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
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
- Diffusion of Responsibility from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
CoW Swap users lose estimated $1.2 million after DNS hijacking
Users who visited the website for the CoW Swap DEX aggregator on April 14 were unknowingly redirected to a malicious website that drained their crypto wallets. An attacker was able to socially engineer CoW Swap's domain registrar…
via Web3 is Going Just Great April 17, 2026Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s old firm pumps $10 million into super PAC led by Tether executive
Cantor Fitzgerald, the Lutnick-tied financial services firm that owns a stake in and custodies reserves for the stablecoin issuer, is bankrolling a super PAC led by a Tether executive.
via Citation Needed April 16, 2026Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7
For anyone who has been (inadvisably) taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning's two big model releases - Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from Alibaba and Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 16, 2026Generated by openring