u/Fit_League_8993

https://preview.redd.it/jwf19j7obbbh1.png?width=942&format=png&auto=webp&s=e930aad319fd1afa976059304570b208327e03b9

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.

Every other day someone shows up in modmail or makes a sad callout post, crying that they got banned "for using Linux." Heartbreaking stuff. Real persecution.

But it's all lies. We can't see your OS. There's no user-agent sniffer wired into the modqueue. Reddit doesn't tell us what you booted this morning. You could be the sweatiest nerd ever, running Linux From Scratch (LFS) and we'd be none the wiser (unless you told us).

It's not the OS that you're running but rather you telling us. And more often than not, it's you telling us that we should run your OS. Read Rule 1. The overwhelming majority of bans here are for breaking Rule 1.

I really don't get it, the rules are as simple as possible, the bar is literally below the floor, and somehow people trip over it daily.

TLDR: You were banned because your shilling couldn't be stopped otherwise

In all my years on this earth, I've watched the Linux community do one thing with remarkable consistency: blame the user.

It happens in Windows and Mac circles too, sure. But nowhere near this scale and intensity - seriously, it's not even close.

Here's the pattern that you've already seen a hundred times: OP posts about a linux problem they're hitting. Before anyone's actually read the thing, the replies roll in: "works on my machine". Or my favorite, the dogpile of "skill issue, sounds like a you problem". OP gets treated as a criminal.

https://preview.redd.it/w361nru6ir8h1.png?width=848&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6cadae8adf2ff73bd93ae3243c48b105841d4cd

https://preview.redd.it/rcs2ugxzrr8h1.png?width=796&format=png&auto=webp&s=3a113a013fa53e8585c8438604febd13b0e12a2a

https://preview.redd.it/ofu3k7kext8h1.png?width=891&format=png&auto=webp&s=424bcc22c76ce4e01d7567f386c8ddb5b0ac11f8

And then, more often than not, when someone actually digs into it, the cause turns out to be a UX problem, a functionality bug or straight-up something just randomly failing.

(For anyone seeking context, OP was installing ubuntu, and it failed installing the bootloader on its own. OP was able to fix their issue via Mint's Boot-Repair, not thanks to these "helpful" replies)

So I keep asking myself: why is this tolerated**?** Why is it so widespread that at this point it's just the expected behavior?

• Is it that the community is so fundamentally broken, that it can't admit Linux has flaws? Every bug report feels like ammo handed to "the enemy", so the reflex is to defend the OS (or the kernel, depending on the issue) by blaming the user instead?
• Is it an ego thing? Some people clearly stand a little taller after stepping on someone. "I configured my way through this, so if you can't, that's a you problem".

Honestly, I can't tell. Maybe it's both. Or maybe there's a third reason I'm not seeing.

What I can tell is that unless someone actually bothers to troubleshoot, the OP leaves no closer to a fix. And if you're someone who pulls this, know one thing: every time you do, you're stocking r/linuxsucks101 for free. You think you're defending Linux, but you're the main exhibit.

To any regular person watching, dogpiling someone for asking a question or complaining doesn't read as "based power user", but reads as unnecessarily cruel, makes the whole community look like the unreasonable, deranged ones, and leaves yet another stain on the community's reputation

I used to be a hardcore loon. Daily-drove Fedora, defended it to the death, and genuinely thought people were just lazy for not putting up with Linux shenanigans.

I had opinions on Microsoft and Apple that I'd share with no one asking me to, and worst of all, if you used Windows or Mac OS I'd have already decided something about you.

What pulled me out wasn't an argument specifically. It was friends and coworkers who just... didn't care about it. They used whatever worked, shipped good stuff, lived full lives, and never once made their OS anyone else's problem. It was a slow process, but it made it hard to keep believing Windows/Mac users are lazy when the people I respect the most were quietly using them to get more done than me.

One line I still remember came from a senior at work. He said I should stop assuming my personal preference was an objective standard everyone else was failing to meet. Then he added the part I think about the most: "don't let an operating system become your personality".

It stung back then, but I eventually realized that mindset wasn't making me a better engineer. It was just giving me a cheap way to feel superior to people who'd never asked to be ranked.

Around the same time, I started noticing how other Linux users came across: preachy, superior, contemptuous of anyone who hadn't seen the light. And it was a mirror. That was exactly what I sounded like.

