Author: swathe

There’s a lot to be said about the Linux community, good and bad. We definitely all like to revel in the openness and freedoms that have taken Free and Open Source Software to such dizzying and world dominating heights. There is, however, a darker side that can’t be denied and it’s all centered around the perception of a behavior that is much maligned by many Linux users. What is it you ask?

Elitism.

Some of you may say it’s not a perception, it’s a very real thing, and for sure there people who are elitists and revere that moniker. Unfortunately, as the increase of distributions has gone on, and the popularity of the more obscure ones has grown, people now lust after all the pretty rice they see on the unix porn subreddit. This drives them towards distributions like Void, Arch and Gentoo. Sadly when they dive into the worlds of these more advanced distributions they hit a brick wall very fast, and often leads to the propagation of a few misconceptions.

“I got told to RTFM, what a bunch of elitist jerks!!”

Sorry, but reading the manual is something we should all be doing. People pour hours into documentation only to have it ignored and then people jump onto IRC, forums or reddit asking for help with stuff that is easily answered by reading the man pages.

“This is way too hard, why don’t you do it like ubuntu does!!”

If that’s the type of system you like to use, then use ubuntu. All the packages you see on riced out systems on reddit are available just as readily in ubuntu as they are in Arch. The uncomfortable truth people need to admit to themselves is they WANT to run Arch, and have all the prettiness, but either don’t want to put in the work and learn or simply just do not yet have enough Linux experience to make the transition.

An amatuer boxer would never just jump in the ring with Mike Tyson. He’s far to experienced and difficult an opponent. An amatuer would have no right to complain about it being unfair. The same applies here. Without the relevent experience and technical knowledge, users have no right to disparrage a distribution or it’s users because it is too hard for them to use. You choose a distribution based on your requirements and its strengths and limitations. Don’t blame others for making the wrong choice.

“ubuntu is derived from Debian so it is Debian”

Wrong. ubuntu is it’s own distro and there are many other respins. Respins of respins even using Mint as an example. Luckily the ubuntu community is pretty helpful and users can get access to a lot of information and assistance, but this is seldom the case. People respin distros for their own purposes and release them to others which is great, but one cannot make the mistake of thinking it is one and the same as the original release. There are almost always differences, and as soon as there is a single one you are asking people to support something not of their own, which is not a fair or realistic expectation.

Of course, some communities are more militant on their policing of support requests for alternative spins of their distribution, and from what I’ve seen in particular in the Gentoo and Arch communities, this has usually been borne from multiple bad experiences in the past and forum spanning when the creator of their respins etc does not provide support.

“$distro sucks because of X….”

Nobody is forced to like one distro over another. It drives me fucking insane when people refer to one distro or another as broken because a package doesn’t work or “it’s too hard” etc etc.

Some distributions are developed, built and distributed with instructions to be a certain way because that is the vision the developers have for it. Don’t be a cry baby because it doesn’t suit your use case. Switch to something that does.

So, how do we fix this?

We can’t. Human nature is human nature and this is how people have, are and always will act. I like everyone else have distros I prefer over others, and will defend those reasons, their respective communities and the way things are done. I do also much rather prefer people to use Linux and BSD over anything else so if ubuntu or SUSE floats your boat, go for it.

Just be aware that if you are choosing a distro, especially when stepping up the difficulty level, more advanced users have a higher expectation of competancy, support and bug reporting ettiquette and the general opinion that the best thing for a user to do is work on being a better problem solver. You learn more and in turn can also better support the community.