I am a Linux user, now I will not say that I am a professional at Linux, but I at least know enough that I can guide a new user at some places. I at least understand how to use package managers and init systems, I have gotten my hands dirty with bootloaders, but I am still not that good at Linux, plus kernel developers kinda scare me, even though I will still make someone mad no matter how I do something. I am more saying this to my fellow Linux users, mainly the more traditionalist of the group, or the veterans, same with the elitists of the community.

Good lord, these opinions are just insane

It is okay to have an opinion, hell, I would say it is good to have differing opinions (though, as long as no arguments start). The thing is, it isn’t really the people who have opinions, it is just how they react when it is challenged. Some people in the community seem to get vindictive and just seem to try and put the other person down for just having an opinion or doing something they think is wrong. This comes with a problem of scaring people off when they may be asking a question, or may prevent further questions from being asked by the user out of their bad experience.

The diehard veterans just seem to be a bit out of touch, or they seem to be out-of-date. Some of their concerns are valid, don’t get me wrong, but that doesn’t mean all of their opinions are valid or even correct. I mean, if they want desktop Linux to grow, there needs to be some room to change, otherwise Linux will just stay in its current niche state, or worse, fall out of the desktop space. Plus, the elitism just needs to stop, because it scares away new people, which prevents desktop Linux from growing.

People also really should accept stupid questions

There seems to be a disproportianally large quantity of people who just bash on users for asking questions they think is common sense enough they should already know the answer to. I’m going to say it, there is no stupid questions, only stupid phrasing. Yeah, hate on me all you wish for saying that, but stupid questions need to be asked, because almost all of the users coming to Linux will be stupid. To ground you into reality, most people are not tech savvy, hell, it may be safe to say that most people are stupid in general.

Not everything should be answered with the terminal

Yeah, many Linux users might call this controversial, but please hear me out for this one, I know how powerful the terminal is, but think of the users of Windows or even MacOS. If you think of the people outside of Linux, barely any of them use a terminal to do anything. “Well, akshually, both Windows and MacOS are designed to do everything with a GUI,” You might say, yes, that is valid, but there are some powerful things you can do with powershell, same with zsh on MacOS, look some stuff up for yourself if you don’t believe me. The difference is that most people don’t bother to use that power, mainly because they don’t want to, it just looks easier and better when you visualize what could be said with some text for some, especially visual learners, which is a lot of people.

When you bring those people over to Linux, they will be very intimidated by the fact that some tutorials to do a simple thing is in the terminal. I got to say personally, it is much better and faster to click a button to change a setting than type it out. Yeah, some fast typing and command line warriorness can at best rival the speed, but that is much tougher to do than just clicking one button once. I also know that the terminal is one of the few universal things in Linux compared to everything else, but at least give people the option to do it with a GUI, since it allows the less savvy people to use it, while the savvy people can do their thing.

There is no “right” way to do something

Same with the fact that there is no correct distro for people to choose. People just act like the distro they use is the best distro for everything, even though it most likely isn’t. If I am to be honest, the only distro most people should use is Linux Mint if they are new to Linux, and Arch Linux if they at least have some experience with Linux. Yeah, kind of hypocritical to say that in the next sentence, but neither of these distros are best for everything, they cater to specific people, Linux Mint for people who just want things to work and a lot of community support, and Arch Linux for people who want their own custom tailored system without too much hassle and decent documentation.

People just try to market distros and make them to work for everybody or just try to replicate the philosophy of Windows. Here is the news, you can’t cater to everybody with one distro, and if you could, then everyone in the world would be using it by now, but nobody is because it’s not possible. You need to cater to a specific community, in Mint’s case, the noobs and regular computer users, and in Arch’s case, the advanced users who know enough about Linux and computers to build their own custom tailored operating system.