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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean keep a spare machine for emergencies? Some of us have always had them as primaries, rather than leaving that world.

20 years ago, the type of person analogous to a typical HN type would have been on Linux. Thread after thread on places like Slashdot started from a position of Linux advocacy as a common baseline. Then in the early 2000s there was a massive shift to Mac among those types.

Personally, I miss the days of rank and file in such communities being desktop Linux advocates. We lost something of our soul.

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I, for one, don't miss it. Linux Desktop evangelists are horrifically annoying people to deal with because they look down on everyone, believing themselves superior for using it. Tell them Linux doesn't work for what you're doing and they'll say you should change what you're doing, tell them it is missing essential functionality for you and they'll insist you don't need it, tell them you don't like the way parts of the system work and they'll list a dozen reasons you're wrong. Then, after roundly dismissing all criticism, they'll gaze into the heavens and shout "why won't more people use the Linux Desktop? Is it not pretty enough!?". In short, they're condescending assholes and I'm glad they aren't nearly as prevalent as they used to be.

I think your comment itself is a little presumptuous of motives and commits some of what you accuse others of doing.

But that aside. The free unix-like desktop has a lot of choices to be made, and one person's setup isn't going to be the same as another's. To me, that is the opposite of looking down on somebody for what they use, if we all agree that these are legitimate choices. And there is a little bit of a spirit that if something is lacking, you can try to pave your own way, which I don't see as a bad thing, though I can see others rejecting it.

If anything I think the current community is a little too homogeneous, with a lot of people opting for stock Ubuntu or whatever, than it used to be, and that's a criticism I would make.

I don't have a problem with people who use Linux Desktop, they have their reasons for their choices just as I do, many of which I would agree with[0]. My problem is with evangelists, people seeking to convert others to their chosen religion of Linux Desktop. Unfortunately because Linux Desktop users have a lot of overlap with Linux Desktop developers these attitudes still pervade the community. Case in point, how often do you hear a variation on the phrase "normal users don't need that"?

[0] and in fact I have a higher quantity of my devices running a Linux Desktop than I do Windows, but my main rig is Windows and that's unlikely to change for many reasons.

> Linux Desktop evangelists are horrifically annoying people to deal with

Agreed, and I am a Linux user. I would much rather spend my time with people who are interested in using Linux rather than promoting it. The discussions are much more meaningful. Besides, evangelists from one side tends to attract evangelists from the other side (with each side being as bad as the other). Once that happens, annoying advocacy tends to transform into belittling bickering.

It's ironic, Linux today is in a better state than its ever been. Chrome is Chrome, dependency hell is more easily mitigated by containerization, desktop environments have mostly become stable, hardware from Purism, System76, and Dell is quite good.

I think a lot of us just end up with Macs because work IT hates the idea of managing Linux machines and macOS gets you 95% of what you need.

> I think a lot of us just end up with Macs because work IT hates the idea of managing Linux machines

Many of us end up with Linux precisely because work IT doesn't manage Linux machines. (What's worse is when they think they can manage Linux machines.)

Everything you say is true, but I also remember every time slashdot would publish browser usage percentages it was something like 70% IE. visible perception did not match reality, even then.

How much of that was people accessing the site from their workplace? IE was mandatory in many places back then.

It seems that GP forgot to include the sarcasm flag.

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