Steve Litt via Talk wrote on 2026-05-20 22:21:
There's an undercurrent of "it should be hard to keep the riff-raff out" mentality that's just bonkers. That is NOT the undercurrent, and it has nothing to do with riff-raff.
Yet you contradict yourself in the next sentence:
to attract people who probably won't use Linux anyway, and if they tried, are unwilling to edit a file Who says a new user should be required to "edit a file" instead of Alt+Edit > Preferences and make their changes there?
More of that exclusionary gate-keeping - hits both points A & B in Giles' final paragraph.
What it has to do with is the destruction of DIY
DIY is alive and well (maybe thriving) ... among those who wish to learn new things.
hypercomplexification, piggy KDE
Cutsie, derogatory catchphrases do the opposite of shoring up your argument. But good luck on your 2028 run for POTUS, I guess?
A great analogy is automobile air-bags. Air bags are dangerous
Well, that's a whole new level of ridiculous. Collisions are dangerous, airbags reduce the risk. By a lot.
A US study showed that the risk for a serious head injury <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_injury> occurring is 5.495% while travelling 40–48 km/h (25–30 mph). The risk is reduced for passengers to 4.435%. *This risk is lowered by 80.5% to 1.073% when using an airbag*. *The risk for passengers is lowered by 82% to 0.797%.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#Injuries_and_fatalities
We'll always have small clusters of people who are in favour of being exclusionist Well, that's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it the wonderful neighborhood analogy.
That analogy fell apart pretty quickly. Some LUGs, for example, are welcoming and have good conversation. Some are an utter waste of time, where cranks run the show. Even in the small cohort of Linux technophiles there are vastly different neighbourhood cultures.
and I don't want to spend hours of my time recompiling. [slitt@mydesk st-0.9.3]$ cat jj make clean make tic -sx st.info
You make an excellent point. It's Giles' point though, which is repeated below (i.e. you ignored how it does not scale well, for one thing):
Try to imagine if every piece of software you used (including the kernel, LibreOffice, everything) acted like Suckless: "you want to change that setting? You have to recompile." You'd set aside every Sunday for recompiles (and half your disk space for git repositories)