Hey all, first post here. (As a Linux fan, you know I can't resist the urge to go out of my way for a bit of light evangelizing.) =P
Having taken a quick glance through this thread I've seen people bring up many of the classic arguments in favor of Linux (free, open source, powerful, customizable, ubiquitous, etc.). Those are all true, in my opinion, and are pretty strong arguments for why many of us use Linux at home, for work, in our phones, on little gadgets, in virtual machines all over the internet, and even as the basis of consumer products. For the LTT audience, I also see Linux as being kind of the software equivalent to building your own PC from parts--as an outsider it can seem inaccessible and a bit hard to understand why it's worth the extra "hassles", but once you get into it you realize that it's cost effective, fun, and allows you to create the (hardware or software, respectively) environment that you want.
Having said that, I want to actually take this post in a different direction and touch upon an aspect of Linux that is rarely discussed but absolutely at the heart of what it's all about; community. Simply put, while Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX are products, which are unilaterally designed by a relatively small group of people and then marketed and sold with the goal of making profit, Linux represents something fundamentally different--a community of users, developers, and companies with a diverse ecosystem of ideas, skills, and use cases who are all collaborating on something that is bigger than any of us as individuals. I know that sounds lofty, but frankly, it's true.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that some Linux users can be a bit overzealous, but that passion and enthusiasm comes from a place of truly caring about the platform in a way that I think users simply don't care about Windows or OSX. The same criticism can often be made for other passionate and geeky communities, whether we're talking about games, comic books, etc. People are invested in this stuff and they care deeply about it in a way that goes beyond a mere product in the greater market and, in the case of Linux, we've helped to build it into what it is today. And while everyone online remembers the one annoying encounter they had with some Linux maniac (like you might remember a bad interaction with somebody in an online game), what we often overlook is the bigger picture of a Linux community that started from 1 dude in a dorm room and eventually katamari'd into this global behemoth of geeks, "hackers", developers, companies, and (slowly but surely) even artists, musicians and gamers.
This, of course, can't be said about our relationship with Microsoft and Apple. They make something, we either buy it or we don't, we have very little agency over what Windows or OSX can do or how they act, and what little power we have over those companies or products exists by pure luck and is ultimately fleeting. Without getting into fear mongering, it's important to recognize the reality that they decide how we interact with our hardware and that the only thing stopping them from doing something deeply unpopular is the possibility of lost revenue. Logically speaking, in the event that doing something unpopular will make money, they'll do it, as they have in the past.
So, to end this wall of text, why does any of this matter? Who cares if Linux is a community-driven thing?
Off the top of my head, there are two big reasons why Linux being a community really matters. (1) If there is a will, there is almost always a way. If someone out there wants to do something and has the know-how (or cash) to make it happen, it will happen, no matter how niche the idea or how small the audience. If you've ever witnessed the successes of the open source community you'll know first hand that, what it is, Linux users make it happen. And (2) as the community grows, Linux's potential grows (seemingly exponentially). Linux has only existed since 1991, I first tried it in 2006 and thought it was pretty cool back then, but now, as we approach 2020, it's evolved into something that I barely recognize. The user experience is absolutely solid, the developer environment is unmatched while things like git and containers have taken over the world, you can make art with great tools like Blender, GIMP and Krita (I'm biased, since I contribute to this one, by the way), you can make music with great tools like Bitwig, Reaper, Renoise and Ardour, and you can even play thousands of great games, both retro and modern, with high-quality drivers and things like Proton and Lutris that make it easier than ever to play even non-native games. But none of this fell out of the sky, it was all a product of a community that has grown bigger and built things better than ever before, and as the community continues to snowball, I truly believe that our computer experience will be better than we've ever imagined. =]
Thanks for reading and I'm looking forward to the episode.
