 Does Linux actually suck in 2021? That's our topic for the day, because people have asked me this question a lot here recently as people wanted to know my thoughts on Brian Linduk's Linux Sucks in 2021 video. Brian does a yearly talk every year. He does a Linux Sucks presentation where he talks about all the things that are not quite right with Linux, all the things that we get wrong, and there's a lot of things that aren't good in Linux. Everything has pros and cons, and I think that's a great thing to highlight. Some of the things that Linux just doesn't get right sometimes. You guys know even me, a big Linux enthusiast, I love Linux. I would never run another operating system on my personal machines, but you know what? Linux sucks at some things. You guys have heard me complain about Pulse Audio, the audio server on Linux a lot. There's a lot of things that really need fixing on Linux, but for the most part is Linux a fantastic operating system? Yes, is it better than Windows and Mac? Absolutely. Brian recently reposted his Linux Sucks 2021 talk here on YouTube, and because a lot of people are just now seeing it for the first time, I guess that's why here recently I've gotten a lot of people asking me for a response video or a reaction video. I typically don't do these kinds of videos, so it's not something I typically do is respond to another video or another content creator. I thought this was an important topic because I think Brian does bring up some very good points, things that are wrong with Linux, and I would actually like to add to some of those as well. I'd like to throw some stuff into the discussion here. One of the things I think a lot of people that are reacting negatively to Brian's Linux Sucks video this year is the fact that we're getting a lot more people coming from Windows and Mac over to Linux. A lot of potential new users, and we're telling these potential new users, people like me, for example, hey, Linux is so much better than Windows, why don't you come join us? And then they get here, and all of a sudden everybody's talking about how much Linux sucks, like the Linux content creators are talking about how much Linux sucks, and these new users are like, well, why the hell did I come over here in the first place? So we're confusing people with the Linux Sucks title. I think that's why some people react negatively to Brian's presentations. This year's video, he had a slide early on in the presentation that said the end of Linux is near. Like, Linux basically is about to die tomorrow. And for me, I think that's a great slide. I think the Linux Sucks title is a great name. I think the end of Linux is nigh or the end of Linux is near is great because I'm a big fan of clickbait. Brian, being a video content creator, he knows the importance of good clickbait. And I love good clickbait, too. I'm a big fan of clickbait, I use it all the time. And that's what some of these slides, some of these titles are. They're not dishonest, you know, will Linux eventually die? Of course, everything dies. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Absolutely 100%, Linux will die one day. You know, he just wants to speed it up a little bit with the clickbait-y title saying the end of Linux is near, right? And that's just to grab your attention a little bit. If he had a slide that said one day Linux will probably die because everything dies, that's boring, right? I don't even want to listen to the rest of your presentation if you give me a boring slide like that, right? I need something exciting. Give me something titillating, right, as far as these slides. And that's what he's doing. So I really appreciate the clickbait. And I think too many people overreact negatively to clickbait. You got to understand the game when it comes to content creation, whether it's video content creation or print journalism, you know, for headlines, news articles, you know, sometimes you've got to be over the top for on a headline or in a picture because you've got to entice somebody to actually read that article, click on that article, click on that video. So let's leave the clickbait aside because honestly, if you've got a problem with Brian and his use of clickbait, then I don't know why you're watching me because I employ clickbait all the time. But, you know, one of the real media issues that he talked about early on in the presentation is how one of the reasons Linux sucks is because our leadership is under attack as far as some of the founding members of the free software movement, the open source movement and just the creators of the GNU slash Linux operating system that we all know and love. Those guys are under attack. You know, we're attacking the people that actually created all of this. And he talks about Richard Stallman and Eric S. Raymond and Linus Torvalds. Richard Stallman was banned, kicked out of the Free Software Foundation. But he created the Free Software Foundation. Richard Stallman created the Free Software Movement. He started the whole thing, right? And they kicked him out because he said something dumb on an MIT