A message to Linux fans

Hi. I'm an adult. I work as a software engineer.

I cannot join in with the Linux community because of you people. You're just *too awful*. Instead of accepting that this stuff happens and it's bad, you childishly nerdsnort and start writing Microsoft with a dollar sign instead of an S, acting as if this stuff is some amazing manifestation of idiocy rather than a likely consequence of using a mainstream OS developed with time and budgetary constraints. It's going to have stupid bugs. Get the fuck over it.

I would like to join in with the Linux community, but all I ever hear is this pathetic nyerr-nyerr-nyerr garbage.

If you want to attract intelligent, grown-up people to Linux you need to stop doing certain things.

1) Don't act as if users of other operating systems are less intelligent than you. It turns out that Linux-advocacy isn't the entire world, and that leaders in different fields (or even this one!) might be using Windows. They're not "lusers", they just have priorities different from your own.

2) Don't act as if Linux hasn't had equally stupid stuff happen to it. Yes, it's a different process altogether, and I would dare say that bugs are less likely due to its open source nature, but they still happen. One that I can remember off the top of my head is Debian's guessable SSL keys.

3) Try—for ten minutes—to give the impression that half of your time isn't devoted to bashing an OS you believe is irrelevant.

4) For good measure try cutting out the xkcd worship and meme-spouting. We might be able to relate to you people if you acted as if you weren't cut from the same distasteful mold.

It is worse to have others believe you than having them locked down?
Why them, the indoctrinators should be locked down, not the indoctrinated. I have nothing against personal exchange of ideas, mind you, it's the statement that everyone has the "right" to duplicate her opinion in hundred million copies and poison hundred million people that irks me. The only thing that can be mass-produced is conformism.

You're talking about a single person or a development team of 5 guys
No, I'm talking about the masses exactly, the masses that would bash you and declare you a dangerous lunatic for daring to suggest that maybe indentation is not so good as advertised, or that hierarchies of hierarchies of include and object files can be replaced with a single include file containing everything you'll ever need, or that `goto` has its uses.

It doesn't matter if you state one of these things to a single developer, or a hundred, the reaction would be identical, "we always did it like that, our textbooks and examples always had it like that, you are insane, we don't even want to discuss it". It's like if you were talking to a bunch of featureless golems, ones of the million identical copies. It doesn't matter that the rest of them are not actually present, it doesn't matter that this particular group is different from the others in some unimportant detail of The Religion (and will engage in flamewars with a zeal only such trifle differences can provoke).

It is a perfect analogy. One man writes down some idea, it spreads and spreads and spreads and then suddenly everyone is a clone and you are a freak if you do not conform. Not because of your arguments, nobody would even listen to them, but solely because you dare to go against.

Is experience prejudice? Cargo cult?
Some of it is not, of course. It's just that most of it is, and trawling for rare pearls of truth, avoiding being poisoned by the rest, is more taxing than discovering everything on your own. The latter also builds character and gives the kind of experience and expertise you'll never acquire by ingesting preprocessed "truths".