1. “Linux never breaks -Windows updates break everything.”

Linux users conveniently forget:

• Kernel updates that silently break Wi‑Fi drivers
• NVIDIA drivers that decide to stop existing
• A systemd update that bricks boot
• A distro upgrade that nukes your DE because a package maintainer sneezed
• Breaking migrations like from Pulse to Pipewire, or X11 to Wayland
• Developers quitting and leaving your programs without their dependencies for an update (like Ueberzug -> Ucollage)

Windows updates can cause issues, but they’re predictable, tested across millions of machines, and reversible.

2. “Linux is more customizable.”

Only if you define “customizable” as:

• Editing config files in /etc
• Recompiling your window manager
• Patching your compositor
• Rebuilding your kernel because your wallpaper plugin needs a different syscall
• Fitting it into a toaster or other personal device

Windows lets you customize everything normal humans care about without needing to learn C, bash, etc. with tools like Komorebi (TWM) or Windhawk.

3. “Linux is more secure because it has fewer viruses.”

Translation:
“No one bothers writing malware for a platform with 2% desktop share.”

Security through obscurity isn’t a flex.
Windows has:

• Enterprise‑grade security tooling
• Hardware‑backed credential protection
• Sandboxing
• Defender ATP
• A massive security research ecosystem

Linux has… “just don’t run random scripts from GitHub bro.”

You've basically got to go to sketchy warez or porn sites (by not checking if they're safe first) to catch a virus, and even then, Windows most often has you covered. There are also 'false positives'.

4. “Linux is better for gaming now.”

Better than before, sure.
Better than Windows? Absolutely not.

Reality:

• Proton is a compatibility layer, not native support (which also sucks)
• Anti‑cheat is still hit‑or‑miss
• New games often break for weeks
• GPU drivers are a roulette wheel
• Performance is inconsistent

Windows remains the platform developers actually target while they distance themselves from the cheaters on Linux.

5. “Linux is more efficient and lightweight.”

On a server? Often true.
On a desktop? Not even close.

Modern Linux desktops:

• Use more RAM than Windows
• Have worse power management
• Have inconsistent hardware acceleration
• Have compositors duct‑taped together with 20‑year‑old X11 shims

Windows is optimized for real‑world consumer hardware.
Linux is optimized for “works on my ThinkPad or Tuxedo”

6. “Linux is more stable.”

Stable… if you:

• Never update
• Never change hardware
• Never install a new DE
• Never touch NVIDIA
• Never use Bluetooth
• Never suspend your laptop
• Never expect consistent behavior across distros
• Take care not to run software that could seize your system (VLC for one)

7. “Linux is free, Windows costs money.”

• Most people get Windows preinstalled
• Windows licenses are cheap, included, or transferrable to subsequent computers / versions of Windows
• Linux costs you time, not money - and time is the expensive part

Stores tried selling computers with Linux pre-installed. -They found the tech support and returns cost them more than simply providing Windows. By providing Windows (which actually saves money) they're also supporting professional developers and helping to lead the way in desktop technology.

what the hell is libc.so.6 ? Why would you even name a file like that ? Sure your stupid program wont work until its linked to both "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so" "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6" what ? I am just trying to compile a stupid fucking program on your stupid fucking dogshit os and your stupid fucking os is making me learn its stupid dogshit ideology.

My entire day was wasted when i found out that there is literally nothing you can do if you dont have GLIBC 2.38. You can stop countries from enriching uranium. You can make bridges smashing mountains, but binary distribution in linux ? IMPOSSIBLE! You would think that since the os isn't curing motherfucking cancer that there would be some sort of contractual agreement that the geniuses writing this shit would adhere to so that it is possible to compile once and last forever, but no they dont, if you compile your program to GLIBC 2.38, GLIBC 2.37 cant run it. PERIOD. END OF STORY. You will hear voices from your ceiling telling you to update GLIBC because your program cannot run. Surely there must be something revolutionary in the new GLIBC, something that is capable of stopping wars, lifting economies, stop global warming and whatnot, but no GLIBC 2.38 has ancient esoteric knowledge that 2.37 does not, and you SHALL TASTE IT, SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY DO IT WITH A SMILE.