My loon phase was about 8-10 years ago. And leaving the evangelism behind, looking back, feel like leaving a cult. No longer a loonix priest, if you will.

There's a specific type of person who finds out someone uses Windows and immediately reaches for "computer illiterate".

https://preview.redd.it/6zcoeywpeg8h1.jpg?width=1643&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9046925d75ceea4634f2613bf032b817065b4e9d

And maybe that person can't recompile a kernel, sure. But here's what never occurs to this person: they can't hold a conversation without steering it back to their setup. They can't meet someone where they are. They can't read a room, take a hint, or talk to a human who isn't them.

Between computer illiteracy and social illiteracy, only one actually matters when you have to exist around other people.

You can teach someone the terminal in a couple of days. You can explain what a kernel is, and you can educate them on the differences between various filesystems. But you can't teach someone to stop being insufferable about it.

A "skill issue" with a package manager is fixable. A skill issue with basic human decency follows you around for life.

Because that's all the insult ever is: someone who feels small puffing themselves up by deciding they're better than you at the one thing they happen to be good at. Putting others down to feel okay about themselves, in total denial about their own shortcomings.

https://preview.redd.it/byxed1lmhb8h1.png?width=983&format=png&auto=webp&s=d36d73ad93bab23b2da251603c01ae9cda990cdb

"Oh my god, I can't believe Windows 11 failed gracefully and fell back to a simpler interface instead of full-on crashing and burning like loonix does. The horror!"

Yeah...that's all I have to say.

I write software for a living. Can you imagine what would happen if I closed every ticket with "works on my machine"?

First time, my lead has a quiet word with me. Second time, it's getting discussed in the retro. Third time, I'm explaining to HR why every bug I'm assigned magically resolves itself the moment it touches my laptop and no one else's.

And I'm speaking from experience here. Back when I was starting out I did say it once, on a bug I could not reproduce for the life of me. My lead just said "maybe we should ship your machine to the client then".

"Works on my machine" is not an answer. It's the thing we built entire careers around making impossible. Containers, CI pipelines, reproducible builds, telemetry.

Then I close my work laptop, open Reddit, and see some linux user report that their audio dies after every suspend, or their external monitor only works on Tuesdays, or their WiFi card exists in lspci but not in reality. And the top reply, upvoted, gilded, treated as the final word:

"Weird... works fine on my setup."

That's it. That's the support. And I really can't stress it enough - in any actual engineering job that line gets you fired. In linux land it's basically their second commandment, carved right under "thou shalt ask what distro they're on instead of helping," and right above "thou shalt inform them they are on the wrong distro. Arch, btw."

Every once in a while one of us makes a post here about the toxicity in the linux community - talking about how the second you dare criticize anything about it, the linux lovers lose their minds and mass downvote your post, then derail and strawman it into oblivion, all while unleashing terrible personal insults on you, like you've criticized their own mother.

And then someone shows up in the comments going "I don't know what you're talking about, this never happens to me."

Dude, of course it never happens to you! You never say anything even slightly negative about it! I checked your comments/posts about linux and it's all "switched 5 years ago, never looked back, everything just works perfectly". Why would they say anything to you, when all you ever post is praise?

Please, come back here after posting something even remotely critical. You'll see how fast they change their tune. I promise you that.

You wanted a phone. The thing that rings, shows you pictures of your friends and scrolls the reddit. Instead you bought it secondhand off a guy who clearly used it as a development board, and now you're telling everyone it's "more open" while you waste half of every day just keeping it in "working" condition.

https://preview.redd.it/cks280vtfp7h1.png?width=949&format=png&auto=webp&s=e3cf1efedd502d813113c0b1bb17a0683a209ccd

That's you. That's Linux. You wanted the thing that works but you bought the thing that requires a forum dive before you can even think about using it.

You might be screaming "NO! It's not 2009, you don't hunt for drivers all day". Sure thing buddy! Until you buy any hardware that came out this decade. Drivers for your Wi-Fi 7 MediaTek card are nowhere in sight. Your only path to turning the damn thing on is some guy who reverse-engineered an out-of-tree driver and a DKMS module you have to rebuild every kernel update, that works at maybe 60% of its full speed and drops every time you even think about it dropping. And that is the happy case, if we're both talking about the same MediaTek chipset, if it's the other model (you know), you're SOL. Enjoy being leashed to an ethernet cable.

