What Is Wrong With the Linux Community

It's not recent that I've read people positioning themselves, sometimes aggressively, about Canonical's decisions and the direction they are going in relation to, for instance, funding the company or the snap thing.

I have an analogy:

Imagine you invite some friends over to your home. You show them around and tell them they’re welcome to use the place freely, for as long as they like. Some friends appreciate your generosity - one helps with the dishes, another offers to cover the energy bill.

But then there’s one friend who doesn’t like the blue color of your couch and insists you should change it to red. You thank them for their opinion but explain that you prefer the blue. Instead of accepting your choice, they start complaining - not just about the couch, but about the entire house - and eventually decide to leave.

This story is a bit wacky, but it kind of describes the impression I have about what happens with Ubuntu - and maybe some open source software I know of.

Many times we don't support the companies or devs behind the softwares we love and use daily, but some people want to feel entitled to denigrate them and badmouth the project for not being exactly the way they want it. The same usually does not happen when it comes to a paid software or those that are mostly developed for MacOS or Windows.

I remember that my first contact with a Linux distribution was in 2006. It was a Live CD that I was gifted containing the version 6.06 (Dapper Drake) of Ubuntu. That was definitely a game changer for me.

Today, one of the OS I use is Arch Linux. This is for several reasons, but mainly because I love its almost minimalist approach. I've hopped through many distros (many of them Ubuntu-based) trying to find one that I was better suited to, but the fact is, I've used Ubuntu for a long time. Eventually, I switched from Ubuntu due to certain decisions Canonical has made changes that I didn't like.

And that's just the whole point of my early story. Companies and developers have their own values and goals. They have every right and duty to make any changes to the product they develop, and I have no right to rant about something that was offered to me at zero cost because it doesn't operate the way I like.

It's pretty simple: if you're not satisfied, switch to something you like, or even create something and share it with the community.