Linux memes I'm sick of seeing/reading/hearing

  1. The year of the Linux desktop - give it a rest, get on and use it, develop it, explain it to people who show interest WHEN ASKED
  2. The Top 5 (or 10 or whatever) Linux Distros - for what? for who? on what platform?
  3. Conversely the 5 worst Linux distros - for what? for who? on what platform?
  4. Talking heads, who probably know a bit but have an over-inflated idea of their “rightness”.
  5. The bloatness of this or that distro - who cares, except folks working with really minimal hardware. A distro can try and include in it’s .iso the apps that a sizeable proportion of their target audience MIGHT want, or the least needed to get up and running and leave addng everything else to the user, or try and strike a balance. Hey, it’s their distro, they choose and the marketplace (users) will decide.
  • I do NOT mind distro comparisons pointing out the strengths of weakness of distros for particular user, tasks, platforms.
  • I do not mind reviews by people about why their choice is right for them, their use and their platform, just don’t go all absolutist on it.
  • I think it’s good to discuss how to explain Linux and it’s advantages to INTERESTED people, but we should not be evangelical missionaries trying to convert the heathens - we will rightly be treated like I treat the Witness and Saits missionaries that drag me out of bed on a Sunday morning - with distain and colourful language.

Rant over, several things, articles, YouTube videos and blog posts prompted this rant and my insomnia has lowered my tolerance. Now to try and find some of the sleep I didn’t get last night.

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I used to be pretty sick of “BTW I use Arch”, because I’ve heard a lot of people talking how elitist Arch community is and very little actual elitism. Kinda the same way people making fun of annoying vegans became way more annoying than most vegans ever were.

It doesn’t bother me when Destination Linux crew does it though, because of their positive spin to the meme.

BTW I don’t use Arch, but I used to for few year and it’s very nice distro for people wanting to learn more about Linux.

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Yeah, this is an odd one, some people say it and mean it, they are annoying, others say it as a parody of the 1st lot, they are less annoying, but it’s becoming a lame meme to often used.

I have had 5 hours sleep now and and am feeling a little less aggravated and ranty.

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There’s one more reason why I heated it, like many popular memes, it simply got so overused, it very quickly became unfunny. If half of jokes on a page have the same punch line it stops being funny very quickly.

Nowadays, it’s not so popular, so it’s much easier to tolerate.

My biggest Meme I am sick of is BTRFS is garbage. Anyone that has used it properly would say otherwise. It has been a great workhorse for me for several years. I use it on my main server in a RAID 10 configuration with 6 drives. It’s quite performant, has a low overhead, keeps snapshots automatically and super easy to set up. At least, on openSUSE. Also, SUSE/openSUSE wouldn’t stake so much in BTRFS if it was garbage.

(stepping off soap-box)

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Number 4 is the thing I hate the most. I had pointed out something in a telegram group today that was missing in a testing ISO that I have installed and have been testing and someone said that they wouldn’t enable this in a testing ISO (it had to do with installing a printer) but the way they said it made me angry and I pointed out to them that I have been using Linux for 20+ years and fixed the problem on my own but was just mentioning something that was missing in system settings. This person knows a little about Linux but not as much as they think they do and would probably not be using Linux if they had to go through what I did in the mid to late 1990’s to get it installed and working lol

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You pretty much nailed my “don’t ever do these things” list when I post anything anywhere, make a video, or otherwise open my mouth. I had a career in IT and have used Linux for 20 years but I recognize how little I actually know in the overall totality of what there is to know. As the saying goes, what I don’t know could fill volumes.

There is nothing more irritating to me that an “expert” who doesn’t readily admit that. I think I’ve probably blocked the people you are referring to because I would get so worked up over how irresponsible they were. Even just seeing their video thumbnails would trigger me. The irony is that the more wrong someone is the more attention they seem to get. Which leads me to your last point.

I don’t think that evangelizing Linux or open source is necessarily productive, particularly degrading people who don’t use it as being inferior or ignorant. I do however think it’s important that for the people who have an interest to find quality content and communities that can show them why using those things is potentially a benefit for them. I have to wonder how many times someone has thought to try, encounters one of the talking heads or random RTFM comment and then just dismisses the possibility based on that one interaction. If that’s true then I think it does a great disservice to everyone.

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