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
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Edge Detection with Inkscape
- Spring Security, Webjars, and MIME type error
- Terminal RSS Reader With Nom
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Deeper dive: Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware? from Unsung
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- The default person from https://popagandhi.com/
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Recently
I skipped August's Recently because this summer has been relentless, mostly in the positive sense. July and August were filled with bike rides, 5K races, friends in town, life changes and logistics.For a friend's birthday, we rode the rickety Coney Island...
via macwright.com September 1, 2026The Swiss Cheese model, pt. 3
After two more serious posts in this series, I wanted to stop somewhere a bit more lighthearted and inconsequential. “Here’a a fun thing you can try,” begins this 13-minute video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained: The premise of the parlor trick the vide...
via Unsung August 31, 2026My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and r...
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog August 31, 2026Generated by openring