Ask a Linux forum why your printer doesn’t work and there’s a fair chance you’ll find out what’s wrong with you instead. You bought the wrong model. You chose the wrong distribution. You didn’t read the wiki, or you read the wrong bit of the wiki, or you should have known the wiki was out of date. Somewhere along the way, the printer disappears from the discussion. You’re now defending your right to be annoyed by it.
I’ve spent enough time using and writing about Linux to find this exhausting. An ordinary complaint becomes a test of character. Someone wants a working scanner, a setting restored or an application that survives an update. They get a lecture about personal responsibility from someone who has mistaken their configuration files for a moral achievement. Wanting your computer to work is a reasonable expectation. It shouldn’t require an apology.
The strangest part is how quickly a workaround becomes a recommendation. A forum thread, three terminal commands and an undocumented configuration change later, the scanner works. Wonderful. I’m glad someone found the answer. But why are we pretending the whole exercise demonstrates how good the experience is? The person who solved it deserves credit. The fault doesn’t. If I have to keep repairing the same broken workflow, I’m doing maintenance I shouldn’t have to keep doing.
I’m told this is the price of control. Sometimes it is, and sometimes I’ll happily pay it. But control also means deciding what deserves my attention. I might want to spend the afternoon writing, editing photographs or doing something that doesn’t involve discovering which component broke after Tuesday’s update. There’s no prize for taking longer to get your work done. The software may cost nothing. My time doesn’t.
Desktop loyalty makes the discussion even more ridiculous. A project removes a useful setting and its defenders immediately explain why nobody should have been using it. Yesterday it was part of a great desktop. Today it’s unnecessary clutter, and your attachment to it reveals an inability to embrace progress. Apparently the setting became useless at precisely the moment the developers removed it. Then someone contributes “works for me”, apparently unaware that a bug report isn’t a referendum on whether their laptop is functioning.
The volunteer argument usually follows. Developers give their time freely, so criticism is treated as bad manners. I don’t expect anyone to spend their Saturday implementing a feature for me. I also won’t recommend an application merely because someone spent their Saturday making it. Effort deserves respect; the result still has to be judged. “Patches welcome” is fair enough when someone demands unpaid work. Used to dismiss a person describing a broken workflow, it amounts to telling them their complaint only counts if they can fix it themselves. On that basis, most bug trackers could close tomorrow.
Plenty of Linux users offer patient, practical help. The defensive crowd, though, has a peculiar recruitment pitch: leave Windows, join us, and prepare to have your expectations corrected. Want a familiar feature? You’re stuck in the past. Want simpler configuration? You’re demanding that Linux be dumbed down. Need an application without an adequate Linux replacement? You should change how you work. It’s quite a sales technique, inviting people over and then explaining why everything they want to do is wrong.
I don’t need Linux to win an argument every time I use it. I need it to do the job in front of me, and I want to be able to say when it doesn’t without sitting through a defence of the entire open source movement. A missing feature is a missing feature. A regression is a regression. Neither becomes less irritating because Windows has faults too.
Every “go back to Windows” reply is a customer retention service delivered free of charge to Microsoft. Before posting that reply, perhaps answer one question: Do you actually want more people using Linux, or do you just enjoy feeling superior to the people who don’t?
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