An Ode to Linux Desktop Users Everywhere
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels. The package makers, the man page writers. The rounded windows in Qt mixed with the less rounded windows of GTK. The ones who literally see things differently because of missing proprietary fonts.
They’re not fond of rules, installation wizards, double clicking and have no respect for the status quo.
You can downvote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you cannot do is ignore them. Because they ship your bug fixes.
They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty screen and know that you have to blacklist your video card driver? Or sit in silence while tweaking alsamixer on the command line? Or write bash aliases to reload your network driver kernel module each time your laptop resumes from suspension? We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because people who are crazy enough to think that they can run Linux on the desktop, are the ones who change the world.
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Great Lakes, Illinois
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- Are we inside a Sarlacc?
- Vagrant Box for ROS2 on Apple Silicon
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
- [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
- My next chapter with Mastodon from Mastodon Blog
- How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin? from charity.wtf
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
GPT-5.2
OpenAI reportedly declared a "code red" on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google's Gemini 3. It's less than two weeks later and they just announced GPT-5.2, calling it "the most c…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries December 11, 2025Marc was Invited to the “Wake Up Excited” Podcast by Brad Frost
A big part of our chat circled around authenticity and self-worth. A few questions we touched were: How easy is it to overlook your own achievements? How strange does it feel to work alone so much? How often do we […]
via Blog – Brad Frost December 11, 2025Reflections on my first year writing full time
The best essays Johanna and I wrote in 2025, and some reflections on what it was like to write them.
via Escaping Flatland December 11, 2025Generated by openring