"But it's customizable!" Brother, you have customized your way into a tiling window manager you spend more time configuring than using. You have a 4000-line config for a text editor. You lost a Sunday because an update renamed your network interface from eth0 to enp0s31f6 and you found that out from a forum post written in 2014 by a man who has since died. You did not ask for this. The wheel of dependency hell turned, landed on YOU, and you stood up and said "thank you sir may I have another?".

"But I'm smart, I know how to do all that, you're just computer illiterate."

A great man once said: "An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity... if you make something so clusterfucked he can't understand it he's gonna think you're a god cause you made it so complicated nobody can understand it". That is your "configurable" OS. In fact, it's so configurable that you can't even use it properly without configuring it. "Sane defaults" is a phrase lost on you.

Maybe you'll say you wanted POSIX, and I get that, I also like POSIX. But you could've picked something that's actually UNIX-certified like macOS, or has real lineage, like BSD. Instead you picked the worst implementation of it, Linux, and you pretend it's godlike.

Before anyone types "skill issue", I'll go first - Hobby issue.

Loons love to LARP about their security. There's this silly take I keep seeing, especially on pro-Linux subs, essentially saying "Linux is so much better than Windows, no viruses."

https://preview.redd.it/sv20g6a2ve7h1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=3b6ec104349bdabc65c7ea4a364ce9b1762f70c8

That ignorant mindset is exactly what hackers count on, and it's one of the more reliable ways of ensuring your system gets wrecked at some point.

Many of the users shouting this nonsense ironically also run Wine - which means the second they install it, they've doubled their attack surface. I can't stress this enough, it should be obvious but the loon's mind just fails to accept it - if you take Linux malware and Windows malware together, that's not LESS viruses, you are in fact combining the number of viruses from both platforms. (Running out of ways to rephrase this so it gets through to them)

Windows ransomware and infostealers run just fine under Wine. And Wine maps Z: to / by default - your whole filesystem. So that Windows ransomware doesn't sit in a tidy sandbox. It reaches through Z: and encrypts your real home directory, and any backups or network shares you left mounted.

Somewhere along the way desktop linux users mistook "not explicitly targeted" for "not targetable". It goes without saying, but the recent AUR hacks just confirm the complacency. The malignant ignorance of assuming their beloved Arch is inherently safer, while effectively running random scripts off the internet, mashing q the second that PKGBUILD diff hits the screen.

Around 1,500 packages, owned. Not with a 0-day or some 1000 iq exploit. Someone just asked to adopt some orphaned packages and nobody read what they were building.

The saddest part of it all is that whenever you point any of this out, the loon doesn't stop to think "hmm, maybe they have a point". They downvote it into oblivion, then go updoot the next "linux moar secure" post. Zero thoughts going through their heads.

Every so often a loon rages out in the comments, howling that we're ignorant, that we're talking out of our depth, and that we never even gave Linux a chance.

Make no mistake: we have, plenty of times. Some of us daily drove it for years. Others are stuck using it at work, whether we like it or not. We've been in the exact same trenches you're in right now, and that's why we criticize it.

The loons gloss over the UX pain points, wave away the functionality gaps, and then get genuinely mad when we point out all the stuff that should've been embarrassing years ago.

If that is you, here's the part you've deluded yourself about: you think mentioning the word "Linux" earns a ban here. Being dishonest about it and evangelizing it is what actually earns it. You say "it was rough at the start, but now it's easy, and for the privacy it's worth it", and all we hear is "I hate every single second of my life and I need you to join me so I don't have to suffer alone".

It's never just you quietly using the thing you supposedly love. You need to recruit with a missionary urgency (Microslop will steal ALL of your data, you need to switch NOW!). People who are actually content with their setup don't show up in someone else's comments begging strangers to believe them, and getting angry when they don't.

So yeah, we've used it. We've seen what it can offer, and more importantly what it can't. We saw the tradeoff, and chose to keep our sanity.

Every time someone points out that Windows is easier to use for the average person most people, some loon pops out of the woodwork screaming at the top of their lungs "But Linux is stable! Look! It runs on all the world's servers! It's more reliable than MICROSLOP!". Cool.

In case it slipped past you: a server is not a desktop. I know, I know, in loonie land that distinction doesn't exist, but for the rest of us, that's just how it works.

