Post any genuine criticism on their sub, and it gets downvoted into oblivion and your thread's topic derailed so hard that your thread stops making any sense.
And then they have the audacity to say 101 is an echo chamber, when in fact it's the only place that's safe from the linux preachers.
I know it's a short post, but it's all I have for today.
Saw this meme on r/linuxsucks and figured it belonged here too.
The people worried we’re about to try Omarchy can breathe a sigh of relief. Mocking the level of outrage around it doesn’t mean we’re about to boost its download count.
While the Linux community largely disagrees with it for political or ideological reasons, I steer clear first and foremost because it’s still desktop Linux.
It's Yet Another Distro™ with a pre-riced desktop that still sits on the same foundation we’ve been complaining about forever. And DHH pitching an Arch-based distro as a daily driver is the cherry on top that only makes me laugh.
But hey, if the end result is the same, I guess everyone's a winner.
I recently came across the Stop Omarchy website, and it pretty much sums up why I find the Linux community so fucking exhausting, and also part of why I gave up on linux entirely.
This campaign explicitly tells maintainers:
>“For open-source maintainers, don't accept bug reports that arise on Omarchy systems.”
Not “require a reproducible example.” Reject them as part of a political boycott. There are also lists of companies to boycott and people to avoid for funding the project.
Apparently, appreciating someone’s software means endorsing their entire worldview. For these people, everything is political. Someone with the wrong opinions takes a piss? That’s a fascist piss, and now the toilet manufacturer needs to issue an apology.
Demanding that everyone else participate in your moral outrage, right down to rejecting users’ bug reports only tells us making better software clearly isn’t the priority. You only care about policing ideological purity.
Anyway, this is one more of the many reasons I think desktop Linux will NEVER become mainstream. These insufferable people are likely the same people dismissing your problems on linux, saying "skill issue" and "pebcak". The same people telling you that you're failing as a person if you are running Windows or macOS. All they do is get in the way of progress and irritate everyone. And they've almost completely infested the linux space.
TL;DR: The year of the Linux desktop can wait. I have some moral grandstanding to do.
-
Later Edit: To anyone saying “then stay on Windows” - look at the name of the sub and breathe a sigh of relief. Omarchy is still a Linux distro, with the same fragmentation and usability problems that put us off desktop Linux in the first place.
Mocking the level of outrage around it doesn’t mean any of us is about to install the thing, or even look in its general direction.
This is a point I often see Linux users make when promoting it: Linux is different from Windows, therefore some of the difficulty people have using it is simply due to unfamiliarity.
To a certain extent, I get it. If you've used Windows for 20 years, you're obviously going to come in with certain expectations.
That said, I disagree with the premise as a whole, and especially with the conclusion that this explains desktop Linux's usability problems, especially when macOS exists.
macOS is also Unix-based. The filesystem is completely different from Windows, the GUI follows different conventions, shortcut keys are different, software installation is an entirely different process, and plenty of things aren't where a Windows user expects them to be.
And yet, for the most part, it remains intuitive.
Care to imagine how easy of a time I had using both Linux and macOS, originally coming from Windows? And if I put myself in the shoes of someone completely nontechnical, the contrast only grows.
A well designed user flow and interface can be completely foreign to you and still make you go:
"Oh, so that's how you do it here", a reaction completely different from "Why the fuck did I need to learn this?".
In short, Linux lacks sane defaults and expects users to understand things they really shouldn't be required to, while Windows and macOS acknowledge that not everyone wants to dive that deep into the technical details.
We don’t, really.
But you do! So much so that you keep trying to invade this place as if your life depends on it.
Here's the thing, bucko: most of us don't care even slightly that you run Linux on your desktop. Install Gentoo on your refrigerator and replace your car's infotainment system with LFS. Go ahead. Just don't preach it to us, and especially don't preach it here!
This sub exists because Linux evangelists insist on preaching about the damn thing in every single corner of the internet:
The fact that a tiny corner of the internet where all that madness is explicitly unwelcome exists drives you up the wall.
