Skip Navigation
86 comments

  • Many things in a FOSS ecosystem will sooner or later confront you with one hard truth:

    The program you're using was not developed for you.

    It was developed because the creator saw a problem and wanted to fix it. Then they made a program to fix it and stopped refining the program the moment they were content with it. Little to no consideration for other users or mass-adoption. Which is fine, they developed it, it's their time.
    But it also means that you will frequently be confronted with things that are objectively unintuitive and unreasonable from a new user's perspective because they make sense from a developer's perspective. The former will always be outranked by the latter, even though there will always be more users than developers. Unfortunately that's just how it is. There are some few exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

    • This is a great explanation. I started an open source project that was reasonably popular because I was off for two weeks and had a problem I wanted to solve. Before those two weeks were up, I had completed everything I set out to do. I didn’t really expect anyone else to use it or care. But they did, and over the next 2-3 years I burned myself out testing different distro configurations, debating with people on mailing lists on other projects that affected mine, responding to hundreds or thousands of issues that came in, coordinating language translations, reviewing pull requests, etc. I kept going thinking that maybe it would look good on my resume or lead to work in the future, but the only person in an interview that had heard of it told me he disagreed with its existence!

      Even though I had total control of the project, it was so hard to keep my original vision in place. Should I turn down an incredibly ingenious pull request because it didn’t fit my original vision, even though many other people will use it? But if I accept it, it’s another complexity to maintain. What about a pull request that meets a lot of goals but is only half way there in terms of implementation - do I take my time to finish that? Some of the people arguing in the ecosystem were paid employees of Canonical, Microsoft or some other entity that seemingly had nothing to do all day but try to bend projects to their will. I really had no time left to deal with my own interests in improving the project.

      I know this is a long rant, but many of the projects in the Linux ecosystem are maintained by people in a similar situation. It’s pretty amazing that it’s as cohesive as it is.

  • Social media addiction comes from frustration toward the devices people are using, and so does, more often than not, free software/open source advocacy.

    Social media addicts could then learn to use better tools, especially GNU Emacs (which is diametrically opposed to social media, in the best way), but they generally stay addicted so it's hard to find a decent, drama free online FLOSS/hacker community.

    Furthermore, whereas free software advocates generally use better tools, open source advocates are, frankly, grotesque at times, and certainly won't tell people they'll prefer to increase productivity metrics over fostering wellness and democracy, leading among other things people to confuse FLOSS with e.g. hacking or permacomputing and to speak on behalf of things they won't understand.

    The onboarding process of libre software development is generally mediocre, not internationalized (Guix is an exception), and i18n of decent graphic tools (e.g. Linux Mint, which I wholeheartedly recommend) is rather new, so FLOSS communities (which need top notch IT infrastructure if anything to maintain and fix their machines) generally aren't up to date yet, and won't be for years because most of us use Mastodon anyway. This results in pedantic circlejerks about the CLI and I'm not even talking about sustained patterns of messaging on anonymous forums fostering depression among our communities, because our existence is a threat to Google and Microsoft (and to any kind of wannabe dictator – Putin, Bannon, your local right-wing representative, and so on).

    As a symptom of that mess, Linux users on Mastodon (who generally aren't FLOSS activists) will basically catcall people into deleting their whole drive and installing Linux with FDE or into dual booting, even if our backup/restore programs are excellent. We still see installing Linux as a long-term commitment and not as something going along the lines of “let's backup your drive with Syncthing and install Linux Mint, we'll keep in touch if you want to get back on Windows”. Instead of taking a shower (metaphorically) and leading by the example by thriving IRL with a decent beginners-friendly distribution, we'll get ready to ask questions like “do you want a source-based or binary distro?”, “what do you think about rolling releases?”, or “do you really want to use glib/systemd?”, as if anything – any volunteer work – our pedantic quest for moral purity would hold in low esteem wasn't vastly superior to any 30-SLOCs snippet extracted from the Windows source code.

    Simply put, if you want to install Linux you're gonna want to look for AFK user groups, have a depression mitigation plan, and consider everything a self-claimed “FLOSS activist” will tell you online as a tragic and suicidal projection of digital (+ AFK) abuse.

    Besides that, there are many great female Linux influencers and one of them has rightly said that since she wasn't paying for software on Windows, everything she used had a better alternative on Linux. The Linux Mint UX is just better IMHO and the bugs, honestly, are rare and quickly fixed (whereas some Windows laptops will predictably disconnect from wifi networks, for years).

  • the vast majority of my work software is windows/mac (although the expensive software I wish I could afford just added linux support in 2022). that's the big one for me. on a smaller note i haven't checked on my games since, i mean if i'm going to have to run a windows box i might as well take advantage of the plusses, but i understand there is significantly worse compatibility on linux.

  • I can give you my experience so far, seeing as the common criticisms of Linux usually boil down to unwillingness to try it as well as kernel level anticheat and Adobe products, and I....honestly don't miss either of them, but I'm mostly a dev and a single player games enjoyer, so not much to miss, really.

    The speakers on my Razer blade laptop (running EndeavourOS, btw) stopped working randomly, but I'm not convinced it wasn't my fault since I did have to work on the laptop internals for unrelated reasons and might have screwed something up.

    My webcam on my desktop, a Logitech Brio, has been acting up as of a couple of weeks on Bazzite, where the microphone keeps kinda dying and I have to unplug/re-plug the webcam to have a working mic. Also the audio quality on my Sony XM5s keeps changing to shitty quality, mostly when I do the re-plugging of the webcam, but it's happened at random times before. Gotta go change the codec on the audio settings every now and then due to it.

    Monitor brightness can sometimes behave weirdly, not going back to a brighter setting after auto-dimming.

    Games with kernel anticheat don't let me play online.

    This has mostly been it, to be honest. There's a microscopic learning curve for Bazzite since it's immutable, so I have flatpaks for most stuff, and "figure it out" for anything else, but other than that, it's just better than Windows ever was. If you run into an issue, you're most likely going to be able to solve it with a quick online search or by consulting the eldritch hallucinations of OpenAI or of your choosing.

86 comments