That’s a well-meaning assumption, but no. My personal experiences asking for help from the linux community are very spaced out, and I understood long ago that asking for a GUI for something in linux is akin to requesting the murder of Torvalds.
For sure there are lots of people who start using linux and demand it works for their very specific usecase, verbally assault project maintainers, expect they be treated like paying customers despite getting something for free, and just do not understand that many opensource projects are passion projects with no commercial goals. I won’t even get into the FLOSS purists who lose their minds when somebody does want to make money with opensource and dares use a different license.
But what I see more often is somebody asking for instructions to do something and being told to RTFM, “just do X”, or copy-paste some commands into their terminal. And when the person asks for something without terminal commands, the responses are less than friendly. What worse is when developers suggest building a GUI (or even presenting a GUI) to make things easier for newcomers and advanced users going “but there’s a CLI for that” or “please don’t” or some other response like that.
And of course this isn’t limited to the OS. As a developer, the “just use vim/emacs” crowd are equally as annoying. Trying to get neovim configured was such a terrible experience I just dropped it. Not only because of neovim itself, but because of the community too. “just learn LUA”, “just copy this into your config, it’s not that hard”, *copy-paste some link to a stack-overflow question that has nothing to do with the question I asked*, etc. . It’s quite similar with the Rust community that would love to lynch anybody using unsafe in their code.
It’s that unhelpful and dogmatic attitude that I find is pervasive in tech communities. KDE developers and Gnome developers get along well, KDE and Gnome users could wage wars over which DE is the best. Zeus help you if you’re a beginner and get in between.
That’s a well-meaning assumption, but no. My personal experiences asking for help from the linux community are very spaced out, and I understood long ago that asking for a GUI for something in linux is akin to requesting the murder of Torvalds.
For sure there are lots of people who start using linux and demand it works for their very specific usecase, verbally assault project maintainers, expect they be treated like paying customers despite getting something for free, and just do not understand that many opensource projects are passion projects with no commercial goals. I won’t even get into the FLOSS purists who lose their minds when somebody does want to make money with opensource and dares use a different license.
But what I see more often is somebody asking for instructions to do something and being told to RTFM, “just do X”, or copy-paste some commands into their terminal. And when the person asks for something without terminal commands, the responses are less than friendly. What worse is when developers suggest building a GUI (or even presenting a GUI) to make things easier for newcomers and advanced users going “but there’s a CLI for that” or “please don’t” or some other response like that.
And of course this isn’t limited to the OS. As a developer, the “just use vim/emacs” crowd are equally as annoying. Trying to get neovim configured was such a terrible experience I just dropped it. Not only because of neovim itself, but because of the community too. “just learn LUA”, “just copy this into your config, it’s not that hard”, *copy-paste some link to a stack-overflow question that has nothing to do with the question I asked*, etc. . It’s quite similar with the Rust community that would love to lynch anybody using
unsafein their code.It’s that unhelpful and dogmatic attitude that I find is pervasive in tech communities. KDE developers and Gnome developers get along well, KDE and Gnome users could wage wars over which DE is the best. Zeus help you if you’re a beginner and get in between.
Anti Commercial-AI license