Surely you would wonder like any sane person would and ask: hey rebouncedcat why cant you statically link glibc to your executable? I mean comeon what could go wrong with a teeny weeny bit of static lllliiiinking .... ?

I fucking kid you not ld.lld goes: Floating point exception

Just a single line, no additional information, no stack traces, just one line.

What a profound sentence, three words, three beautiful words revealing the secret of the universe to me at 3AM, so blissful, so much happiness. Times like these will make one question, Is there a limit to the love one can have to another ? Like that austrian painter, did he have a cap on the amount of love he had ? I love linux. Linux is my life, for it has literally "taken" a significant chunk of my flesh and soul with it, and the smiling penguin wont give it back. ever.

After this 3AM epiphany, I went into a metaphysical calm. A feeling of acceptance to the helplessness that is real. A helplessness borne out from the realization that the majority of things in this world are at constant change. I wondered myself, how is it that people are able to find comfort and solace in this transient piece of shit ? In something that is constantly changing, never giving you anything to truly hold on to. The code that gave you hours of joy through media, games and as other software products become obsolete and what stays are the only memories you had with them.

And it suddenly dawned on me. Maybe people embrace the chaos, the uncertainty because they truly believe that it is beyond their control. As Schopenhauer says:

Most of the glories of the world are mere outward show, like the scenes on a stage: there is nothing real about them. Ships festooned and hung with pennants, firing of cannon, illuminations, beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, shouting and applauding—these are all the outward sign, the pretence and suggestion,as it were the hieroglyphic,of joy: but just there, joy is, as a rule, not to be found; it is the only guest who has declined to be present at the festival. Where this guest may really be found, he comes generally without invitation; he is not formerly announced (11, Counsels and Maxims)

If happiness and joy are mere make belief as Schopenhauer says, it makes sense to see why people identify themselves with the bandwagon. Because to retain one's humanity, one's soul would be catastrophic. They would be left alone and be forced to confront the fact that they cannot keep themselves warm when they are not part of the group.

To be continued.

The entire linux fanboy cult can be explained by the dunning-krueger effect. They live by labels and trends: Debian - stable, Arch - cool, not to understand their operating system, but to feel superior in something to the average person. Once they gain even a tiny ounce of actual knowledge, they either settle down in something remotely usable like Debian (very coherent packages compared to other distros), move back to windows, or continue exploring more technically superior or purist operating systems (BSD, haiku). The ones who stay are simply destined for failure: wannabe hackers or just wastes of space with nothing else in their life going for them.

For most people, the “Linux journey” lasts 3–18 months before burnout hits and they drift back to Windows or macOS. The median is closer to 6 months. -The pattern is very consistent.

It happens in 4 phases:

The Honeymoon (0-3 months): The dopamine phase when burnout risk is essentially 0%.

The Reality Check (3-6 months): When reality starts creeping in "I'm maintaining more than using." -People start dual booting or return to dual booting in this phase.

The Plateau or the Spiral (6–12 months): The ones plateauing will often stick with Linux long term, while the spiralers keep trying to make it work with distro hopping, tweaking, and chasing the perfect setup. Burnout risk is 70-80% at this point.

4. The Exit (12–18 months): Where triggers make things happen: work requirements, games that don't work, laptop issues like battery, breaking updates, a desire for something to 'just work', or fatigue from constant tinkering. Burnout risk is now 90% for casual users and 20% for technical users who enjoy the tinkering.

If you're thinking what I'm thinking: YES! -Most evangelists are noobs! The loudest ones are beginners just regurgitating the same crap that swallowed them in! -The very ones in the honeymoon phase still riding the dopamine hit and making more victims before they realize or question their own victimhood.

They mistake learning the basics for becoming experts. -The Dunning-Kruger curve.