You deliberately break the rules, get banned exactly as advertised and then parade the result as some sort of victory. The posts where you're bragging about your bans, calling them "badges of honor" are actually just diplomas in failing basic rule reading comprehension. Not gonna lie, it kinda feels like playing chess with a pigeon.
Anyway, just understand that this sub is an enemy of your own making, and it only exists because you couldn't tolerate people rejecting your ideology religion cult.
The best possible thing you could do is ignore this sub, but we both know that ain't happening.
See you on the next "badge of honor" thread, dorks.
Linux users talk as if Windows users are perpetually one bad update away from installing the flavor-of-the-month Linux distro. They often help that fantasy along by exaggerating real Windows problems or inventing problems Windows doesn’t even have.
But lemme tell you, Microsoft could add a thirty-second, full-screen, unskippable ad at startup and most people would still stay on Windows. They would complain, find a registry hack, install a tool like Winhance, switch to LTSC, delay updates or simply tolerate it.
If Windows became genuinely unusable, most would buy a Mac before even thinking of touching desktop Linux.
And the reverse is true too! If Apple made macOS unusable overnight, most Mac users would move to Windows (not start researching distributions, desktop environments, compositors and package managers).
Realistically, Linux only enters the equation if it solves more problems than it creates. And it simply doesn't, especially not on desktops.
This is also why the usual Windows criticism from Linux circles has less "oomph" than they think. I previously wrote about how telemetry is not the same thing as marketing data collection. Linux discourse often takes a real problem, strips away every technical distinction and inflates it into an emotional outburst about how "Microslop is spying on everything".
Even when their criticism is completely correct, it's still not an argument for Linux. Microsoft making Windows more annoying does not turn a pile of separately developed projects into one cohesive desktop platform.
I also went into the deeper reasons in Why don’t you use Linux?. The problem is not one missing application or one broken driver. The whole experience is a mess. It's structurally fragmented, ideologically burdened and routinely expects the user to become its unpaid systems integrator.
That’s really the gist of it. Linux isn’t the second option. Hell, for most people, it ain't even the third.
This perfectly captures the loon response when you say you play Fortnite, Valorant, CS2 on FACEIT, or another anti-cheat-enabled multiplayer game with your friends.
They’ll explain that those games not working on Linux is actually an advantage, casually forgetting that being unable to play what your friend group is playing is an objective disadvantage.
To be fair, that limitation probably seems irrelevant when they’re not even invited to group calls anymore. Their friends got tired of the endless “muh spyware” lectures.
Heck, they’re probably not even friends anymore.
>inb4 “But they’re still in the Discord server” - the rest of the group has a voice channel hidden from them (Yes, this post is based on someone I know. How could you tell?)
Some loons seem to have absolutely no awareness of how openly hostile and obnoxious they are being. They barge into discussions, insult people, derail threads, evangelize Linux to anyone (especially people who didn’t ask), and then act genuinely surprised when they get banned.
To me, their surprise is more baffling than the behavior itself; How can someone not tell they're being an absolute menace?
Either way, that stuff doesn't fly here. If that upsets you, feel free to rage out in the comments and mint your very own badge of honor.
Sometimes companies collect too much data. We would all like more privacy and more control over what leaves our devices. Sure. That's something most of us can agree on.
But loons tend to do two blatantly misleading things with this topic:
First, their outrage is incredibly selective. In Linux-focused spaces, whenever privacy or AI comes up, the blame somehow always lands on big bad “Microslop”.
It's fine to criticize companies when the criticism is earned, but how come Google gets nowhere near the same level of outrage? They're shoving Gemini into Android, Search, Chrome and Workspace. And while you can uninstall the Copilot from Windows, if you wanted to be completely rid of Gemini (while remaining in Google’s ecosystem), you simply can’t.
So in a way, it all ends up feeling a lot like brand tribalism rather than honest criticism.
The second piece of dishonesty is conflating telemetry with marketing data collection.
Telemetry is software reporting how it behaves in the real world: crashes, errors, performance problems, application versions, operating systems and problematic hardware or browser combinations, whereas marketing data collection is about profiling people for advertising and targeting.
I work as a web developer. Tools like Sentry automatically report crashes and errors, along with the technical context needed to reproduce them.
