

TL;DR: Tribalism bad. I’m sure you’ve heard it before but it really needs repeating.
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?









It was real.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2026/apr/05/middle-east-crisis-live-iran-israel-us-war-trump-strait-hormuz-missing-pilot-downed