• onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    27 days ago

    The Linux communities have been among some of the worst communities I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with. The reason is simple: many Linux users are asocial outcasts. The greatest thing to people who feel underpowered is to have power over somebody else. Combine that with the inability to express oneself properly due to lack of physical, social contact, and you get the stereotypical pedantic, argumentative, shower once a week, “akshually”, overweight neckbeard.

    There are exceptions of course and things have gotten better in the last 10 years, due to the addition of other underrepresented groups (ethnical minorities, sexual minorities, etc.) who, thanks to the proliferation of digital technology, have found a sort of refuge behind screens and somewhat away from their oppressors. Also, with more people on the planet, Linux being more present, geek culture becoming cool (Vin Diesel plays DnD, Marvel is a huge franchise, tech entrepreneurs becoming fashion icons and being referenced in popular media, …), Snowden banging on about privacy so much that Malus nows sells itself with it, and a lot more stuff happening, Linux has gotten an influx of people who aren’t traditionally socially excluded.

    Open source has a big chance to become cool and mainstream. We just have to be more accepting and helpful of people who join, and willing to have interfaces for non-technical users that don’t ever, ever want to see a terminal.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Blaze@lemmy.zipOP
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      27 days ago

      Well put. Your first paragraph sometimes describes some interactions I have on Lemmy as well, but thankfully most of the people are nice.