Ideally, I want to find and fix a bug before the client even realizes they encountered one. That way, the entire process is seamless: no support ticket, no hunting for logs and no asking a non-technical user to explain what went wrong.
Linux distributions do have some crash-reporting tools, but the experience is extremely fragmented. Far too often, users are still expected to find the logs, open an issue, attach a dump, and answer questions from a maintainer. Most people simply will not bother. They will close the broken application and move on.
Because of this blind spot, when something does not work on a user’s computer, nobody knows why. Far too often, the final response is simply:
Far too often have I encountered linux users not knowing the distinction between telemetry and marketing data collection. At this point I am putting all of the blame on evangelists (linux priests). They're the ones spreading misinformation, conflating terms and confusing people.
To hammer that last point home, I am European, so I can only speak directly about this region. GDPR is not perfect, and regulators are not omniscient. But if Microsoft or Apple were secretly making their fortunes by illegally selling everyone’s private data, as loons often imply, wouldn't one expect the EU to have noticed and hammered them with fines by now? And “The software sent telemetry” is not evidence of that. It's just evidence of someone being into conspiracy theories.
TL;DR: Loons take a kernel of truth (companies sometimes collect too much data) and wrap it in selective outrage, technical illiteracy and paranoia.
This is thematically related to an older post I made, a server is not a desktop.
Android seems to exist in a state of quantum superposition. When adoption numbers come up, it is absolutely Linux:
>Linux runs billions of devices!
>Linux dominates mobile!
>You’re probably using Linux right now!
But often, in loon circles, when Google’s telemetry, proprietary services, locked bootloaders, and restricted user control come up, Android suddenly stops being “real Linux.” And when we point out that Android succeeded by burying the traditional Linux experience (pure insanity) beneath a usable interface, it also stops being "real linux".
I've really been thinking about this, and asked myself "why stop there?" Why stop at Android? Every modern Windows installation can run WSL, so we might as well count Windows as Linux too.
If I take a look at statcounter, I can see:
Linux: 2.31%
Windows: 29.68%
Android: 40.22%
That gives Linux an undeniable 72.21% market share.
TL;DR: Desktop Linux has finally achieved mass adoption, and it's so over for us.
Edit: Fixed broken formatting
Some Linux users complain that they are banned too easily. While I understand the complaint, and I would prefer the rules to be more relaxed, at this point, there does not seem to be another workable option unfortunately.
Case in point, two loons recently came into the community.
The first was immediately disrespectful, spammed tags, and somehow still could not understand the differences between a desktop and a server.
The second quietly posted a Nazi slogan and deleted it shortly afterward, hoping nobody would notice.
Both were banned.
This is not an isolated problem. We have tried giving people the benefit of the doubt before, and they repeatedly abuse it. They spam, preach, insult people, test boundaries, and then act shocked when the rules become stricter.
You cannot complain that the fence is getting taller while repeatedly trying to climb over it.
TLDR: I would genuinely like the community to be more open and the moderation to be less aggressive. But that requires people who can behave normally.
Some Linux users say the OS wars should stop, that people should just use whatever works for them, and that operating systems are only tools, and guess what?
I agree. You should not build your personality around an operating system.
But r/linuxsucks101 did not start this. You cannot go five minutes on the internet without finding some loon advertising Linux where nobody asked.
Someone posts about a Windows problem on r/windows?
>Bro, just switch to Linux.
Someone asks for help with macOS?
>Linux does this better.
Whenever someone mentions gaming, privacy, old hardware, programming, phones, smart fridges, or the weather, somebody will appear to preach about Linux, almost guaranteed.
That is why this subreddit exists. Nearly every other operating-system community has already been infested by evangelists who cannot resist turning every conversation into a recruitment drive.
Even communities specifically created to criticize Linux get invaded by people who worship a kernel and every half-finished distro built around it. Then they downvote everyone into oblivion for disagreeing with them.
We would love for operating systems to be treated as boring tools. In a vacuum, our position is already moderate: use whatever you like. Nobody is stopping you. The rules here only get stricter because loons keep becoming more and more disruptive, more dishonest, and more obsessed with forcing themselves into spaces where they clearly are not wanted.
