Warning: this is an opinion piece with hyperbolic opinions. Take it with a handful of salt. It has also been written in the duration of perhaps nine to twelve months, so expect certain disjointedness. Also if you have feelings and opinions about words and how people should use them, it is probably advisable to skip this piece.
As previously mentioned, Linux is indeed a superior operating system, which all of you should have been using as a daily driver at least beginning from 2007 back when Beryl was all the rage (and rightly so), and you should both feel sad that Beryl/Compiz has met its' untimely demise at the hands of GNOME 3 (who's that? Oh, Red Hat, carry on, you corporate soul suck) and ashamed that in this day and age of enlightenment you are still using vastly inferior operating system.
Of course, Enlightenment didn't catch on either, probably because behind it there wasn't a corporate behemoth bent on just screwing people over using software which is free both as in speech as in beer to do something that is akin to what evil old Microsoft* used to do - embrace, extend and extinguish, but Red Hat being Red Hat rather choose to change "extinguish" to "exploit" just about as recently, when they just said "screw it", and went on to "extinguish" step as their recent endeavors in CentOS show.
There is an asterisk next to evil old Microsoft; One would think that new Microsoft with WSL and putting .net core on github is somewhat less evil, but in reality they just found a way to exploit linux on azure, acquiring github has the same old developers developers developers feel to it, and fear not, if you are perceived as a threat, they will screw you over just the same as the old MS. We're just jaded because openly evil actors are kind of the norm nowadays.
But I digress.
In any case, most of the readers would wonder why would I claim that one specific brand of liquid detergents is vastly superior to established operating systems?
Let me tell you: all of the other operating systems are either boring or utterly unusable. If you're using a boring OS, you rarely have to really push your fingers into the viscera, as things usually work and you can only trigger a BSOD by shorting your usb cable and blowing a few capacitors off your motherboard in the process. That is not the case for Linux, who, bordering on usable, retains at least some sense of adventure. Check this out:
So you're using Rakuten Viber as your messaging device because, well, your significant other uses it, because some of their friends really chose cute girl stickers that really express what they mean over the guarantees of perfect forward privacy or end-to-end encryption or just a system that would-just-not-bcc-putin-when-you-send-nudes whatever. You just feel lucky it's not facebook messenger that just sucks your data like a famished leech and no amount of sweet baby rays can convince me that Zuck is a human and I'm not sure that being can be placated with just nudes. But I digress - in any case, your superior operating system is officially supported.
The problem lies that sometimes it tries displaying it's own notifications in a way that crashes the GUI. Why? who knows, your gnome session is gone, tough luck bub. The fix is simple - you turn off the notifications in the settings. Your phone will notify you instead. You can FOCUS now. Other messengers are not better, but at least you can write kill-assholes
alias that sends a kill -9
to some severely stubborn processes like teams
that just enjoy hanging out in the process list forever. You have a start-assholes
alias as well but you don't think you've used it, like, ever.
Adventure doesn't necessarily stop with messengers.
Official nvidia-driver
package gives you the sweet functionality that sometimes your GUI just hangs, mouse and all. Power management is the most likely suspect, apparently you should not turn that off if you just want a monitor that displays a grafana dashboard of your home heating management system; removing nvidia gpu fixes things. You also look with suspicion to apt-get dist-upgrade
output that somehow promises you that you'll free about 400 gigs of disk space on a 256G nvme, which raises an eyebrow when next day it fixes itself.
Don't get me started on egpu weirdness, only fixable by creating xrandr buffers for egpu to draw in your integrated gpu buffers or something like that.
But it is so much better than the alternatives! Have you ever considered that a certain operating system from Redmond, WA is openly hostile to its' users?
An operating system that will gladly say screw your MBR, that tries to scare you into not running software you downloaded, yet still hides file extensions away from the user; an operating system that installs software (that is impossible to uninstall) without your knowledge and intervention (looking at you, Edge), in which it's normal to have a separate installer you have to install in order to install the software, because, of course, the hot mess that is Windows Installer (aka MSI) can't really be trusted to install and uninstall. It still boggles my mind how the folks with vastly inferior non-corporate intellect have managed to create package managers that not only manage to install and uninstall programs, but also their dependencies while I have twenty Microsoft VC++ redistributable entries in my uninstall list at all times.
Incredibly enough, my operating system doesn't ever force me to reboot and much to my surprise kernel upgrades make things work better, not worse. And since ksplice exists, I don't even need to reboot on kernel upgrades.
My operating system wasn't designed by people who can't really think about other people without displaying a rabid sneer, kicking a puppy just because, and proceeding to open a server message block server capable of IPC-over-network helpfully named "File Sharing" on 0.0.0.0 with no auth.
Yeah.
I can sense the superior smugness on the ether; somebody somewhere nods in agreement, reading this on a sleek aluminum encased M1 costing approximately the same amount of money as a shipping container full of underage child slaves from somewhere in southeast Asia.
Well your operating system is no better: despite having BSD as its roots, it still is vastly inferior, albeit for different reasons.
First of all, it's not a tech company that it comes from. You're in an evil cult. There, I've said it. I can already feel the hail of stones flying at my head. But countless examples of being different just for the sake of being different, gaslighting your own customers, bad design hailed as revolutionary, downgrades presented as courageous upgrades and, of course, millions of fans vehemently defending any perceived offense towards the Great Holy Fruit just drive the point home. In the year 2021, Safari still doesn't fully support OGG Vorbis, an open audio format available since at least 2006. Come on, Great Holy Fruit, even Edge browser supports it since 2019! AAC is as dead as QuickTime movies and other proprietary crap you try to push (looking at you, bonjour). In the world of Great Holy Fruit no other systems exist, and should they be given a chance, none would.
I don't really mind harmless cults, I only hate on evil ones.
Then there are all of you... glorious perverts, for the lack of better word, using Qubes, Haikus and TempleOS, waiting on version 1.0 on HURD, riding the long tail of weirdness up to the unholy resurrection of Plan9 (was it ever truly, really dead? Who knows) - I salute you, the proud minority destined for permanent obscurity and, presumably, pains that I could never conceive the concept of, let alone endure - I salute you in my funny, funny, funny, funny way. Let me know when your OS can run classic Doom without you sacrificing your sanity at least.
In other words, dear reader, have you accepted Linus Torvalds as your personal Lord and Saviour? I have this little flash drive on me, just by chance...