this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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I'm sorry this dude has to go through this shit. If I could, I would help, but there just isn't any time. I'm fighting NixOS and just getting things to work for me. There isn't even time to get it working for non-technical folk, let alone disabled folk.
My blame goes to the gate keepers who want to keep linux an elitist space. The people that want things to be hard so that they can feel superior and laugh at others who can't do what they do. The people that unironically say RTFM.
Linux could be such a great distro for normal users but the very first step of installing it is already a hurdle for many people. And yet many linux users recommend dumb shit like Arch to beginners or tell them to buy (and support) non-Linux hardware vendors instead of funnelling money into the linux ecosystem.
If the majority of Linux users who could actually invested monetarily into opensource and the linux ecosystem, and the Linux Foundation invested more than 2% of it 200 million annually into the kernel and advocacy, maybe things would look different. But it seems like we're a long way from the linux community actually being welcoming and self-funding. We'll have to wait for corporate sponsors like Valve to actually make the OS popular and worthy of interest to app developers and accessibility advocates before the community realises that being popular does come with more benefits than negatives.
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Arch is not dumb shit and recommending it to beginners is fine if they are curious and want to learn about stuff.
Recommending Arch to people who just want a working machine is silly, and stuff like Gentoo is kind of dumb shit.
But if you want a simple "it just works" distro you should probably be using Mint or Pop! or similar, and avoiding trying to do anything unnecessarily advanced unless you are cool with reading manuals and so on.
This is precisely what I mean. But there are too many people in the community who do exactly this. And then when beginners post a tirade about how shitty the linux experience was because they were recommended a geek distro, the comments are often filled with the equivalent of "skill issue".
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