T-Minus 23 days & counting

Entry 07/18/2025 08:36:58: Mentat 2525

It’s time for me to start talking about the major gripes that I have not for the Linux Operating system, but instead with the community at large.   This is going to be the breaking point for me to wanting to work not only with the operating system but also with getting the answers that I need for anything that’s going on with my system(s). 

The first is that a good majority of the more experienced parts of the community lacks any rapport to the questions they encountered on the forums.  You are either dealing with the experienced people that demonstrate a complete uncaring attitude to being nice to people — new, intermediate and veterans — in the forums.  They copy-paste their answers which they have done ad infinitum (which is actually a sure bloody sign that if it’s **so** good, you’d think there would be a pin for it somewhere on the community boards).  They don’t work on anything remotely demonstrating interpersonal experience.  It’s like a race to get the most amount of answered like it’s an e-peen flex that they’re the ones with the most massive endowment for experience in the community. 

Or…  And these are my personal favorites.  In order to prove their experience as they’re trying to prove their massive e-peens, they will use ad hominem build straw men against another posters comment in order to prove their superiority.  They’re not helping either the poster or the contributors, and all they’re doing is creating a form of toxic environment that is neither supporting nor helpful to new users trying to get used to the culture they’re coming into. 

Finally and my personal favorite are the worst of the community.  They come in, drop a single comment like "well if works for me" (and yes.  17 years later I’m still seeing this scattered through more than just the Canonical community) and were positively no fucking help solving the problem.  These people are in my opinion, the worst examples of last word attitudes that aren’t useful and create a more negative environment than humanly possible.

**THIS IS NOTHING** like the experience that I’ve dealt with from any Microsoft or Windows community where people answer the question, explain a little of their experience with it, and move on. 

I often attribute this to the most negative parts of human qualities:  arrogance, condescension, elitism/turpitude (at worst case), and the sort of community negativity that I often didn’t have to encounter with problems in the Windows or Apple Communities.  In fact, they came in, answered the question, posted third party information and did what they could to create a positive experience before moving on.  

The last thing I would expect from people that were outcasts, misfits, out-of-box thinkers, and the generally independent thinkers that often take abuses from others for being different.  No instead they seem to be shoveling out the abuses they experienced  onto people in the world.  It’s the cycle of abuse that doesn’t seem to end. 

The second gripe I have comes from the people that don’t remotely answer the question posed about a piece of software and instead foist another piece of software that has **nothing** to do with the question posed.   Case in point, I was looking for answers to the questions I had when it came to KIO-drive (when I was trying out Fedora Plasma).  Did they answer the problems posed about KIO-Drive and Dolphin?  Nope!  They ignored the OP’s question, and would then insist to the OP to install RClone, OCAMLFUSE. OverGrive, or InSync instead. 

What the people insisting on alternatives didn’t explain is that RClone required excessive additional steps in order to operate properly…  And it’s use is much slower than what Windows users are used to with Google Drive (which was also not explained).   OCAMLFUSE has a small chance of working, yet more strongly on the not working at all (ending with a 403 "not authorized" issue and falls back on RClone’s part for setting up the cloud console to make it work).  Oh and I forgot to mention, three sites that supported OCAMLFUSE did an extremely poor job explaining that you had to include another repository from the creator of the program to make it part of the auto-update feature.  Bad move there, believe me.  To continue, OverGrive can cost $5.00 for a license to make it work "conveniently" (read: set and forget), and InSync costs a whopping $39.99 – $49.99 (depending on whether it’s on sale or not) to use it past the try-and-buy time. 

This neither answered nor remotely explained all the details of the alternatives leaving the person high and dry having to make decisions as to whether ANY of it is worth the effort. 

By the way, I did find my solution:  FreeFileSync.  It works like SysInternal’s tool: SyncToy from days gone by, and with the necessary tarball only requires a minor check with Google turning the 15 GiB Drive/Cloud into a thumb-drive.  The total time I had to take on this was 6 hours of going through..  Yes, RClone, GIO-Drive, OCAMLFUSE, OverGrive, all of them ending in either lack of proper documentation frustration or simply took too long to troubleshoot. 

And this is one example of the way the community completely derails a question on software by pointing to another piece of software they personally like instead.  If you can’t answer the questions — shut the fuck up and let other people answer it instead.  If no one answers it — believe me — you’ll be given the opportunity when the person comes back and asks, "are there alternative to …" 

The funny thing is that people laughed at me when someone asked the question, "what is one of your red flags when dealing with the Linux Community?" and I pointed this out first and enthusiastically.  Yet they all knew from experience how often they encountered this in their wanderings. 

