When I started using Linux in 2005, I was young, and everything felt exciting. I used to spend a lot of time on these forums back then. It's sad to see this place now. I can understand most people probably moved to reddit, so it's not like it's an indicator of the state of the community as a whole, but still... This is my personal experience over the years and my perspective. Moving from Linux to windows in ~2005 was amazing. There was so much to tinker with and it felt designed for that - it felt totally different from windows in that kind of way - you could massively customise things to make it look like or behave like any OS or workflow that you can imagine, and it even felt like you were
encouraged to customise and explore everything, to make it your own, something that suited your specific needs. For sure it was more difficult and it wasn't always easy to get things working, but it was so fun. It exposed more details of computing that windows did at the time, and I got into scripting and programming and stuff partly because of linux. Then as life moved on, that sense of joy & excitement started turning to frustration. I'd get everything set just how I liked it and get it working great, then it was time to update to the next distro release and it'd break everything. It got to the point where I dreaded the next update in 6 months time because it was always a headache. As I started using the computer for more serious things like creative productivity tasks etc, that hassle of having my workflow thrown out the window every couple updates became bad enough that I started delaying updates. Like imagine you've got work to do and stuff to get on with, but you can't do it because you installed an update without thinking and suddenly your desktop looks and behaves completely differently (eg. a situation like the transition from gnome2 to gnome3) and you have to relearn how to use everything over again OR spend hours working out how to get the desktop to behave the way you're comfortable with again. Gradually, the atmosphere around Linux changed from what I was used to before. The aura of excited hobbyists making things to tinker with that was strong when I came to linux in ~2005 seemed to start getting replaced with an aura of serious corporate or serious professional software that discouraged tinkering. Gnome completely revamped into something wildly different seemingly overnight from the perspective of end users like me, and also started removing as many config options as they could, and GTK became more and more uncustomisable too. The aura changed so much - if you use gnome which is apparently still the most popular linux desktop environment overall (perhaps just by virtue of being the default in most distros? idk) it really feels like customisation is frowned upon, in fact they go to lengths to stop you from doing it. I've seen over the years how the gnome people started trying to make the linux desktop into something rigid and uniform with tight limitations on how you can personalise it.
Now they even seem to actively hate tinkerer hobbyists, who seemed to be the main user base of linux in the mid 2000s when I was new. Also other things changed and it started feeling more fractured. I watched a bunch of bitter holy wars break out, like init vs systemd, X vs wayland, and Gnome vs everyone else etc. It stopped feeling exciting and just feels kinda bad and bitter when I think about it now. I'm on linux just because well I guess it's better than windows (that's low bar these days) and I can't afford a mac and even if I could, I could never give money to apple on ethical grounds. I'm running a 3 years outdated version of ubuntu because I have stuff I need to do and tbh I can't stomach wasting a week fixing bugs and dealing with whatever new horrible things the gnome people have prepared for GTK since 2021. it's usually GTK giving me the worst headaches
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