And for the love of god, stop the LARP. Stop pretending your choice of operating system makes you smarter, more technical, more independent, or morally superior.
TL;DR: We’re not the instigators. We’re the consequence.
I’m seeing more and more Linux evangelists arguing that because Linux runs most servers, you should use it on your desktop. Even seen some commenting here on r/linuxsucks101, before they swiftly (and rightfully) got banned.
So I'm making this post to remind you loons: a server is not a desktop.
A server is built primarily to serve other machines. A personal computer is built primarily to serve a human.
In other words, running headlessly in a data centre does not prove that an operating system provides a good desktop experience.
Second reminder: Your grandmother is not a Kubernetes cluster.
We have already covered this great confusion in more detail here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxsucks101/comments/1u0nuqb/loonies_confuse_the_server_for_the_desktop/
I recently saw this exchange:
>I haven't seen a single professional or corporate office in my life that daily drives Linux. Fake-ass vocal minority that's too broke to buy proper laptops or socially eccentric.
Someone responded:
>Tell me you're not working with the top talent of the IT/SW industry without telling me you're not working with the top talent of the IT/SW industry.
According to Linux evangelists, the really talented developers all use Linux. If your workplace mostly uses Windows or macOS, apparently you're part of an organization of weaklings and haven't reached the upper levels of the industry yet (that's ridiculous nonsense).
Some professional developers do daily-drive Linux, but after roughly ten years in the industry, I have never noticed any meaningful correlation between desktop operating system and technical ability. The devs on linux are a random minority of developers who happen to prefer it, not the most skilled ones.
I have met excellent and incompetent developers on all three operating systems. Installing Arch does not unlock hidden programming knowledge, and configuring a tiling window manager does not make someone a better engineer.
I've also seen a deliberate conflation between working with Linux and using desktop Linux.
Plenty of developers work with Linux every day through servers, containers, virtual machines, WSL or SSH while using Windows or macOS on their actual workstation. That makes them Linux professionals and it does not mean they want it on their desktop.
Reminder: Actual professionals generally have work to do.
In fact, the people who have seriously used Linux for years are often among the least impressed by the propaganda. They know every sore spot firsthand, so the delusional propaganda actively annoys them.
TL;DR: Loons, the Linux pros also hate you
Edit: Fixed the broken quotes, fixed typos
I see this question asked a lot, along with "what would make you switch to linux though?"
The answer is probably going to vary a lot between people here, but since these questions get asked constantly, I figured I'd give my take on both:
Many of the problems with desktop Linux are, at their core, UX and ideological problems. On UX, Wayland's insistence on so-called "security" is a good example, it routinely makes life harder for the desktop users it's supposedly protecting. See this thread. (Many such cases!)
But the technical stuff is downstream of something worse: the ideology. The FOSS fixation actively holds Linux back, and the GPL is a big part of that. I wrote about this here. The title is deliberately inflammatory, but if you read past it the point stands: the license is actively hostile to anything that isn't itself GPL, which strangles the kind of investment that makes an OS pleasant to actually use.
You can see the same mindset in the kernel itself. Linux intentionally does not provide a stable in-kernel driver ABI/API. The official argument is that this lets kernel developers move faster, fix bad interfaces, clean things up, and avoid maintaining old internal cruft forever. That is the pro-Linux argument.
But the other side of it is painfully obvious: it makes out-of-tree and closed-source drivers a permanent pain in the ass. If your driver is GPL-compatible and lives in the main kernel tree, the kernel people will fix it when they break things. If it is not, good luck. You are on your own.
It is an ideological pressure mechanism that pushes hardware vendors toward the kernel’s preferred model, and desktop users get to live with the fallout. Then, the propaganda machine tells them to blindly hate the vendors. u/madthumbz thankfully goes into more detail, in this post.
You can see the same ideology in how the community behaves. Mild criticism gets you treated as guilty until proven innocent, which tells you the whole thing runs on belief, not on any real interest in whether normal people can use the software.
