Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

I don't enjoy seeing others having egos on the Internet.

What do I mean by this?

There's this attitude of “show, but don't tell”.

It truly doesn't increase the number of people even using Linux.

This is more than just the “normie” version of “gatekeeping” that Henry from Techlore discusses.

I understand the following non-examples: it's not that easy to write good documentation for Qubes OS. Even in 2021, two years after being endorsed by Edward Snowden before his 2019 memoir came out, the Qubes OS documentation is still a WIP — well, the “fringe” parts — even though it looks darn good. So, if the documentation on AwesomeWM isn't super complete, I understand why.

But this attitude perpetuated by 4channers pretending to use Gentoo and Luke Smith fans is insufferable.

The Cause: Exploring Kiss Linux

After the time I discovered this anti-systemd blog (in Part 3 of Weird Encounters on the Internet), I looked up Kiss Linux.

It seems like a super spartan Linux distro, probably somewhere in between something lean and mean but possibly usable, such Alpine Linux, and super barren, like Plan 9.

I discovered a Kiss Linux “review”. This was via web searching “kiss linux” on DuckDuckGo.

Climbing up the website tree gives me a blog, and then I notice a post titled “Program eloquence considered harmful”.

The title of this post is extremely reminiscent of the 2015 paper by Joanna Rutkowska (of Qubes OS founder tier fame) titled “State considered harmful”.

I'm confident this blog post's title has some connection, even indirectly.

Anyways, I read about allusions to Eric Raymond (author of the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar) about how UNIX programs are supposed to be verbose.

However, as a very impressionable and naïve person, to the point of being painfully and perniciously gullible, I felt this post requires one to be egotistical — especially being unintentionally burned by those who weren't conscious of leading others.

Clarification

I feel my true intent is to neither criticize the blog post itself nor the author because objectively there is nothing inherently wrong with the facts put forth in the blog post... well, maybe implying that Manjaro is trash.

(But to be honest, I am getting to the point again where I feel that Manjaro is not cutting my tasks sharp enough. As an example I've only recently discovered that Manjaro creates non-standard CXXFLAGS in /etc/makepkg.conf while attempting to figure out how to install linphone-git on Manjaro Unstable.)

However, I think some people are not aware that they impart rather unhealthy views onto others, even if they might not necessarily endorse such unhealthy views or opinions.

No, I don't mean irony/sarcasm — that's what the 4channers and Luke Smith-like YouTubers do, but that's a digression for another time.

Maybe, since I think about this subconsciously frequently, I don't do this. I'm told by non-technical people that I am really patient while explaining technical topics, such as E2EE, and quite knowledgeable (I supposed comparatively at the very least). (I really don't know anything — otherwise I would have figured out how to use the CLI to make local edits for GitHub pull requests, but I'll figure that out at some point.)

Perhaps this is a systemic issue that is independent of Linux acolytes. If so, then those aspects are out of scope for this discussion.

However, I don't intend to pass on unhealthy expectations onto others when it comes to Linux related topics — besides, I've already been irradiated by such unhealthy mindsets and opinions in the sciences. I'd rather not continue the abusive cyclic curse or the Wheel of Saṃsāra when it comes to this.

On the other hand, there is an inevitable threshold of prerequisite knowledge on the topics I touch upon — that can't be avoided, removed, or circumvented... but that is a digression for another time and place.