The current generation is said to be very delicate, sensitive and collaborative. While the older ones are more competitive, abrasive and capable. It is just one way of seeing things, because in the world of GNU Linux, it is on another level. Also, if you really wish to know more about good old school hackers, read more. Even in 2020, the term ‘hacker’ is still widely mistaken as code breakers, crackers or a digital thief.
In order to understand it better, let us talk about a real life example. Many years ago an online fast friend, “PICCORO“, (not a very pleasant name in the GNU Linux community) went to a possible field work along with his manager to discuss the legal and monetary aspects of it. He was in accompanied by some other technologists, after several hours seeing expensive and luxurious suits obviously thought that to have those suits they should earn a lot of money, we are talking about a very young boy in front of some professionals who have years in the industry. And then during introductions, the first one mentions, “I am a DB master with Oracle”, the second one mentions “I am a master in .NET”, the third one does not stay behind and says, “I am a specialist too”. After they finished with their lavish introductions that they had a degree and great careers and a lot of experience in their respective field as well as obviously using Windows OS. The very conceited but self-confident
above said friend of mine, “mckaygerhard“, daringly questioned project manager, “With all those titles, why do you need someone like me? That’s sad and ridiculous for you right?”
Today the Linux community is divided in almost two fractions. Old school hackers or power users and new era like the millennial, so sensible, smart, but also, coward and sometimes stupid to make changes in the world. Unfortunately this era is plagued with millennial and sensible people, that is why we have bear shitty changes in once glorified Linux community like Windows integrations, systemd, docker, Winbuntu etc. Of course Redhat is not behind in adding to or bringing new drastic changes every now and then. Linux community would not forgot that!
Huge gap between Efficiency and being Friendly
In a blog post by Hayden Barnes about ‘Toxicity in Open Source’, he said, “There is a very small but
noisy contingent in open source that is far from open, responds with vitriolic hate to other viewpoints,
engages in the worst forms of gatekeeping, and are generally very toxic people.”
This is absolutely gibberish and false. There are a lot of people and those so-called toxic people are the mostly power users. These people have worked hard and developed a strong core Linux community from scratch. Where as the new generation is brought up to follow the rules of tech giants. Most of the current generation today is just users and web developers. We must remember that web technologies cannot be compared with and is nothing without back-end development. The GlibC, GCC and and other GNU Linux developers are the core developers who created strong pillars and foundations that proudly powers and conquers the Internet servers of the world.
We can remember Debian in the beginning when it was developed and released with help from Free Software Foundation. Same goes for Alpine Linux now, both are excellent projects but only from experience, hard work and tireless hours that people with “toxicity” have put in. So, nice and educated new kids in the Linux community are so friendly to integrate and make Linux fit better in this new era. Whereas the truth is they are making it less sane and more inefficient in today’s era of Linux. Let us take a look at Red Hat, Winbuntu which were used in the past to provide dockers images but then what happened with these modern, friendly and gorgeous distributions is well known to every body. It was just not efficient enough to use as docker images for instance and was replaced by Alpine Linux. Alpine Linux is an old school efficient distribution with non-English very unfriendly [if you go by Barnes’s above said post] community. Yes, almost all the core and native Alpine developers are not native English speakers, yet have put together a robust, secure and highly efficient distribution.
Barnes in his post, said, “I was called an asshole, shill, liar, ‘microsloth mouthpiece’, and other things.” Mr Barnes is actively promoting use of Windows as a replacement for Linux with WSL. A sub-system cannot ever replace whole system. It is by no means a smart move. You are being stupid by actively getting involved in such a sub-standard project. Rather you should be focused on replacing closed-source and proprietary Windows system with free and open GNU/Linux for a better future of our global community.
Microsoft and other giants in the tech industry are not any different with their hypocrisy. Without those crackers, viruses do not exist, and then antivirus businesses will not exists any more. The so-called “bad things” you have to protect your system from, if there were not all these viruses, all these “hateful and unfriendly” people, who would make programmed obsolescence, with statements like, “you should upgrade your system to be safe”. These “evil hackers” (wrongly called hackers when they are crackers in the true sense), are secretly admired by the industry because without them they cannot keep gaining more money from naive millennial and unsuspecting users.
If any of the millennial’s feelings is hurt while reading this. It is the ugly truth. In fact if you eliminate these “millennial tech giant friendly new comers” from our beloved large opensource community, the remainder would be an amazing lot who can do the required hard work for greater good. Because developing in reactjs in nothing when compared to the development of the glibc library.
Haters are not the last bottle in the desert
Of course another example is Devuan, Devuan is a popular fork of Debian, relatively faster than Debian and low on resources, because they have carefully choose to exclude systemd. The problem is with their lead developers who choose to call themselves as “Veterans Unix administrators” and their attitude is the typical “works for me”, where the system works so well only for them. They released the version 3, so late owing to some errors and matters of failures that could have been avoided if they had cared and changed their attitude a little bit. Devuan version 3, Beowulf, had Pulse Audio related bugs, which made it useless for blind people from day one, it is quite evident in their own release notes itself.
On the other hand, you will find distributions like MX Linux with Debian as base but a totally different approach and attitude. Therefore if users hate the work of a hater, they will ends up opting for something else that shares the same vision and effort. You are not the last or only option. So, the core developers and maintainers of a distribution have to be open-minded or at least take note of reports in the open technology’s world. Devuan’s developers never cared to listen which resulted in a number of unfixed issues in a major final release.
