The Linux Community Sucks: According to Almost Every Outsider | Tek Syndicate

https://teksyndicate.com/videos/linux-community-sucks-according-almost-every-outsider

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ahahaha yess.

I can be a carebear <3

The only thing I want to ask is to set the right example. I think we heard some of the same vibes towards a certain DE here before. Linux is great, the people sometimes well... not so much :-)

Personally i love LInux. I have a 256GB SSD in an external enclosure that i carry to and from work. The more i use it, the more i hate Windows. I also cannot stand using a Mac at work, so i boot into Linux and can escape the walled garden.

I wish i had the skills to help contribute to the community, but if all i can do is send is a crash report, ill hapily do it.

I'm glad you guys are doing these videos and I'm definitely going to keep watching them. I know the basics of linux from previous attempts at using it as a daily driver, failing and giving into the ease and comfort of Windows and OS X. Hopefully this will spur me on to try again.

My comments RE. the community:
There is a definite elitist toxic element, although that's easily ignored. My problem is the lack of patience that is often in the wild. The times I have given up is when I have followed instructions to the tee, multiple times, something still hasn't worked, and i'm offered nothing, or solutions that are way beyond my level.

Thanks guys!

The video brought up good points, and maybe highlighting them will help. :) Everyone should work together, all these people looking at Linux as a viable alternative are looking at us right now and seeing everything that we do here, good and bad and the bad always shines brighter for some reason.

You pointed out some of the good things about the community too and asked people to be more helpful, but you missed one point.

The Linux open source free software community is also great! There are a lot of helpful people out there and on the forums here too. There are some people on here that I've seen that are as helpful as they can be, regardless of question, distro of choice or terrible graphics cards choices :p People on #teklinux when someone comes for help even if its nothing else will try and point people in the right direction.

We all use the same software in the end, slight differences in configuration or package managers don't change the fact that we all like working on Linux OS' and at the end of the day not only are we all one community within the open source/free software world; Here we are also one community within teksyndicate and we should support each other.

EDIT: I know this is a long post. You don't have to reply about how long it is. If you can't read or just don't want to, please visit Twitter to share your thoughts with those that care.

Well, I've found that to be somewhat true as well. It's somewhat elitist at times, which has kept me at arm's length from venturing too much into Linux.

I do think there is room to debate which technologies are better in Linux, and compare features of desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc), initialization methods (systemd, sysinit, etc) and filesystems (ext3, ext4, btrfs, zfs, etc).

I think that it's a matter of choice in the end. What are your needs? What do you want? If there are features you want or don't want, pick the distro that fits those needs and wants.

We can all sit around a campfire and sing kumbaya until our hair turns blue (Marge Simpson reference?), telling each other why we like one type of food more than another, or why we prefer one genre of music over another... but personal taste is subjective, and subjective matters cannot be debated objectively.

<rant>

While there is certainly room for improvement in every technology out there that isn't perfect (and I don't think there is a perfect technology available yet), there are three ways you can help software technologies improve:

  • Tell the developers what features you want. If some default option isn't your personal choice, tell them you'd like a feature to add the option to change it as you want. If GNOME doesn't look the way you want, tell the developers you want to be able to change it and customize it to look the way you want it to. (This also applies for being compatible with other things you want.) With enough feature requests, your desired feature could make it into the next release. - But beware, belittling developers or insulting their users won't make them more likely to hear your calls for improvement. If anything it'll make the community more isolated, and make their developers and users less likely to add the features you want from you or others. (The whole Pavlovian memory association thing from neurology/psychology.)
  • Help the first group of users to find existing ways of adding those features through modifications, extensions, plugins, shell scripts or whatever else. In fact, don't just help that one user: make a tutorial (written, or maybe even a YouTube video) about how others can do the same. If other people have that same question they might check out your tutorial, and your helpfulness might bring more people to request that feature to exist natively in that software (desktop environment, startup method, filesystem or whatever else). If that feature can't be added because no methods exist (or because you couldn't find any after at least 10 minutes worth of googling through at least 5 pages worth of results in at least 5 vastly different search terms), THEN recommend some other software that does what they want.
  • Write code to augment the functionality of the software you want to be improved. Whether it's a new software, a fork, an extension, plug-in or shell script, you'll have to learn more about that kind of software in general. And if they're wrong and you're right, others will follow you and choose to run your software (and you'll have massive bragging rights!). If you're wrong, the learning process will make you appreciate those software developers a lot more, and you'll have learned a thing (or two) that might land you a very high-paying job somewhere awesome (like Google, HP, Novell, Netgear, etc).

Just be helpful, and don't be negative. Be positive, and request features rather than criticize. Always give someone the benefit of the doubt, rather than thinking they're a troll. And don't belittle other people's personal taste. Maybe someone just uses KDE or GNOME because that's a desktop environment they're more familiar with, or has the features they need. Rather than criticize someone else's taste, ask them why they made their choice. Discussion is a good thing, and saying that you'd like to see their choice have some new features is a good way to get them to agree. Showing them why those features are good also works marvelously (maybe YouTube videos - and if one doesn't exist, make one!).

The Linux community can be the best community online. Imagine if suddenly the community was one of the best parts of using Linux? Can you imagine how damning that would be to Apple and Microsoft, when Linux if the most user-friendly OS out there? If you really like Linux, help it and support it by being a good community member that's positive and helpful.

</rant>
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Linux Rocks! I learned Linux 10 years ago and have never looked back. My Linux skills have been paying my bills ever since 2005.

I was forced to learn on Gentoo (1st Jr. Admin gig) and it is a great distro to learn on because it forces you to do everything from scratch including compiling your kernel. I rarely use it anymore these days, I've moved on to Ubuntu, CentOS and RedHat. These are the distros that most enterprises (companies that will pay you well) use.