mailing list that got him in a lot of hot water, a lot of negative press. So they kicked him out of the organization. Eighteen months later, they let him come back, though. So he's back as a part of the Free Software Foundation now. Eric S. Raymond, he helped found the open source initiative. He was one of the people that helped coin the term open source. And he helped define what open source software is. And the open source initiative kicked him out of his own foundation. The open source initiative was actually infiltrated with some really nasty people, the ethical source crowd. Ethical source is not open source. Ethical source are people that actually don't like Free Software or open source software. They want to infiltrate the Free Software Foundation and they want to infiltrate the open source initiative. So once they have some power in those organizations, they want to be able to redefine what free software and open source software actually are. And one of the things they don't like about the current definitions of free software and open source software is that they have freedom, right? They don't like that to be a free and open source license, you have to allow anyone, regardless of age and race, nationality, you know, you can't discriminate against anybody for any reason to use your software. They can use your software, whoever it is for any purpose that they want to use that software for. That's free licenses, right? That's a freedom license. That's what free software is and that's what open source software is. They want to redefine that. They want to start restricting who can and cannot use these pieces of software, this ethical software. So if I don't like you for a political reason, I can prevent you from using my software. It'll be in the license, you know, it'll say these people that belong to this political party, they can't use my software. If you work for this particular government organization that I don't agree with, you can't use my software, et cetera, et cetera. And that's horrible, right? That is completely antithetical to everything that free software and the open source software movements stand for, right? We might as well just close the whole thing down at that point because we're no better than Microsoft's proprietary licenses like the end user license agreement. Once we start, you know, picking and choosing who can use our software based on, you know, things like philosophy and politics and religion and nationality and things like that, then we're just as bad as the evil proprietary companies that we're trying to fight. So some of the ethical source people infiltrated the OSI, they got board positions and once they could actually vote and do some stuff, one of the things is they got rid of Eric Raymond. So I do think Brian is absolutely right. That whole thing is horrible. I don't know what is going on inside the open source initiative these days, but the fact that it's been taken over by people that, again, want to redefine what open source software is in a very negative way, I think that organization has, it may as well not exist anymore, right? It's not serving our needs as far as the community's needs anymore, they're off doing their own thing. And he also talked about Linus Torvalds. Linus Torvalds was forced to go on vacation for a month one time to go get sensitivity training because he talks very nasty and mean-spirited sometimes to people. And I don't think that's a problem with the community. I really don't. I don't think Richard Stallman's problems or Linus Torvalds problems are political in any way because I don't know Richard Stallman's politics. He's very, very liberal. He's extremely far left. So it's not like a cancel culture situation where the left is attacking Richard politically. The left was attacking him, but there were attacking him for him saying some really, really dumb things that he shouldn't have said about Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein and things like that. Linus Torvalds problem is not a political problem either. Linus Torvalds is just sometimes really mean and nasty when he talks to people. And when you're really mean to people, obviously they're gonna bite back eventually, right? So I don't think this is really a problem with the community. The only one that I see as a big warning sign, the Eric S. Raymond winning the open source initiative I'm really concerned about. And now that the ethical source crowd has taken a hold a little bit in the OSI, they want seats in the Free Software Foundation as well. So those of us that are members of the Free Software Foundation or if you're involved in any way in the Free Software movement, you need to be on the lookout for these people. Mr. Lunduk also talks about how some of the big Linux companies, they're undergoing dramatic changes and maybe this is a negative. I understand what he's talking about here a little bit. He's talking about IBM, of course, buying Red Hat. Red Hat was the big Linux company, right? The Linux enterprise and server space company, you know, and then IBM bought them. And then IBM immediately