I seriously doubt any of these are reasons for the masses. You can go and ask any average person and chances are (s)he won’t even know or care about GNOME/KDE, systemd, or actually have any idea of any kind of toxicity of this kind. I think the article exagerates the importance of some pretty irrelevant internet discussions that are only followed by those who are actually geeks that are passionate about technology, not “the masses”.
In fact, the first time I was ever exposed to toxicity in the computer world was when Microsoft, MS-DOS and Windows users continuously criticised aspects of those very same systems (the “blue screen of death” meme being a famous example of things like this later on). Not in the Linux community.
Also, the article claims there’s a lack of developers but fails to offer any numbers that can be compared. How many developers actually work on Windows (the OS, not apps) vs how many developers work on GNU/Linux OS? how many of them work in it for a living? (because there’s people who do actually get paid to work for Linux) how many don’t get paid and still contribute adding up to insane numbers of hours? I don’t think it’s that simple, you can’t throw an assertion based on a presuposition you hold on one particular aspect and forget about the rest of the picture.
I don’t agree with most of the article either, but looking at it from a more general point of view it is true that at 2-5% at most Linux is not anywhere near adoption of the general masses and the normal step would be rather to get normal “tech enthusiasts” (i.e. not the very early adopters like currently) to use it more.
I know actually quite a few people that fall into this category and who continue to use Windows on their desktop. They claim to have their reasons, which I find mostly non-sensical, but they are definitely not part of the open-source culture and thus the superficial outside look at some of the discussions ongoing gives them easy excuses to be lazy and continue using Windows.
But there are also “tech enthusiasts” that actually enjoy engaging in passionate discussions about what approach to desktop environment is optimal.
I’m sure the alternative of attempting to centralize and armonize it all not only will be unsuccessful at preventing conflicts (because there’s no such thing as a “one size fits all”) but it’ll make it harder for those who do want to have the freedom to experiment with alternative approaches.
I’m not convinced that you’ll attract more tech enthusiasts by trying to unify everything. Systemd in a way tried to unify and standardize things (with relative success) and it ended up resulting in just another source of discord.
Personally, I think the “toxicity” comments come from 5+ years ago where you were completely shut down and ridiculed in forums if you had missed anything in the man pages/ wiki or didn’t understand it completely. Also, and this still happens, if you don’t include the necessary logs. I totally get where both sides come from.
We can’t really help people without logs, but at the same time, linux noobs have no idea where to find any of the logs that are relevant to the problem. In order to go through the wiki and get enough information to find the correct logs. It would literally take many hours to not only sort through the 30+ articles you might need to go through just to understand enough to find the correct logs when us vets could often tell them what specific logs would be helpful in 1 sentence. Especially if they have no prior terminal skills.
I seriously doubt any of these are reasons for the masses. You can go and ask any average person and chances are (s)he won’t even know or care about GNOME/KDE, systemd, or actually have any idea of any kind of toxicity of this kind. I think the article exagerates the importance of some pretty irrelevant internet discussions that are only followed by those who are actually geeks that are passionate about technology, not “the masses”.
In fact, the first time I was ever exposed to toxicity in the computer world was when Microsoft, MS-DOS and Windows users continuously criticised aspects of those very same systems (the “blue screen of death” meme being a famous example of things like this later on). Not in the Linux community.
Also, the article claims there’s a lack of developers but fails to offer any numbers that can be compared. How many developers actually work on Windows (the OS, not apps) vs how many developers work on GNU/Linux OS? how many of them work in it for a living? (because there’s people who do actually get paid to work for Linux) how many don’t get paid and still contribute adding up to insane numbers of hours? I don’t think it’s that simple, you can’t throw an assertion based on a presuposition you hold on one particular aspect and forget about the rest of the picture.
I don’t agree with most of the article either, but looking at it from a more general point of view it is true that at 2-5% at most Linux is not anywhere near adoption of the general masses and the normal step would be rather to get normal “tech enthusiasts” (i.e. not the very early adopters like currently) to use it more.
I know actually quite a few people that fall into this category and who continue to use Windows on their desktop. They claim to have their reasons, which I find mostly non-sensical, but they are definitely not part of the open-source culture and thus the superficial outside look at some of the discussions ongoing gives them easy excuses to be lazy and continue using Windows.
But there are also “tech enthusiasts” that actually enjoy engaging in passionate discussions about what approach to desktop environment is optimal.
I’m sure the alternative of attempting to centralize and armonize it all not only will be unsuccessful at preventing conflicts (because there’s no such thing as a “one size fits all”) but it’ll make it harder for those who do want to have the freedom to experiment with alternative approaches.
I’m not convinced that you’ll attract more tech enthusiasts by trying to unify everything. Systemd in a way tried to unify and standardize things (with relative success) and it ended up resulting in just another source of discord.
Personally, I think the “toxicity” comments come from 5+ years ago where you were completely shut down and ridiculed in forums if you had missed anything in the man pages/ wiki or didn’t understand it completely. Also, and this still happens, if you don’t include the necessary logs. I totally get where both sides come from.
We can’t really help people without logs, but at the same time, linux noobs have no idea where to find any of the logs that are relevant to the problem. In order to go through the wiki and get enough information to find the correct logs. It would literally take many hours to not only sort through the 30+ articles you might need to go through just to understand enough to find the correct logs when us vets could often tell them what specific logs would be helpful in 1 sentence. Especially if they have no prior terminal skills.