Mornin’ fellow quarantined humanity-saviours!

How’s everyone doing today? Still good with ample supplies of TP and hand sanitizer? Good.

I gotta say I’m feeling a bit antsy. Prolly missing my tours to the healthy clubby, still too lazy to leave the house and do something. No. We still have lots of foodstuff and drinkies so I couldn’t justify breaking the curfew. Couldn’t live with myself.

It’s still more than 2.5 weeks to sit out and I guess opportunities to break out of quarantine will arise sooner or later and will become more frequent too. So why rush it now? We got enough to do and keep us busy as it is, no?

Some plans for today include, but aren’t limited to …

• downloading the next episode of Star Trek: Picard
• watching some older movies
• writing O@tM about those movies
• installation of LMDE4 on my test ‘puter Gaga
• preparing meals
• eating said meals
• sleeping
• watching YouTube

Oh jeez, so many tasks, so little time.

But let’s start with some early morning – 8:44 a.m. ain’t that early anymore, right? – Linux philosophy. All of y’all who don’t care about Linux (Why? And Shame on You!) can switch this blog OFF now. 😉 Anyhoo …

Y’all know that the Linux “community” isn’t really a community. It was maybe something like a community, in the early times, when Linus Torvalds sent out what was Linux Kernel 0.00001 to likeminded computer geeks, dispersed all over the globe, who got him and his idea, and knew how to read and implement Linus’ code.

The last litte bit of community spirit was destroyed with the advent of Ubuntu. “But Ubuntu has a great, strong, super duper helpful community, bitch!” you might say, and it might sound correct. But it isn’t!

Literature up the wazoo and dozens of forums are making a great customer support infrastructure but not a community. The Kernel Group, various distro developer groups, yes, they are co-operations, they are community. But receiving an answer for your question in one of a dozens of forums ain’t community per se.

Community is a give and take, is a concerted effort, is sharing a mindset and a goal! Getting your n00b questions answered by some RandomJoe Forumist on the interwebz ain’t comunity!

That’s of course only my opinion and not to be taken as gospel.

And that elegant segue brings us directly to the next topic:

When does an opinion become gospel? Who are those geek deities, so super duper savvy we can take their word as gospel – and what is then the value of said gospel?

Lemme give you an example: Your name is Eager Newbie, you just started out in Linux and you’re not sure what desktop environment might be right for you. Heck, you’re happy to even know what that is! So you ask around. And of course you get wildly differing answers. Pretty much every expert gives you another answer. Because in Linux that’s how we roll.

So let’s see what we have here:

Professional geek: “Go with KDE Plasma, it gives you (fill in a lot of geekspeek that goes straight over your head) and you never use your mouse/trackpad anyway, do ya?”

Superduper Geek: “You don’t need a desktop, just a Window Manager, coz (warble warble, mumble mumble).”

Guru of Gurus: “Keep it easy, and go with Gnome Shell. It’s like your smartphone. When you install dozens of Extensions you will be able to use it eventually as a computer and trust me, I’m a jediyaddayaddayadda … “

Real manly expert guru: “Real men are working exclusively in the Terminal! And that is the only truth! Real man make fire!” Makes Ooga-Chaka Ooga-Ooga noises.

Clueless little happy go lucky Orcsibaby: “I have no clue about shit but you could become a happy penguin when you use Mate or Cinnamon. They are somehow Windows-MACish and shouldn’t pose a problem. Of course all the other desktops are soooo much besterer, so don’t take my word as gospel.”

Now let me ask you a question: Who’s word would you take as gospel?

Stay healthy guys! And please don’t forget to wash your hands. And help your elderly, more fragile neighbors out in these hard times.

Laterz

xoxo