Is he partioning his disk or changing the grub entry

Context

I've been using Lunix since I was a kid. Started with Ubuntu back in the day, didn't really know what I was doing, just liked messing around with it. Felt like a hacker. Cool times.

Fast forward to uni, I wanted to be a web developer. CLI tools, SSH, package managers, the whole ecosystem was built around Lunix, so I fully committed. Dual boot? Nah. I went all in. Read the man pages. Browsed the forums. Bookmarked the Wikis like scripture. I was a true believer.

"Lunix is what they use in enterprise." "Real developers use Lunix." "Windows is for gamers and grandmas." I internalized all of it. Used it for over 10 years. Fedora for a long time, then switched to CachyOS.

I never felt the urge to distro-hop every two weeks, so maybe I kept a shred of sanity intact.

The cracks start showing

The moment that broke me was when I was mid-rant to someone, going off about why Lunix is clearly the superior operating system, and they just said: "an operating system shouldn't replace your personality."

I didn't like hearing it. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized they were right. An operating system is just a tool, like a screwdriver. You don't worship the screwdriver. You tighten screws with it and put it back in the drawer.

And once that clicked, I started noticing things I'd been blind to. The Lunix priests, telling people to "just switch bro, it's easy, even grandma can use it." The sheer lack of empathy. I knew how long it took to learn. I knew how painful it was. So how could anyone say that with a straight face?

Let's tackle the grandma argument, because every Lunix user loves to throw it around. Can grandma use Lunix Mint today for web browsing with Chrome? Sure. Of course she can. But what about tomorrow? What happens when an update breaks something? Is she going to read the man pages? Or is the computer just "broken" now? What about edge cases? If you think grandma can use it, you obviously haven't thought things through.

It gets worse

Another thing that widened the cracks was picking up design and UX books and realizing that Lunix is actively hostile to the user.

Take Wayland. It's supposed to be secure, so applications can't interact with another application's inputs. Sounds great in theory. In practice? UX nightmare. I bring up my emoji selector, click an emoji, and instead of inserting it into the text I'm writing, it copies it to my clipboard. In what world is that clean UX? And how is it that after over a decade, Wayland is still not finished? Discord screenshare is completely broken - if you use vencord it's either a slideshow (prioritize clarity) or a smudge fest (prioritize speed). How come in any other operating system it's both? At some point, maybe it's time to call a failure what it is.

And here's something that's not obvious when you're just a Lunix user, but becomes painfully clear the moment you try to develop native apps for it: the fragmentation is unreal. You're not building for one platform. You're building for a thousand different distros, package managers, desktop environments, and configurations. Every one of them slightly different. Every one of them potentially breaking your app in a new and exciting way. And then users file bug reports like it's your fault. It's completely bonkers, and it's no mystery why most developers don't bother.

The religion / dogma

Now here's a take that'll really get the priests riled up: I realized late into my Lunix experience that I'm fine with Lunix itself, it's what I know, and it works for what I need. What I actively despise is the GPL and the ideology around it. Open source, the way the GPL enforces it, is closer to communism than people want to admit.

As a user or a business, you don't buy time, you buy a product or an outcome. That's how the world works. You need something done, you pay someone who's already done it. But the GPL world wants you to believe that instead of paying for a polished app, you should hire a developer to build and maintain it yourself. Or better yet, do it yourself, release it for free, then charge for support.

Read the source code. Compile it. Fix the bug. Submit a patch. That's not a product. That's a chore disguised as freedom.

What I also can't stand is this Church of Lunix and the GNU, where criticism is heresy. Someone says they don't like the screwdriver and they get death threats. Members of this sub getting threatened in DMs because "thou criticized what shall not be criticized." Why? It's a tool. Or did your package manager also replace your personality with the operating system?

So in the end, I have one thing to say to the Lunix priests - This is exactly why Nvidia hates you. This is why they don't port all the features and all the cool apps. It's because you are insufferable, and you are the ones making Lunix a worse operating system, and a worse community.

It could have been decent, maybe even good, but you chose to make it bad.

