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.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- My next chapter with Mastodon from Mastodon Blog
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson
I talked with CL Kao and Dori Wilson for an episode of their new Data Renegades podcast titled Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison. I fed the transcript into Claude Opus 4.5 to extract this list of topics with timestamps and illustrative quotes. …
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries November 26, 2025Pluralistic: Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" (25 Nov 2025)
Today's links Google steers Americans looking for health care into "junk insurance" : An enshittified search monopolist meets the worst health care system imaginable. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disaster fantasi…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow November 25, 2025Digital asset treasury companies are running out of steam
Convincing traders to pay $2 for $1 of bitcoin worked — for a while. As premiums evaporate, an unwind could be painful.
via Citation Needed November 25, 2025Generated by openring