An Ode to Linux Desktop Users Everywhere

| linux | writing |

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

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its prede...

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries August 16, 2026

“I think there’s a lot of value in these.”

Speaking of user interface guidelines, developer Matt Sephton and others compiled many of Apple’s human interface guidelines, starting from 1980, all the way to 2014, including some goodies like early drafts, NeXT, Newton, and so on. Elsewhere, designer Ge...

via Unsung August 16, 2026

Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026

Birding photos from Dutch Gap on Aug 15, 2026 My best bird photo from this morning is a dragonfly (Eastern Pondhawk, I think). Least Sandpiper Green Heron Red-headed Woodpecker. It's a juvenile, so its head is not actually red yet.

via O'DonnellWeb August 16, 2026

Generated by openring