With these two attitudes alone, it’s completely antithetical to the Windows and Apple experiences and with some of the people leaving both (Windows and Apple) because of being tired of all the bloat, the needless security that has nothing to do with the actual operating system and the needless levels kernel level securities (and security holes), that can leave the OS in an even more vulnerable state than being fixed. 

The third gripe I have has to be the extreme cliquishness I catch from the community at large.  Never in my life have I see so much elitism, cliquishness and insular attitudes from people using an operating system and finding programs to make the OS a user’s experience in free, alternative, and even productive software that meets the person’s needs.  In the three weeks I have moved from Fedora to Mint, I have never seen to much ageism, CIS/Trans/Non-Binary disdain, accusing gamers of not being anything of the sort (yeah, I still remember that one because PVP has been excluded from my repertoire).  I have seen elitism coming from people because they don’t run Arch, Endeavor, Plasma, whatever and even seen condescension from the e-peen flexers because of this.

People, this is an Operating System…  People from 12 years old to 80 years old are using it.  They are white, black, yellow, green, pink, orange…  They are  straight, gay, pan, trans, questioning, demi, polyamorous, whatever.  They can be using any one of 600 distros and yes underneath the whatever UI you currently have, they still use the same basic core that relies on knowing the command structure. 

When you’re having a conversation — be it with the OS, or outside of it — you’re going to be dealing with attitudes, understandings, perspectives and experiences that go well outside of your own.  Don’t make them feel bad if it doesn’t match exactly what the fuck you’re looking for.  Because more often times than naught you can learn something that makes your experience bigger than it was yesterday. 

My fourth and final gripe sort of wraps up with the impression I get from the communities that I’ve dealt with since 2008 when is started all of this during my dual booting experience between Windows and Ubuntu (and later distro hopped to my dissatisfaction).  The complete lack of help when it came to system maintenance and file trimming.  I have seen so many complaints from users running out of space for their discs where logs have gotten to whoppingly huge and unmanageable sizes.  Instead of explaining this to the OP, too often even the experience will tell them to **NEVER DELETE THESE FILES**. 

Umm…  excuse me this is unhelpful and doesn’t address the problems.  How precisely does this hoarding fix anything? 

It’s extremely rare to encounter someone trying to explain it’s time to look at your files to see what the errors are before deleting them.  And ALMOST no one will explain to the person how to delete them/trim them/clean up the rotated files to make it more manageable.   What’s worse is that they reinforce never deleting them — like it’s absolutely forbidden or something. 

This is gamer hoarding:  keeping things "just in case".  Not to mention extremely detrimental when it comes to system operations and system monitoring as it clutters the hard drive with excessive amounts of files that do nothing but take up space.  And it reminds me of this WTF  I often encounter when watching other players collecting new items. 

All I can ask is…  Why? and What’s the point?!  This isn’t remotely helpful, people!  This isn’t remotely a free user experience.  This is the sort of bullshit, secular and even parochial attitudes that we have to deal with constantly from the narrow-minded people in our day to day lives that put us down because we’re different from the pack, the clique, the social circles .  Why bring it to an operating system that — depending on the distro in question — REQUIRES the end-user understand not only how to make it work for them, but also can end up going tits-up because of a system update.  This is a system that REQUIRES the user be proficient and capable of tweaking and optimizing through routine maintenance and understanding. 

This goes diametrically against my first concept about being human.  I goes directly against my second concept of helping.  

At this point, I’m realizing, I like the alternative for Windows 10 which is sunsetting in October.  So far, Mint’s the way for me to go as it’s not causing me the anxiety and headaches Fedora Plasma did when I installed it on the laptop.  It doesn’t feel like Arch, which gave me the distinct impression of not being ready for prime-time.  Nor is it the most cancerous bunch in Ubuntu which is far too busy trying to be "cool".  Or Debian which is more plodding about OS security and features than even I’m capable of being when it comes to slow moving and methodical. 

Mint/Cinnamon does its best to not firehose me with updates, but instead updates based on improvements and code problems that weren’t worked out during the initial release.  So far *fingers crossed* core fixes aren’t breaking things.  And *knocking on wood* requiring me to roll back. 

But the whole of the Linux Community?  As Chris said in The Ritz, Screw you, honey.  Boy, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a queen without a sense of humour.  You can die with your secret…  Miserable piss-elegant fairy.  if you can’t get over yourself or your ego-centric attitudes, die in a ditch.  That social cancer is tiring and drags people down. 

I’m going to be staying as far away from them as humanly possible. 

Until the next time.