Honestly, the Linux communities I've joined have been good. Only issue I've had recently is with social media admins like the ones on Facebook. But I see this type of involvement in many Facebook companies.

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Agreed. And I think one of the things people forget or dont know how to do is debate.

Can I not be a care bear, plz? Can I be the big blue bitch, instead?

@wendell @Logan

This is going to be a bit of a negative post, I'm not being an internet hipster here, I actually would like to address something you guys have repetitively said that concerns me.

"It's all about what you get done." No, it absolutely isn't about what you get done. It's about freedom.

I'm sorry to get all RMS about this, but in regards to this argument that you are making, I fear you are being 'detrimental' to the cause (see this post in regards to how you are worrying people about installing linux). The 'cause' is not about contributing, it's not about being productive or "getting work done". It's about releasing yourself from the shackles of proprietary software, and being FREE to contribute and get work done if you want to.

With other proprietary software, you cannot contribute, or you are locked out of getting certain types of work done because you do not have access to the source code, with Free Open Source software, you can contribute (or not) as you wish.

Sorry for the negativity, but I would really like to catch you guys early on this. FOSS is about freedom, and I'd like you guys to really emphasize freedom over the practical argument you are making right now. To reiterate one last time, it's not about getting work done, its about being free to get work done if you need to do it.

Thanks for reading, thanks for presenting the Tek Syndicate community with Open Software.

PS. (sarcasm on)If you don't use arch linux, you are stupid heads (sarcasm off)

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I am a 'Stanley' man, myself.

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[/internethipster] Frack y'all, Amiga is the best OS [/internethipster]

Seriously now, I love the pragmatic focus you are aproaching your linux videos. I hope the most die-hard linux fundamentalists can see the benefits of having new people coming in, and giving everything we can to make their transition easier.

Also, If anybody wants to watch Lunduke's talks that @Logan and @wendell were talking about, I've posted both newest here a few days ago

I'm sure some of you will enjoy this:


"Hipsters in the Wild"
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Agreed. Debating shouldn't be just about winning. It should be about researching the topic in greater depth, learning about the subject (and from each other), trying to see things from other perspectives (especially the perspesctives of the other participants in said debate).

True debates aren't insult contests, or insinuating other technologies are inferior. It's about showing the best case for your perspective, than objectively considering the other person's case for their perspective. But that only applies to objective topics; subjective topics are dependent on the subject, and in subjective matters there can be no objective conclusion other than to say subjective matters vary from subject to subject (read: person to person).

I think @wendell did an amazing job at highlighting why Btrfs is amazing due to it's error-correction feature for data integrity. And that's why I'm going to uninstall Debian and Linux Mint, and just start using OpenSUSE from now on. But that isn't to say that ext4 is a bad filesystem. It just doesn't have that one feature which is very important and very useful - but it isn't a feature everyone needs or wants, so it might not be for everyone. But because my data integrity is critical to me (I've had too many bad experiences losing data), I'm going to use Btrfs and the only distro that has it by default is OpenSUSE (even though I really like the Cinnamon Desktop environment, since it's very familiar to me due to my experience using Windows, and since I'm trying to learn Linux without making the learning curve so steep I give up).

I think that's how debates should be like. Friendly, useful, on topic. (And maybe with some handy-dandy references, like this one: )

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems (Check Btrfs in the second table, under "Checksum/ ECC" )
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features (Under "Checksums on data and metadata")
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Checksum_tree_and_scrubbing
[4] - https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Features (Under "Checksums on data and metadata (crc32c)")

You can use BTRFS in Ubuntu.

Change the file system to BTRFS and throw in a 512MB /boot partition and that's it. Easy :)

You can also install Cinnamon on Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lestcape/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cinnamon


Adding to what @Logan said, Ubuntu is "noob friendly" but it will let you do as a power user. The hipsters that get annoyed at it I feel are just annoyed that it's the one becoming popular (OEM machines) over one of the smaller distros they like.

I tend to avoid Linux forums and Linux discussions, really Tek Syndicate is the only one I've bothered with outside of Youtube. So much misinformation was spread by those hipsters.

For instance @Logan was caught out by the sensationalist "spyware" claims about Unity which is one tickbox to disable in Settings and is merely the same online search results you will find in Windows, Mac, iOS and the worse offender, Android.

Its a fundamental concept that a lot of people (and I don't mean to put words in anyone mouths) are afraid to talk about. Richard Stallman started Free Software not for technical reasons but for very much philosophical and moral reasons, to give the end user the freedom to use their computer as they wish without restriction or control by a third party.

People don't seem to like mixing philosophical reasons for free software with the technical reasons of open source. And I think its very important to talk about and keep in the spot light. At the end of the day you can do as you wish but one of the undeniable benefits of free software and most open source software gives you is a set of irremovable rights to the use of your computer and software.

For those who have some time and wants to learn more, look up Eben Moglen (yup, not RMS) he does a lot of good work for Free Software and law, and has a lot of good presentations on these subjects.

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Yeah, the attitude towards new Linux users does need to be a bit more open minded. I've had a lot of people tell me (insert DE or misc. program here) sucks and that I should use (insert their alternative). No need to be rude guys :P just have a civilized discussion, and at the end of the day we're all on Linux anyway, and it's your computer so whatever you like should be what you use.

Tutorials also need to have less of a "USE THIS DE BECAUSE ITS THE BEST" attitude, and more of a "I personally like this DE, but you should also try this, this, this, this, this, and this, and just see which one you like best. Just don't use Unity because it spies on you" :P