shut down CentOS, which is kind of a big deal because everybody loved that particular operating system, especially on the servers. I use CentOS all the time on servers back in the day, no longer now that it's dead. But you know, is that a negative? Does that make Linux suck? Not necessarily because I was never concerned about what the big Linux companies do. I know people are heavily invested in following what Red Hat is doing and Canonical is doing and SUSE is doing. You know, those are the big three Linux companies that make a whole lot of money in enterprise Linux. And they certainly help spur Linux development and really promote the advancement of Linux in a big way, right? But they're not, even though they do big things with Linux, they're not Linux. Not even close to, they're not even a major part of the Linux pie. What's the big piece of the Linux pie? Us, the community. Linux is really all about the community. Matter of fact, Linux is not even an operating system, in my opinion, Linux is a philosophy. It's an idea and in many ways, it's the community of us that share that idea. I'm not really concerned about Red Hat or Canonical or SUSE. All three of those companies, they could go bankrupt and go out of business tomorrow. Linux will still be here. I'll still be here. My system here running Arco Linux is still gonna be running, right? I'll still be getting updates and everything will go on just as if nothing ever happened. So I'm not worried about companies in Linux, but again, maybe it's because I don't have to deal with this kind of stuff. I'm not a sysad man or some kind of network engineer or anything like that. I don't work in that kind of space. So those of you that do, where you rely heavily on products from Red Hat, for example, maybe this is a bigger deal, but for just us Linux desktop users, is it a big deal? No, most Linux desktop users have probably never even heard of Red Hat. The next point that Brian really spent a lot of time on was the fact that the Linux kernel has become too big and too complex and it's too many millions of lines of code, right? It's just this gigantic thing and it's too big. Nobody can possibly know everything that's in the kernel. It's going to be a security nightmare, you know, vulnerabilities everywhere. And eventually it's going to get so big it's like it's just going to collapse upon itself, right? It's just going to become unmaintainable. And I, this one, I kind of disagree with Brian a little bit on this because I agree that the kernel is big. It's massive, right? But the thing is that the kernel team, they add millions of lines of code to it each year, but they also delete a whole bunch of lines of code from the kernel every year. They're actively getting rid of legacy code in the kernel. Now, they don't remove as much code as what gets added, but when they say, hey, we added two million lines of code to the kernel this year, you got to understand they probably removed, you know, 500,000 lines of code too, and getting rid of some of the bloat and some of the legacy stuff that nobody ever really uses. Because eventually, you know, the kernel is now been in development for 30 years. Some of that stuff in the kernel, you know, there's no devices that need that code out there in existence anymore in use. So they're constantly getting rid of some of this unnecessary code. I also think it's a little bit unfair to say that Linux sucks and that the end of Linux is near because the Linux kernel is getting bigger and bigger every year, because it's getting bigger and bigger every year is because more companies, more people that work for these big companies are contributing to the kernel. Thousands and thousands of people are making commits to the kernel every year, right? Think about that. Thousands of people are working on this kernel and it's gonna die and the end is near. No, right? That's not the way it works. When things get more popular and you have more and more people working on them, then actually they are nowhere near death, right? You can't say now that something is as popular as it's ever been that the end is near. So I think that's an unfair criticism that's too big to me, lines of code. The one thing I will agree is vulnerability, security vulnerabilities, when you have that much code, obviously, there's a bigger attack vector and obviously we're gonna see more attacks in the kernel. Now as far as Brian says that the Linux kernel is too big to be maintainable, sustainable, I can't really have an opinion on that because I'm not a software developer and I actually know Brian Lunduk is a software developer. He's worked on software, some of these major software companies. So I'm gonna defer to him on that opinion. One of Brian's slides dealt with the fact that Linux sucks is because there's no longer any in-person Linux conferences. And of course he's talking about the pandemic, right? So in 2020, all the Linux conferences were canceled, right? Because, well, for a good portion of the year, especially early in the year, you couldn't even go to work or to school or anywhere, right? We