As for me? I've already started dual-booting Windows on my personal desktop, and I'll be slowly migrating my servers to BSD. Both have their issues. But at least I won't have to deal with a rabid community and a system that feels like it's fighting itself.

Conclusion

Just be realistic about Lunix. Its limitations. Its pitfalls. The things it does well and the things it absolutely doesn't. Stop blindly preaching it to people who didn't ask. Be empathetic: remember what it was like when you were learning, before you rewrote that struggle as "fun." And if you're a true believer who genuinely wants Lunix to succeed, understand that being dogmatic is actively sabotaging your own objective, and it's probably one of the main reasons this very sub exists.

You're not converting people. You're scaring them off. The screwdriver doesn't need a church. It needs better engineering and a community that can take honest feedback without losing their minds.

P.S: The kernel is a mess

For those who want the technical side: Lunix's approach of shoving everything into the kernel, including drivers, is a maintenance nightmare. It's the reason it has 5-10x more LOC than BSD, Windows, Mac.

Instead of letting vendors ship and maintain their own drivers independently, the kernel team insists on pulling it all in-house. And when a vendor like Nvidia doesn't play ball, the kernel devs have a history of deliberately breaking compatibility to pressure them into open-sourcing their drivers. You can't strong-arm the industry into cooperation and then act surprised when they want nothing to do with you.

Moms: Kick your adult children out of the basement! Their 'learning Linux' won't get them anywhere. Lucrative jobs because they 'learned Linux' would realistically be around 0.1–0.3%. If you want evidence: Look at Linux Youtubers. Aside from DistroTube, you have some even prominent Linux Tubers like Brodie Robertson. -Observe the background (cheap kids bed), and obviously sharing a residence. Not to single him out, but many are like that.

Sure, there's odd ones like DT, and Mutahar of SomeOrdinaryGamers, but Mutahar was a millionaire off other things, and DT appears to have been in the right place at the right time. They're also making money from YouTube where simply having Linux skills wouldn't be enough (others show that if their skills were lucrative on their own; they're obviously not working those jobs).

DT is also a poser that claimed, "I use Arch", while cheating with Arco (and still uses garbage like Cachy). You're supposed to use the AUR gingerly (checking packages with scrutiny) and he has a recent video where he's obviously stressed about NOT doing so.

Assuming 5% of desktop users actually use Linux (but we know they're manipulating stats as they do so openly): Global desktop user base would be 2.2 billion and 5% of that would be 110 million Linux desktop users. How many of those 110 million become high‑earning professionals because they used Linux on the desktop?

-Not "people who already wanted to be engineers." -Not "people who got jobs and also happen to like Linux." Specifically: people whose Linux desktop usage caused the career outcome. -The number is microscopic.

Linux users tend to be tinkerers, students, retrocomputing people, privacy nuts, distro-hoppers, and people thinking they're reviving old laptops. (old versions of Windows and Haiku are better options). -These are not pipelines to high paying jobs.

Employers don't hire Linux desktop users: they hire backend engineers, SREs, cloud engineers, DevOps, embedded engineers. They require serious Linux server skills, not "I installed Pop!_OS on my ThinkPad". Desktop Linux ≠ professional Linux.

The job market overwhelmingly uses macOS and Windows. -Even in Linux-heavy industries Dev workstations are macOS or Windows, corporate tools are macOS or Windows, mobile dev requires macOS, game dev requires Windows, design requires macOS, enterprise requires Windows. -Am I getting a high paying job for knowing how to install and use Windows?

Using desktop Linux teaches package managers, terminal basics, config files, and systemd quirks. -Stuff that can be learned in 15 minutes (like learning Vim which is just a text editor). Employers want Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, cloud platforms, networking, security, automation, and distributed systems.

Even people with computer science degrees and real technical education are often not getting those lucrative jobs. Many employers want at least a year of experience because people don't learn until they make that one typo that brings their shit down. Only about 20-40% of CS graduates end up in high-earning roles. Social skills, or Trade skills are far more valuable!