Here's the thing the actually competent people figured out: A server runs sustained, throughput-oriented workloads. Serve the requests, crunch the batch job, keep the database warm. It's headless, managed remotely, and its whole purpose is throughput and fairness across many tasks. And the usage pattern is predictable.

A desktop is the opposite: bursty, latency-sensitive, interactive. You click, something spikes for a few hundred milliseconds, then it idles, waiting on you (Unless you're a robot, of course).

That's literally why CachyOS ships the BORE scheduler. BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) tracks how bursty each task is and gives the bursty interactive ones priority, so the thing you're actively using stays snappy instead of getting starved by some background hog.

Now I'm not about to recommend CachyOS to anyone, it's got plenty of its own issues, and I especially wouldn't hand it to the average person. But I'll give them credit: they're one of the few in the Linux space who actually figured out what a desktop is. Low bar, sure, but somebody cleared it.

-

While we're here, the real reason Linux owns the server room isn't some mystical superiority. The licensing cost is zero (the more servers you have, the more the savings add up), and billions have been poured into server-specific optimizations precisely so corporations can squeeze even more value out of it (they didn't do all that for your homelab, trust me).

Here's the funniest part - some loonies genuinely think running Linux is some anti-corporate stance. The kernel they evangelize as sticking it to the man is the same kernel making corporations an absolute fortune.

Maybe one day the loons figure out that a server and a desktop are not the same thing. But I'm not holding my breath. They've let me down way too many times before.

I see this predominantly in one specific sub that I am not going to name - people endlessly posting about how our beloved r/linuxsucks101 is dead, how it's all AI slop that isn't even one bit factual. They say it's going to sink any day now.

Let's pretend for a moment that it is indeed the case - if it's so, why not let the sub die on its own? Why get triggered, join the sub, and try to "uhhh acktually" us to death only to inevitably end up getting banned?

I am being dead serious. If the sub is on its way out, ignoring it is exactly what would speed up its hypothetical demise. Instead, you comment and contribute to engagement, boosting the sub in the process.

I know that you know that I know that it's all a big load of baloney. The sub is thriving under masterful leadership, triggering loons left, right and center. And the sheer terror that u/madthumbz might have posted, making fun of your favorite distro AGAIN simply keeps you up at night. So you're here, refreshing like an obsessed ex-girlfriend, calling us obsessed while you're keeping 10 alt accounts because the previous ones got banned.

Honestly, I find it hilarious that we pull more hate from our sibling sub than we get from even r/FuckMicrosoft.

It's alright, we don't blame you, we know you can't help it. So go ahead, leave the comment, screenshot the inevitable ban message, and go karma farm, calling it "a badge of honor".

She's a teacher, and one of her students who I can only assume keeps a Stallman poster above his bed told her about GNU/Linux - how it's free, how it's so much better than Windows, how Microsoft is the devil incarnate and how she's basically plugged into the matrix and her private data is basically getting milked by Big Bad Corpo™. The whole sermon.

By the time she got home she was almost ready to wipe her desktop and join the resistance. So she asked me about it, and if it's worth it. And because I love my mother, unlike some of you loonies, I told her the truth. I said: take everything you like about Windows and strip it out, then take everything you hate and make it ten times worse. The printer that sometimes works? Now it works zero times. The games you're playing? Now they run 15-30% slower, with stutters (modding your sims 4 would also get a lot more painful). And the mediatek wifi 7 card in your pc will become a paperweight. I'd also become your unwilling tech support that you'd have to call every single day from now on.

Safe to say she's keeping Windows, and I am keeping my sanity.

Every once in a while someone wanders in here, reads a post, and types out the same comment: "well, actually, Linux can do that now," or "this is misinformation," or "you clearly haven't read about X". And then they get removed or banned, and then they make a second comment somewhere about how this sub "can't handle criticism."

Maybe it's you who got banned. And maybe you even cried out "censorship!". But make no mistake - it ain't it, you're just confused about where you are. So let me clear this up once and for all.

This sub is called linuxsucks101. It does exactly what it says on the tin. You came to a place named after disliking Linux and got upset that it dislikes Linux. Imagine walking into a McDonalds and getting upset that they don't serve Wendy's chilli - that's what you're doing.