As a software dev, I'm mostly fine with Linux living in a box you ssh into. The tooling is there because corporations poured millions into it (but that money went into making Linux a good server, not a good desktop). Corporations have every incentive to use Linux for server boxes and basically none to make it a desktop anyone would choose. (Ironic how FOSS has been repurposed to make mega-corporations millions and billions, while loons like to pretend that their distro of choice is a middle finger to them, but that's a thread for another time).
The only incentive left for desktop is ideological - the loons who show up here to preach about "microslop" and "freedom", but all of that lands on deaf ears if the actual experience of using the thing is fundamentally broken.
Seriously - pretend I'm a newbie asking you how to start with Linux. We immediately have to talk about distros, update frequency, compositors, window managers, translation layers, desktop environments, init systems, and package managers. None of this exists on Windows or macOS, because each is one cohesive unit, not a stack of separately-built projects bolted together and shipped as a "distribution." Even when the individual pieces are solid, the seams show, and the whole thing feels flimsy.
So to actually answer the second question: sure, there are things that if changed, would get me onto desktop Linux. But they're so fundamental to what Linux is that, realistically, nothing ever will. And I suspect this feeling holds true for the rest of 101's members.
“Why do you hate Linux?”
And probably, for many of us, it isn't a pure hatred of Linux itself. It’s what can only be called "Linux fatigue".
Imagine you’re not really in the mood for McDonald’s. Also imagine McDonald’s advocates show up every single day to tell you your food is evil, that McDonald’s is morally superior, that you only dislike it because you’re ignorant, and that if you don’t eat McDonald’s you’re basically a corporate slave.
Guess what, eventually you’re going to become a McDonald’s hater. Hell, maybe some people will even make a sub called r/mcdonaldssucks, which will promptly be invaded by mcdonald's advocates, forcing you to spin up an r/mcdonaldssucks101, with stricter rules.
I think it's all pretty clear, that’s the Linux desktop discourse.
I’m not even sure these questions are always genuine.
People here, especially u/madthumbz, have been documenting what makes desktop Linux suck for a long time. The UX problems, the fragmentation, the ideological baggage, the compatibility issues, the community defensiveness (And so much more!). None of this is new.
But instead of engaging with any of it, the usual Linux evangelists just dismiss it all as ignorance, FUD, user error, Microsoft brainwashing, or whatever else lets them avoid the actual point.
So while I hope this thread clears things up a bit, I’m not exactly holding my breath.
We’ll see.
Edit: fix typos
Every time someone criticizes Linux, and especially the Linux Desktop, the same smear campaign starts.
“Nooo, you just don’t understand Linux.”, “You’re just used to Windows.”, "You live in an echo-chamber", “You probably tried Ubuntu once in 2014 and gave up.”, “You’re just ignorant.” and worst of all - "You're too dumb to use the smart people operating system, unlike me, whom is very smart indeed ☝️🤓"
case in point, read this insane comment left by a loon on a previous thread
But all of that is false, some of us have been long time, experienced users. My first contact with Linux was Slax 6 back in 2008. I’ve maybe used Linux longer than some of you loons have been alive. In production systems too, at work.
So no, I’m not here because I clicked the wrong download button, installed the "wrong distro", or didn’t know what a terminal was, like this other loon was claiming.
I’m here because I know exactly what Linux is like. I’m here because I’ve seen the same excuses recycled for decades, and I've seen how the linux community has monopolized the entire world's hopium and copium supply. The propaganda has been straight up delusional.
The year of the Linux desktop is perpetually currentYear + 1, and somehow it’s always the fault of some evil external force. Never Linux itself, never the community.
That’s why places like this exist. It's the one safe place from all of that madness.
We’re not helpless idiots who need a wise Arch user to descend from the mountain to enlighten us. Be real.
Linux is free. It’s one search away. You can download it, install it, copy it, fork it, redistribute it, and so much more. So if it’s so easy to obtain and supposedly so ready for everyone, why isn’t it the default choice by now?
The answer is obvious.
The average person is not using Linux as their main OS because it is simply not ready for the average person.
Now take off that copium mask and breathe in the fresh air.
A while back I made a post about “works on my machine” and how absurd it would be if software engineers treated bug reports that way. But maybe I was being too generous.