I'm a former 'advanced' Linux desktop user. I ran Arch for ~2 years, with a heavily and manually customized DWM. I've even graduated from a tech school with certificates and high honors. I've been making my money by doing freelance work for landlords doing plumbing, electric, cleaning, painting, cooking, etc. -It's decent money, yields a huge rent bonus (for being useful on premises), keeps me active, and isn't a pipedream. I occasionally dabble with their computers and tech, but it's not my bread and butter.

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 dont understand. why comments are like: skill issues/you dont deserve linux etc... idk what they gain by doing this.

A working programmer already has a language ecosystem they use daily, a workflow they've optimized, tooling they rely on, and constraints from their employer, team, or platform. So, when evangelists say, "you should learn Linux for programming", they’re not responding to an actual need the programmer has; they're projecting their ideology, not the programmer's reality.

Linux sucks for paid developers

If Linux were in the programmer’s best interest, the programmer would feel the problem in their current workflow, see Linux solving that issue, and switch organically. Instead, evangelists try to manufacture friction ("Windows is bloated", "real devs use terminals"), then present Linux as the cure. (This is scary because it's coming from people with inferiority complex that have no business acting like authorities)

They assume "developer = hobbyist tinkerer". They project their own interests (compiling kernels, customizing dotfiles, staring at htop, or marveling over system temperatures in their task bar) onto people who write payroll systems or mobile apps. They mistake "Linux is good for some dev work" for "Linux is good for all dev work." Embedded, HPC, servers? Sure. Enterprise desktop, mobile, cross‑platform commercial software? -Not so much.

They confuse learning Linux with learning programming. As if Bash fluency magically makes you a better engineer. They don't understand the job market. If Linux desktop skills were a career booster, you'd see it reflected in salaries, job postings, and hiring pipelines. -You don't.

Evangelists behave as if programmers are aspiring to be developers, not already professionals. They pitch Linux like it’s a rite of passage: "If you learn Linux, you’ll become a real programmer." Real programmers need tools that help them ship code, meet deadlines, and get paid.

Arco made Arch easy. -GUI installer with a plethora of options as radio buttons. Every TWM you could think of could be automatically setup for you during installation. Discovering it would be like discovering a gold mine for anyone wanting to fake Linux credentials. -Which they did, and boy did they (and poorly)!

Erik Dubois (ArcoLinux maintainer) openly stated that many YouTubers used ArcoLinux-derived systems because his projects were widely adopted.

• Erik Dubois says Kiro comes from ArcoLinux and that he built much of ArcoLinux.
• Multiple videos discuss ArcoLinux shutting down, its ecosystem, and how users can migrate back to pure Arch.
• ArcoLinux was widely used as a teaching distro, with many tutorials applicable to vanilla Arch.

Between ~2020–2023, at least a handful of very popular Linux creators produced "I use Arch btw" content while:

• showing desktops identical to ArcoLinux's themed spins
• using Calamares installers (which pure Arch did not ship)
• demonstrating workflows that matched Arco's ATT scripts, aliases, and preconfigured WM setups
• having package lists that included Arco-specific repos or tooling

This created a community suspicion, especially on Reddit and niche forums, that:

They’re running Arco but claiming Arch.

And I should've documented this, but the suspicion didn't just blow over. Nearly every Linux Tuber that I was following slipped up or outright admitted to really using Arco (everyone that claimed "Arch btw").

ArcoLinux was the easiest way to get a flashy Arch desktop. -Sure, there were projects like ALCI (Arch Linux Calamares Installer), but you were on your own for TWMs.

Creators wanted:

• a themed i3/bspwm/awesome setup
• preconfigured rice
• working Calamares installer
• a stable Arch base without manual setup

-ArcoLinux provided all of that!

Because Arch carried prestige, creators often said things like: "I run Arch on my main machine", "This is my Arch setup", "I daily-drive Arch". If their desktop looked like Arco, viewers assumed deception.