You're allowed to not like this place, in fact, if you love linux or GNU, it's completely understandable that you'd hate it here. But that just means this sub isn't for you. And it's okay, there are other subs built specifically for the thing you want. Go enjoy them.

Which brings me to the actual mystery: why do Linux users feel the need to invade every other sub like an aggressive tumor? It's not enough to have their own spaces, they have to be everywhere. I'm fairly sure I could open r/food right now and find someone shilling Linux in the comments.

Later edit: I actually searched for "linux" on r/food and found this. I only said it as a joke, but it seems the jokes keep writing themselves:

https://preview.redd.it/t2xqiugs3o5h1.png?width=948&format=png&auto=webp&s=b759f46df9c14e5985fe437d3e23d6cae889b48b

That's the part I genuinely don't get. Nobody is brigading r/linux to tell them Windows is better. We don't show up in r/archlinux going "um, actually, have you considered not". We're content to dislike Linux in the one corner of the internet built for disliking Linux. The traffic is entirely one-directional, and somehow we're the obsessed ones.

TLDR: You're on the wrong sub, buddy. The exit is right there, and there's a whole pro-Linux internet waiting for you on the other side of it.

Later later edit: The whole food theme is coming strong with this one, so I'll go get a burger. And I'd better not hear about linux while I'm eating, or I'll choke on my burger.

Before I begin my post, I need to mention this right out of the gate - no matter which metrics you check and how you look at it, Windows dominates the desktop. This means that for the vast majority of problems you'll encounter, there's already a guide, a forum thread, or even an official Microsoft fix that you can use. You rarely have to talk to a human. Linux desktop doesn't get that luxury. There are plenty of issues that don't have pre-written answers, so you have to go and interact with the community. And that opens a huge can of worms that I'm about to get into.

There's also the UX - because applications in Windows and Mac OS are built by teams of developers, designers, UX researchers and testers, you simply won't encounter that many usability issues compared to linux applications developed by volunteers (many times just one person doing all that work). And the more problems you'll have, the more you'll have to interact with the community in the hopes of solving them.

All that said, let's just get into it.

-

My first contact with Linux was Slax 3, around 2008–2009. In between I've had stretches where I daily-drove Fedora and Arch. I've had plenty of experiences, good and bad. These days I use macOS, Windows and CachyOS.

The point is, I'm not talking as an outsider, I've got the inside scoop (many of us on 101 have it). And I've got bad news for the linux evangelists:

Microsoft could start putting full-screen unskippable video ads in Windows now, and people still wouldn't switch. It's not because users are dumb, and it's not even because of what Linux distros can or can't do.

It's because of the deeply toxic community. There's a category of people I like to call "the Linux priests", who'll tell you that Windows is the devil himself and macOS is a prison, and that you need to wake up and make the switch.

Maybe it sounds convincing to you, so you listen.

Then something breaks. Maybe it's the printer, maybe it's the sleep functionality on your laptop, or maybe it's just your nvidia card having a significant performance drop in games. So you start asking questions, and that's when the fun begins: "Skill issue!", "Why the hell are you using that application?", "Did you read the wiki?", "I use arch btw", "works on my machine".

These are the same people who say even your grandma can use Linux now, but will tell you "It's open source, contribute if you don't like it" in the same breath.

The point is, you can't cry about lack of adoption while simultaneously treating every new user like a criminal.

https://preview.redd.it/uhcgyu4tvn5h1.png?width=1592&format=png&auto=webp&s=a94a46e6e02504e5203c59b454a1ccf697bed152

Another big problem (that I have addressed in a previous post) is that criticism isn't accepted. It's always the user's fault, never the operating system's. This is most apparent when it comes to hardware issues, the Linux priests will say "you bought the wrong thing" or "it's the hardware vendor's fault". On the one hand, I find it ridiculous to blame someone for the hardware they chose (you won't see this with any other OS). On the other, even if it is the vendor's fault, the end result is that the device won't work, and for the user the outcome is identical: the OS doesn't work with their hardware.

Beyond that, there's the infighting. Arch vs Ubuntu, Wayland vs X11, systemd is the devil, "your distro is a toy". How do you convince people to join a community where even the established users can't get along with each other?

Linux doesn't have a marketing problem, it has a toxicity problem. And until the community addresses that, "year of the Linux desktop" stays what it's always been - next year.