had the lockdown for two months here in the US where you were prevented from going practically anywhere. And then even once you could actually go outside of your house after the two month lockdown, you still couldn't gather, right? You couldn't be in a public place more than, you know, a few people couldn't be in a spot at the same time. So obviously all the Linux conferences were canceled in 2020 and in 2021, right? We still, even though we're starting to get past the pandemic, it's still not to the point where people are comfortable having a big in-person conference yet. And I do think that's a negative. He's right about that, but that's a negative about the world in general right now, right? It's not that Linux sucks in 2020 and 2021. It's the world sucks in 2020 and 2021. It's just Linux happens to be a part of that world that really sucks right now. Brian also mentions that Lugs, Linux user groups, they're no longer a real thing anymore. Most Lugs are now dead. What Lugs are for those of you that aren't familiar is there used to be like in-person meetings, these Linux user groups, you'd have these local Linux user groups where Linux enthusiasts would get together and chat, talk about Linux, install Linux, people would bring their laptops and if they were having trouble installing, you know, a Debian or Arch or whatever it is they were trying to put on that machine, you know, Linux users could help them get that thing installed on that machine. And that was great back in the day when Linux was hard to install. I think the problem now with Lugs dying off is they're just not necessary anymore because the rise of the web especially, a lot of these Linux user groups when they started, you know, mid-nineties, you know, when the web, early days of the web, not that many people were on the web and now everybody's online, you can just pull up video conferencing software like Discord and Zoom, you can chat with somebody about Linux, you know, in a video conference, you don't have to actually be physically present with people anymore and as far as really needing hands-on help, like I need to go carry a machine to somebody, hey, can you install Linux on this thing? Linux is so darn easy to install, right? It's not, this isn't Linux of 20 years ago where you really needed help from somebody to get Linux installed. Most Linux distributions these days, somebody can get them installed in under 10 minutes. Another reason that Linux sucks in 2021 according to Brian was the rise of Google Fuchsia. So Fuchsia is a operating system that Google is working on. Google wants their own operating system that's not Linux-based because Google has, of course, two very, very popular operating systems, the Android operating system and the Chrome OS operating system, right? And they are Linux operating systems, they actually run off a Linux kernel but Google doesn't control the Linux kernel, right? So they want something that they can have total control of. So they're creating Fuchsia. Fuchsia will probably eventually replace Android and Chrome OS. And is that a bad thing for Linux? I don't think so because you gotta understand why Linux is in the spot it's in as far as popularity. Linux is the most dominant operating system on the planet, right? Think of all the countless millions, hundreds of millions, billions of servers on the planet. They're all practically running Linux, right? Why is that? It's not really because Linux is technically superior. It's not because of technical merit that Linux is running on all those machines. Mainly people choose Linux is because of the licensing and because of the development model of Linux. That's why Linux is successful and Google Fuchsia is not going to have that. So I really don't see Fuchsia posing a threat to Linux at all even though Fuchsia obviously will eventually replace all these Android and Chrome OS devices. You're talking billions of devices. You know, Fuchsia may become the most popular operating system on the planet. Doesn't matter. I mean, it's always been the case with Linux though. I mean, we've always been, there's always been that proprietary operating system that was the big elephant in the room, the real giant. Of course, we're talking Microsoft Windows, right? In the 80s and 90s, early 2000s, Windows was the dominant operating system, right? And it didn't matter to Linux, right? People didn't choose Linux or Windows because of, again, any technical merits or anything like that. People were leaving Windows to come over to Linux because of the licensing, the development model, the free and open source ideology, right? That's what people come to us for. And although Google Fuchsia is open source software technically, they're licensing it under an Apache-style license. You know, they're really doing this, it's gonna be open source, but really they're the only ones that are gonna work on it, right? Nobody else is gonna contribute to Google Fuchsia, you know, because again, they're creating this ecosystem that they control, that they wanna have total control over. So why is anybody outside of Google