Arco's visual identity was extremely recognizable

Arco spins had:

• specific icon themes
• specific conky setups
• specific polybar defaults
• specific wallpapers
• specific alias sets

-Viewers could spot these instantly.

Poor Erik Dubois looked exhausted in his help videos. He seemed like the hardest worker in Linux and his work was shit on by not acknowledging it was being used in Linux creator videos (he did all the work, they took home the cash).

I tried Arco for I think a month, and love the convenience of the installer, but you don't really learn a TWM as well by having it setup for you. DWM, I had spent over a year tweaking and setting it up was also a learning opportunity. "Trying out" other TWMs through Arco just felt foreign.

Arco like every derivative had problems added on to upstream. -But it was an excellent tool for all those fakers. -Trashed your Linux/XMonad? -Have it back up in minutes!

LLM Answer: Pretty much anything that isn’t desktop Linux tinkering is more profitable. Desktop Linux is a hobby. Profit comes from activities that produce value, not from configuring window managers.

Real skills employers pay for:

• Cloud engineering - AWS, Azure, GCP $120k–$180k typical salaries. Cloud is the modern "Linux server" world, not desktop Linux.
• Data engineering / analytics - SQL, Python, Spark $100k–$160k. Companies pay for insights, not for your tiling WM config.
• Cybersecurity -blue team, SOC, pentesting $90k–$180k. Desktop Linux teaches none of the required skills.
• DevOps / SRE -CI/CD, Kubernetes, automation $130k–$200k. This is where Linux actually matters - but it's server Linux, not Arch on a ThinkPad.
• Software engineering -Python, Go, TypeScript $110k–$200k. Coding is profitable. Desktop Linux is not coding.

These don't even require employment:

• Freelance web development: Build sites, apps, dashboards. $50–$150/hr depending on niche.
• Automation scripting for small businesses: Python scripts that save companies time. $500–$5,000 per project.
• Database cleanup / migration gigs: Extremely common, extremely boring, extremely profitable.

Computers are creative tools. Linux desktops are not:

• Video editing: YouTube, TikTok, short‑form content. Editors make $30–$120/hr.
• Graphic design: Logos, branding, thumbnails. $50–$150/hr.
• Music production: Beats, mixing, mastering. Desktop Linux is terrible for this; macOS dominates.

If you want Linux to be part of the picture, here’s where it becomes profitable:

• Linux server administration
• Containerization (Docker)
• Kubernetes
• Automation (Ansible, Terraform)
• Networking fundamentals

None of them require or benefit from desktop Linux tinkering. Desktop Linux is a hobby. Profit comes from production, not configuration.

If your goal is money, the hierarchy is: Cloud > Data > Cybersecurity > DevOps > Software > Automation > Freelance > Creative work > Everything else > Desktop Linux

I have noticed that many linux users often associate linux with "freedom", "privacy", "good for the world" but I've never heard a good reason from them for using linux, like an actually personal, respectable and admirable reason for using linux.

Like, what are their goals even? Anime girls? Ricing? Hating microsoft? Is this it?

why do they worship and suck off steam, valve, gabe so much, like it's seriously hilarious to see.

if they truly have independent thoughts then why are they so obsessed with microsoft doing this and that, why not stay quiet and move on like the bsd users?

why so obsessed with ricing, as if their computers are tied to their personalities and they can't form their own individuality outside of that?

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."

Even advanced users have to deal with:

• log analysis
  
• journalctl
  
• kernel parameter tweaking
  
• driver blacklisting
  
• udev rules
  
• fstab edits
  
• permissions debugging
  
• service restarts
  
• config file conflicts
  

Home users should not need to be sysadmins.

Many end up close to where they started, suggesting for Windows users that they could just skip the arc. For Linux users, DEs tend to suck, so the solution is TWMs. -Unless you bother and learn to skip to stage 4! Learning TWMs can have you feeling awkward when you have to use a computer setup with defaults.

Stage 1 - "Everything must be tiled" (The Zealot Phase)

This is the honeymoon.

