by DHH”. It also doesn’t help that the DHH Ruby community drama got big enough to a point where you could learn about it through ambient non-political feed scrolling, just like I did. From a quick social media comment check, Framework social media amounts have received replies talking about DHH being a liability under their Omarchy posts, but they don’t appear to have reacted in any way.

At some point recently, the Framework-DHH connection has started boiling over on social media, and became a discourse Topic - together with Hyprland. Apart from general social media backlash, it boiled over into a Framework forum thread called “Framework supporting far-right racists?”. Blunt, but I find it hard to dispute the sentiment. Since I didn’t mention Hyprland before, here’s a little bit about it.

Already over a month ago, Omarchy posting in Framework discord elicited a reaction colloquially known as “you posted cringe”.

The Hyprland part, in short

Hyprland’s main developer and face, Vaxry, got under fire some time ago, for his and others’ posts in Hyprland community, targeting trans people and other minority groups. Generally, the Hyprland community’s low social standards have been a sticking point for Hyprland users for a while, even before the controversy. Just like with Framework, the controversy point was reached after long-standing community member dissatisfaction finally boiled over.

As of this time, when the Framework forum thread got published, a member of an affected group who did her own research, has asked around and found that , apparently, Vaxry has gotten way better at keeping Hyprland community clean from harassment and has led to creating a better, no-nonsense atmosphere for vulnerable people since then.

From her assessment, Hyprland’s community has improved significantly and is “on a positive trend”:

Hyprland’s community is on a positive trend, I wouldn’t consider them like shiny beacon good or anything just yet, but they’ve made positive changes that’re uncommon to see. I still have question marks personally and some previous incidents are really just Not Good™, but I’m willing to at least offer them the benefit of the doubt, given how things seem to be nowadays. it’s a kinda, watch these guys for 5 years deal

I trust her words on that, and if this is true, I don’t think Framework’s Hyprland sponsorship is anywhere as big of a deal as support for Omarchy/DHH.

That said, due to factors like negative bias, I can’t in good faith blame people for being disappointed by a Hyprland sponsorship, especially if last they’ve heard of Hyprland is the community controversy - even if I personally wouldn’t go that far with the information that I have now. I also can’t exactly blame people for not wanting if they have been personally affected by the situation, or simply if they give it more weight than I do, given how outstanding of a community management failure this was compared to standards upheld by other modern open-source software communities.

From what I’ve seen, the main problem people have is the DHH/Omarchy support, with Hyprland support taking the back seat in terms of severity. This reflects thoroughly in the thread, and even in the OP, way more text is dedicated to DHH, so I don’t think that Hyprland support warrants more explanation than this; most of my post is written concerning Omarchy/DHH support specifically.

The Framework part - part 2

The Framework CEO response has centered on “building a big tent”. It’s been received as an underwhelming one. I think there’s multiple reasons to this.

First one I can point out personally, is the sheer amount of PR and otherwise support given to highlighting Omarchy - I’m personally certain that this situation would’ve been 100% avoided if the Framework social media simply mentioned Omarchy less. Omarchy and DHH are well understood to be pretty inseparable, as illustrated, you simply need to look up “Omarchy” online.

Compared to other Linux distributions Framework supports, this is outstanding, and Omarchy’s otherwise notable obscurity helped Framework shine an otherwise unprecedented light on it. With DHH having been mentioned so widely in tech news, this issue boiling over was a matter of time.

Another one is heightened political tensions in the Western world, doubly so in English-speaking media, and growing polarization against far-right figures, both in political world and in tech. Framework as a company doesn’t map onto the left-right spectrum, right to repair generally does not - I’d argue that this is to everyone’s benefit. Given this environment, outwardly supporting “OMARCHY by DHH”, aka “${PROJECT} by ${FAR_RIGHT_FIGURE}” who’s already highly controversial in tech communities and in the spotlight as of recent, is objectively a misstep, and a waste of goodwill. Unless Framework aimed to get this sort of publicity, that is, which I doubt.

Then there’s the “Nazi bar” problem. Any skilled online community moderators will tell you - far-right people engage in a variety of socially underhanded tactics to gain a foothold in online communities, and it can be costly to root them out. The internet is old enough that a great deal of people have seen this happen to online communities, ruining or splitting them.

Why does this matter?

A notable far-right presence inevitably results in the community becoming repulsive to a large part of its core audience. It’s happened on Usenet, DC++, IRC, Skype, PHPbb forums, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and it will keep happening in the future.

tfw you’ve seen this happen before

This is why you won’t see any socially-recognizable degree of far-right thought expressed openly in any of the big open-source communities; far-right people are present, but they know their views to be sufficiently repulsive to people around them, and people know to clamp down instinctively on this and other anti-social behaviours. It’s not a great existence for people who need to hide their views, sure, and it can lead to further polarization in some cases, but you genuinely can’t blame other people for being cautious of verifiably corrosive behaviour. It’s a mechanism of social change that does verifiably work a lot of the time, and it helps people focus on the tech rather than the anti-social nonsense someone decided to start talking about.