gonna contribute to that project? They're not. They're gonna contribute to a truly open community project like the Linux kernel. So again, I don't see Fuchsia as being a threat to Linux at all. I don't see the rise of Fuchsia having anything to do with Linux sucking. Toward the end of Brian's talk, he talks about that no operating system stays dominant forever, you know, popularity, waxes and wanes, right? He talks about the rise and fall of Microsoft DOS and the various versions of Windows over the years. He talks about the various Mac operating systems that have evolved over the years and of course Linux, right? And he talks about, you know, the end of these operating systems, all of them will eventually end, right? Because, you know, DOS was around, now DOS is dead. I mean, DOS, people still use DOS, but it's not really being developed anymore. Windows 3.1, he talked about, you know, he talks about Windows 3.1, Windows 95, not really the same operating system. Nobody really uses either one of those operating systems. We could consider those dead operating systems, but that's splitting hairs a little bit. I just see this as evolution, right? I see Windows 3.1 still lives on in Windows 11, right? It's just, they just keep evolving, right? Things change. I don't see it necessarily as things dying. I just see, you know, again, it's evolution. I think that's what's gonna happen to Linux, right? The thing with Linux though is we have an advantage. Proprietary operating systems actually can die because Microsoft has a proprietary license for Windows and all the Windows software, right? And if they decide tomorrow, we're no longer going to develop Windows anymore than Windows has did. Nobody else can develop Windows. Nobody else has the rights to the name or to the code. Nobody can edit the code. You're not, I don't even think you're allowed to look at the code, right? Because that's what the license says. So if Microsoft decides they no longer wanna develop that software, that's it, it's dead. Free and open source software though, anybody can do whatever they want with it. If everybody that contributes to the Linux kernel tomorrow decided we're no longer working on the kernel, you know, the thousands of people that commit to it. Well, guess what? Other people will step up and start committing to it and maintain the kernel because they're allowed to. That's what the GPL allows. And if you want to, you can fork the Linux kernel. Well, I'll create my own Linux kernel. I'll rename it, because I'll have to. I can't name it Linux when there's already a Linux. I'll just fork it, rename it, and then other people hopefully will join me and we'll keep creating this new thing. It won't be called Linux, but essentially it's still Linux. So Linux, yes, it'll probably die at some point, but it'll probably also live on in a different form. But what if you don't like that other form? You don't like what Linux evolves into. Well, guess what? There's other operating systems out there that are also licensed under free licenses. Many people think Linux is the only free and open source operating system out there. That's not the case. All of the BSD operating systems are licensed under free licenses. Haiku is a free operating system. ReactOS even is a free operating system. So if for some reason I had a problem with the direction of Linux or what Linux becomes in the future, I just start using one of those because at the end of the day, even though I claim to be a Linux enthusiast, that's really just short for saying, hey, I'm a really big proponent of free and open source software, right? It's just easier to tell people I'm a Linux fanboy than I'm a free and open source software fanboy because that's at the heart of what I really am. So if Linux did die, just disappeared off the face of the planet tomorrow, I would still be okay because I would just become a free BSD user tomorrow. So those are my thoughts on Brian Lunduk's talk this year as the Linux sucks 2021 talk. I'm gonna link to the video below. For those of you that have not watched Brian Lunduk's video, check the link below. Also, those of you that are not subscribed to Brian, he has a YouTube channel. He's deleted most of his videos off of YouTube. He mostly posts over at Odyssey now. So be sure to subscribe to Brian over on Odyssey as well. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Absigate, James, Wes, Mitchell, Paul, oh, Fakami, Alan, Chuck, Kurt, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiku, Haiku, I think Haiko, not Haiku, Haiku's the operating system. This guy is Haiko, I've, man, I've messed this up. I should rerecord, I'm not rerecording. Erjan, Alexander, Peace, Arch, Infantore, Polytech, Raver, Scott, Steven, Willie. We added some new names to the list and obviously I got messed up there. I do apologize. I also wanna thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. You guys know it's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna support me, please check out DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. I've had too much coffee this morning.