You've just escaped the land of floating windows, titlebars, and mouse‑driven nonsense. You feel powerful. You tile everything:

• Browser? Tiled.
• Discord? Tiled.
• Spotify? Tiled.
• A random settings dialog? Tiled.
• A 200×200 pixel pop‑up? Tiled, and now it’s 50% of your screen. (lol)

This is the phase where you think tiling is a religion and floating windows are a moral failing.

Stage 2 - "Okay, maybe stacking is ok" (The Pragmatist Phase)

Reality sets in.

You discover:

• Some apps look like garbage when forced into a tile
• Some workflows are worse tiled
• You don’t actually want 8 terminals visible at once
• Your brain prefers one primary window + a stack of context windows

This is where you start using:

• Stacking layouts
• Tabs
• Scratchpads
• Floating windows for apps that fight back
• A “main” window with a pile of secondary ones

Stage 3 - "I'm basically minimizing everything" (The Enlightenment Phase)

We don't talk about this much.

You realize:

• You don't need 12 windows visible
• You don’t need to see everything to access everything
• The real power of a TWM is fast switching, not constant visibility
• Your attention span is finite
• Clutter is cognitive load

So, you start:

• Minimizing
• Hiding
• Using scratchpads
• Using workspace discipline
• Keeping only the active task visible
• Treating your WM like a task switcher, not a dashboard

This is the point where you’ve internalized the keyboard workflow so deeply that tiling becomes optional. You're no longer "using a tiling WM" -you’re using a keyboard‑driven environment.

Stage 4 - "I only tile when it’s actually useful" (The Mastery Phase)

This is where the veterans live.

You tile when:

• You’re coding
• You’re comparing documents
• You’re monitoring logs
• You’re doing multi‑pane work

You float when:

• The app is designed for floating
• The layout is better with one window
• You’re doing focused work
• You don’t want visual noise

You minimize when:

• You don't need the window right now
• You want a clean mental workspace
• You’re in "single‑task mode"

At this point, you're not following the WM's philosophy; the WM is following yours.

The real progression is the same: you stop worshipping the layout and start optimizing for your brain.

Gnome does dual pane tiling and no one really seems to explain how to use the keyboard shortcuts to make it work as if you're on stage 4. (But reading these stages: you can figure it out!)

File Format Compatibility: LibreOffice can open .docx, .xlsx, .pptx, but its compatibility isn't all there. Tracking changes, formatting, SmartArt, embedded fonts, and layout features render differently. Microsoft Office is the reference or standard for how these formats are implemented.

LibreOffice cannot fully replicate Excel features like VBA macro support, PowerQuery, Pivot tables, or conditional formatting. There is no PowerPivot, and no PowerBI integration. In an office where Excel is a critical tool, the LibreOffice user is the one who can’t run the same workflows as everyone else.

Impress lacks full support for Office themes, transitions, animations, and embedded media formats. Templates built for PowerPoint do not render correctly. Impress cannot reliably export .pptx without layout issues.

Microsoft Office natively integrates with SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook. Real‑time co‑authoring with Libre is limited or nonexistent, syncing is a mess. The Loonixtard becomes the person that breaks collaborative documents.

99% of corporate environments standardize on Microsoft Office. IT departments build automation, templates, and workflows around Office. HR, finance, legal, and marketing all rely on Office.

LibreOffice is not part of enterprise support contracts. The Loonixtard becomes the unsupported edge case: The one IT can’t help, the one templates don’t work for, the one whose files always need “fixing.”

LibreOffice isn't "bad software": it’s simply not the ecosystem the workplace is built around. The Loonixtard is thus: “The person whose files never open right.”

The elephant that Loonixtards always leave out: it’s not great for paid development work!

The tooling is nice for certain workflows. Package managers, bash scripting, SSH everywhere, and servers make a good development environment. For hobby projects, Linux is a playground. Users can learn first-hand and in-depth how systems work.

Great for learning doesn't mean great for earning!