(If you’re wondering, yeah, that’s just a thing that happens - which is how you have projects like Xlibre started by people whose previous claim to fame is getting themselves chewed out by Linus Torvalds because they posted anti-vaccine rants unprompted to the Linux kernel mailing list.)

The “big tent” claim, overlaid on with Framework’s outstanding promotion of Omarchy, looks cartoonishly reckless in this light. People don’t want this for Framework, and they’re cautious to distance themselves because they’ve seen other projects claim to be a “big tent”, only for the tent to catch on fire, melt, and shrink under everyone’s feet, because nobody used a fire extinguisher when it was early enough to do so.

It also does explain the volunteer Framework server moderation team going on hiatus - moderating becomes a whole different beast when your community is made to overlap with another community of an explicitly far-right-led project. In other words, moderation becomes hell if you need start filtering out crypto-fash trying to start shit, as opposed to normal everyday people problems you’d normally deal with. Checking the server logs, the DHH problem has been brought up many times by this point.

What does this imply?

The above, as below, is my personal observations and others’ observations boiled down in a hopefully accessible form. Here’s what I feel comfortable saying about the implications of the Framework/Omarchy/DHH situation, helped by my background.

Sadly, I see this as a net negative for the project. I’ve read through the (by now 900+ message) thread a couple times, checked other social media platforms, and I have seen such situations unfold in the past. Given what I have seen before and what I see now, I’d conclude that this situation hurts Framework’s standing with “one” side of the political spectrum more than it helps get support from the “opposing” one.

I’ve argued in favour of buying Framework for a while now, ever since I got one. One point I’ve consistently encountered is that Framework’s hardware is not the best bang for the buck. This has been hard to dispute for me - and, I didn’t pick Framework for its hardware performance, either. Framework’s repairability mission instead calls for socially conscious consumption, at a projected tangible benefit to yourself later on. In other words, if you buy Framework, you contribute towards a world where devices are not designed with planned obsolescence in mind, even if it does visibly hurt your wallet more than a similar-specs computer from Lenovo does.

It makes sense that Framework’s audience has a sizeable portion of people who apply those principles of social consciousness to other political (objectively, not just commonly-discussed “political”) topics, too. For those people, it’s jarring to see Framework fervently promote a project so tightly coupled and benefitting a far-right figure. I’ll personally add - much less one whose actions and reckless/unskilled advocacy result in worse outcomes for open-source software, too. It turns out people have heaps of reasons to really dislike the guy.

Hard to defend,

Now, recommending Framework on social consciousness grounds has a sudden and significant risk for me, because if someone replies with “well yeah but they do support far-right people”, I am put on the spot with no good argument apart from pretending I didn’t know (aka lying), and it makes me look like an asshole for even suggesting it.

Hardware issues, I could defend from my own laptop repair and electronics development background. Customer support issues, I could defend less, but it was still viable. To this, the only response is possible seems to be “…Yeah” and changing the topic, which obviously makes it a non-starter. In Fallout New Vegas terms, I don’t have the Speech skill for this kind of speech check, and looking through the thread, people defending Framework’s decision don’t have them, either.

Basically, I have no counterargument to offer if someone shuts down a Framework pitch on Omarchy/DHH support grounds, and it’d put me on defense in a way hard to counter or even foresee. This makes it hard for me to even start persuading people who’d normally be easy enough to persuade to consider Framework for their next laptop, again, socially conscious mission and all. This is no Tesla situation, but to put it simply, I’d struggle recommending it.

One another thing Framework looks out to get is a decrease in volunteer support. I have to say that Framework is notable in their support for the project’s volunteers, which is a smart decision for a product with a socially conscious mission. I’d expect at least some people to stick around, purely on the project’s merits. Currently, it does not seem to pan out well, however as far as the volunteer moderation team is concerned - though, again, they have their own very reasonable concerns about overlapping the audience with the Omarchy circles.

and honestly just sad.

For me, this is disappointing. I see it as a boneheaded move that I think was bound to boil over, and I don’t think could’ve been taken any other way once it did boil over. I think it could’ve been very easily avoided, too. The laptops are nice, the mission is commendable, and I was looking forward to doing more with them. It’s really that this action overshadows way too much for many people for barely any benefit in sight. Likewise, it overshadows a ton of Framework’s recent contributions to open-source infrastructure, too.

Sadly, I’m experienced enough to know that openly working with a project intentionally overlapping itself with a far-right audience, even slightly, comes with heaps of negative side effects, directly caused by the ways in which far-right people behave. From the looks of it, plenty of other people are experienced enough to know better, too.