Maybe “works on my machine” isn’t a bad support answer, but an ego that has grown too big. Because after seeing it enough times, it stops sounding like “I can’t reproduce this issue” and starts sounding like “Runs on my PC, so you can go eat dirt”.
Someone says their audio breaks after suspend, their Bluetooth stack randomly dies, or their secondary monitor doesn’t work at the proper resolution/refresh rate, and instead of curiosity, diagnosis, logs, troubleshooting, or even basic sympathy, they get:
“Weird. Works fine here.”
Cool. What am I supposed to do with that? Frame it? Print out the comment and tape it to my desktop? In normal engineering, “works on my machine” is the starting point of an investigation, whereas in Linux discourse, it’s often treated like the end of the conversation.
It’s not just that the answer is useless. It’s that it subtly reframes the bug as a personal failure - Your hardware is wrong. Your distro is wrong. Your config is wrong. Your expectations are wrong. Your attitude is wrong. You are wrong.
And at the end of the day, the thing still doesn’t work.
At some point, “works for me” stops being information and starts being a smug little purity test. Because if Linux works on their setup, then clearly Linux is fine.
And if it doesn’t work on yours? Well...
Skill issue, apparently.
One thing I keep seeing all over the internet is Linux fanatics telling people, “If you have a problem with Linux, contribute to it.”
Which is funny, because apparently their idea of “contributing” is making new accounts, invading a subreddit where Linux glazing is explicitly against the rules, getting banned, and then doing it all over again.
They constantly tell critics to stop complaining and help improve Linux, but they themselves spend all day defending it in places where nobody asked, pretending every issue is user error, and acting like Linux is already flawless.
Imagine if even half that energy went into fixing the problems people actually complain about.
Better UX. Better app compatibility. Better audio. Better drivers. Better consistency. Better documentation that doesn’t assume everyone wants to live in a terminal 24/7. An internal ABI that doesn't break compatibility every 5 minutes, and lastly, some standardization.
Hell, Linux might've been closer to Windows or macOS for normal users by now (Ballsy thing to say, I know, but with the amount of time they spend invading this sub, who knows?).
But no, they’re too busy trying to convince a subreddit called r/linuxsucks101 that Linux doesn’t suck 🤦
Genuinely scary levels of delusion.
I don't even know where to start with this one. Found it doing my normal rounds and I think it gave me actual brain damage.
The thing that kills me is the framing. This sub gets called an "echo chamber" constantly, like we're the ones huffing all that copium. Buddy. We don't care what you run. You like Linux? Genuinely, go use it. Nobody here is going to show up in your linux subs to tell you to switch to Windows. Literally nobody here is losing sleep over your distro choice.
You're the ones who can't stop bringing it up. You're the ones treating a kernel like your identity. You evangelize this thing with the energy of someone getting a fat paycheck. You are spending actual hours of your actual finite life coming in here, trying to convince strangers who explicitly do not want to hear it. That's why the rules are strict, and that's why you're getting banned every single time.
This goes far beyond what a hobby should be. It's an extremely unhealthy obsession. Stop it and get some help.
Anyway. Posting this as a public service so someone else can feel the same brain cell die that I did.
Recently came across this post, and I think it deserves a full read. I find OP's whole arc interesting. Reformed hater buys a Mac and stops fighting his own computer, all because it's a finished product, built for people who have things to do. But I've got a few things to add.
>everyday there's like a 1 in 100 chance that you're going to have to deal with straight bullshit
Even if your hardware is perfectly supported, everything's configured the way it should be, and you actually know your way around linux, "a 1 in 100 chance" is generous. In practice it's higher, and it climbs the closer your distro sits to the bleeding edge.
First timers on this sub and pedantic loons might already be typing "but this happens on Windows too!". Sure, broken updates ship on every platform, these things happen. The difference is that rolling back KB1234 is a few clicks and a reboot, while working out why your GPU dropped to a black screen after a routine pacman -Syu is an afternoon in the TTY. One of these has a name, a number, and an uninstall button while the other has a wiki page and your evening - and that's if you're lucky.