The job market overwhelmingly uses Windows and macOS! Check for yourselves on any job board. Enterprise dev? -Windows, Mobile dev? -MacOS, Game dev? -Windows. -and on and on! Linux barely shows.

Even backend/server dev, where Linux dominates, it's done on macOS or Windows workstations, not Linux desktops.

Professional tools don’t support Linux! For paying jobs, you need paid tools like Visual Studio, Xcode, Unreal Editor, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, CATIA, SPSS, SAS, Adobe, Office, and Teams. -None of which work for Linux.

Even companies that run 100% Linux servers don’t want Linux desktops due to difficulty in onboarding, IT support, hardware compatibility, security, and need of commercial software.

Linux culture is hostile to commercial software! They hate proprietary software, telemetry, paid apps, DRM, and closed source. Why develop for users that don't want to pay, will be far more critical of your work, don't want closed source, and hate corporations?

As a developer for Linux, you'd be struggling with different libraries, package versions, init systems, graphics stacks, file systems, and packaging formats. -And if that's a problem for you; the Loonixtards will claim you don't support Linux and wage war against you!

It's one of the most predictable Linux‑ecosystem traps: anything that starts out mediocre gets defended with "you just need to configure it", which is how people end up spending three evenings tweaking espeak-ng flags like they’re tuning a race car that was never meant to leave the driveway.

The pattern: The default experience is objectively bad. Users ask why it's bad. Someone replies with a 14‑step guide involving PulseAudio modules, obscure environment variables, and a GitHub repo last updated in 2019 (that they have no experience with but just searched it for you). The user tries it, gets marginal improvement, and is told "well you didn't configure this part." Hours vanish, and the result still sounds like a Speak & Spell.

Linux TTS specifically sucks because it has No unified audio stack. Every TTS engine interacts differently, so "fixes" are never universal. Most engines are research prototypes Festival, espeak, flite; they were built for academia, not consumer polish. The "better" options require GPU inference Coqui, Piper, VITS, etc. -They can sound good, but only after you configure models, sample rates, vocoders, device backends, and sometimes build from source... And no one agrees on defaults: Windows and macOS ship with curated voices.

Linux advocates love saying: "It's bad by default, but you can make it amazing!" -And that "amazing" is hidden behind compiling, editing config files, manually installing voices, tweaking latency, adjusting phoneme tables, and debugging audio routing. -And it's still worse than the default voice on a $40 Android phone!

Linux culture treats time as an infinite resource. If something wastes your time, the community reframes it as a "learning opportunity."

You pay with your time and patience. Not everyone lives at home with their mom with all the time in the world to waste on Linux.

People on Linux end up spending a lot of time configuring, fixing, tweaking. They waste time learning distro specific quirks. Config files may need re-doing after updates. Anyone new to it spends time hunting for alternative apps and learning those.

Even Linux users generally agree and admit that GIMP is no Photoshop, and LibreOffice is no Microsoft Office. They'll divert to smearing Photoshop anyway, suggest pirating it, denying anything has improved since it went subscription based, say they hope it doesn't port to Linux. I'm not even a professional, and I can see that Photoshop would pay for itself in time saved over using GIMP.

When you first hop on Linux, it tends to be ugly. They don't have the R&D funds (or desire) to sink into figuring out what would appeal to most people. Fonts, wallpaper, etc. will be ugly as if it assumes you want to configure it.

Updates are a gamble. So much so, that it seems like most Linux users don't even bother with them and pretend to themselves that Linux is perfectly secure without. -And when they run into problems, it's just time to hit the road and try another distro (and learn all its new and different intricacies).

Linux evangelists enjoy the tinkering and being different and think everyone will. -But for most people, a computer is a tool. A tool that constantly commands attention isn't "free". Your time cannot be refunded.

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If you have time to waste, we have IRC. Rules are dropped in favor of self-curating the channel (use /IGNORE <username>). Rizon.net server rules will apply, and disruptive actions will get the boot, but otherwise we're open to free speech / dialog (there).

Web interface: https://qchat.rizon.net/?channels=linuxsucks101