Most saddening of all is that the legitimate and valid communal focused ideology that the old guard purports to hold up - is actually being lived and expressed by the corporations those same people would argue are capturing the ecosystem. The guys out there with big Che Guevara energy are the real ones building and perpetuating a misery machine fueled by your ideology and nothing else. [...]
This is incontrovertible fact you can only fail to see if, to you, Linux is not the democratization of technology but instead the intimate satisfaction of init scripts sliding up your butthole in just the right way.
You cannot ever lose sight of who we as technologists are here to serve. Moms who don't know or care what the hell an init system is. Normal gamers who just want to chill and play Overwatch with their friends. Young children inspired by the genuinely good ideas of our forefathers that this ideological nonsense eventually will scare out of the community. That's the real loss behind all this. Every time you succumb to the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem and tell some poor clueless kid that can't run a bash script yet that he should run Mint on his gaming desktop because it's "stable" - that's one more person that inevitably decides we're all fucking crazy and never comes back and spends the rest of their lives telling everyone they know that Linux is hard and confusing when it hasn't been either of those things for years. [...]
This not only drives users away, but inevitably it discredits the positions of every single Linux enthusiast on Earth in the eyes of normal people. In many cases it's simply impossible to argue that Linux actually IS easy to use and learn and why that's the case, because the Linux community traumatized them and damaged their worldview so significantly that they think Linux enthusiasts and software engineers are all a bunch of crackpots that place absolutely no value on anyone's time or ease of use.

It's pretty hard to disagree with this guy after seeing the massive shitstorm over Age verification and Systemd's purported """willingness to participate""" these past few days.
I feel like we are days always from someone asking what distro to get and some huge comment section fight breaking out over OpenRC and Antix versus Systemd and Cachy or something along these lines.
Now imagine you as a newcomer with no Linux knowledge being on the receiving end of this mess. Yeah I get the point he's making.

And then you flip this to the "experts" view and:

"I just don't really see any reason to invest in AppImage considering the existence of Flatpak and the good work being done to improve generics." It seemed simple. Straightforward. Easy conclusion to arrive at. And before I've managed to wipe the sand off my phone screen and get back to enjoying myself, I'm suddenly getting all caps DMs from someone who hasn't participated in the community in months. I'm called arrogant. Closed minded. That I'm shutting down AppImage because I don't like how the sausage is made.

Like holy shit. Why the hell are people out there yelling at software maintainers about packaging decisions???
And I've seen people do this for Flatpak too.
"Why is this only available via Flatpak weh weh Red Hat is the devil!"

I understand not wanting to "cater to the normies". I understand wanting to have your own corner where you do things your way and don't give a shit about the needs of the regular Joe. I totally get it.
But people at large really need to stop yelling at other people not catering to them.

Want software packaged in X way? Do it yourself!

Lately DankPods (Aussie YouTuber) has been taking about his escape to Linux.
He talks about how he moved most of his needs (bar video editing and other minutiae) to Linux as it's the only platform he feels he "owns" / sees a future in.
Yet even him, said he'd almost rather not talk about it publicly because of the mountains of people in his comments yelling at him for choosing Bazzite over something else. Or accusing him of making Linux "Look bad" because of Nvidia issues despite him using the right Bazzite Edition for Nvidia. Or the people yelling "Why you still edit on Mac? Just Davinci on Linux bro" despite there being a billion quirks to it.

How on Earth has the community at large not moved on from Distro wars? Holy shit.

This is basically what the blog author is grasping at here. How many people have been driven away from Linux because of all this infighting? How many more will be?

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Finally, someone that actually RTFA.

The systemd fiasco really tore the heart out of my respect for the Linux community, especially the one right here. One asshole out there pretty much doxxing an opensource developer for putting a field in the same PII area as address and phone number, and the rest of the assholes were looking to crucify the guy instead of shaming the doxxer for it. And nobody (well, few people) saw what was wrong with that.

And then, yes, the init wars, and shitting on devs for their choices about packaging, and shitting on them for not liking how they run their project, for using AI, and and and.

The downvotes on this comment garnered tells me it hit a nerve, and that's why I posted it. I don't expect anyone to actually take it to heart and change, but when I was pushing back here against the pitchfork mob over the age verification thing, I hoped for a better response. Typical, as the linux community likes to shoot the messenger.

In the end, driving people away from desktop Linux works in our favor, because it puts off the day that Linux enshittifies. So I can't be too upset.

[–] Elting@piefed.social 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I’m still new here and to Linux and the whole age verification thing read to me as over-reactionary internet behavior you find all over reddit. No real underlying reason to make such a fuss other than to virtue signal to other linux users how security minded you are. Just makes the whole community look ridiculous.

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 1 points 57 minutes ago

Yah, you'll want a thick skin around this group and don't get herded into groupthink, but you seem to have that covered already.

There are places to look for help if you need it (I'm happy to take DMs) but unfortunately I'd have to recommend reddit/r/linuxquestions as probably the most welcoming. While the ArchWiki is a great source of information, stay far away from the Arch forums unless you're wearing blast armor. Format a question the wrong way and you'll get fragged. I'd say the Debian forums are probably the easiest to get along with, it seems populated with adults.