Linux

If this is your take after your annual Xmas Magic Mushrooms trip, you need to take more shrooms

The great Umberto Eco once wrote some wonderful musings about the similarities between different then popular personal computer operating systems and different branches of Christianity. I see that's now 30 years ago this year so now might be a good time for a repost, English translations and Italian original can be found here: https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html

Don't be silly, the Linux community has never told me to hate someone just because they're differen... Oh.

And besides, there's no arcane practices or secret knowledg... Oh.

Carry on.

What are arch commoners pray?

I already knew it basically was a religion, haha

Unconditional belief in OpenSuSE supremacy, Gut für Alle!

No keep going, I like what you're cooking.

Linux produces actual results. Linux hate is the religion.

Idk why but I love this post haha

Foss for the Foss God!

I like how you realized part way through that you were typing out nonsense, and decided to post it anyway lol

Also: how high are you right now?

With Linux you're either in hell or in heaven. With Windows you're in purgatory. /S

The one true way is TempleOS.

No but there is an ideological basis for free software though it is firmly based on practical experiences dealing with the consequences of close source devices.

Red Hat and Ubuntu are business. Debian and Arch are communities. Some of the smaller distros are basically that one guy in Nebraska.

People promote them for various reasons. An IBM employee will have different reasons to the supporter types who latch on to a distro and mascot like it was a football team. Now football, there is a religion. Its all ritual, nothing they do has any practical use, people congregate once a week and in some parts of the world it turns violent.

When the deb users start committing genocide on the rpm users I'll call it a religion. Until then its just a bunch of anime convention fans arguing about their favourite isekai.

Linus is God's god.

!unix_surrealism@lemmy.sdf.org

this pretty much... i think. I still don't fully grasp unix surrealism

The Red Hat pantheon, gods tha- wtf am I writing?

scripture

amen

We do willingly summon daemons to inhabit our magic crystals.

The Arch pantheon, progressive gods that bring revolution along with a bit of chaos.

That's Fedora, really, Arch did cool packaging and bailed

i support getting high in church

I mean, this place is filled with a bunch of missionaries asking if yove heard the good word of Linux on every Microsoft Windows post lol

Linux from scratch is atheist?

Who is Zeus

Well, it might seem that way sometimes. But in the end, what's different to religion is that this is all rooted in facts. Facts which are quite abstract, so not everyone gets them and even those who do get them sometimes wonder whether it's important or not sometimes. The thing is, Linux is at its core a neutral, open and free operating system, and it's basically the only one which is advanced or mature enough to be a real competitor to let's say Windows or MacOS. Of course it's more than a competitor on the server, it's basically the only relevant server operating system (Windows Server has a niche in application servers within a MS intranet domain, or to control Windows clients via policies, that's about it, and MacOS server is already long dead I think). Of course, some of Linux' success is because those same companies also contribute a lot to the development of Linux, because they need it for themselves as well. But that's just one more thing which makes Linux a very unique thing. It's like a neutral baseline for an operating system. Like a very capable OS core that everyone works on, even the competition works on it, because they also rely on it.

That it's open source and transparent and that anyone can use it or improve it or change it or whatever makes it special, because it's not a commercial black-box product where you just consume it as-is and have zero rights whatsoever to do or change anything about it. That's actually incredibly special in today's commercialized landscape. Its open nature also means it can never die, only grow. And because it's a proven good system which is also so very different compared to established desktop OSses, it can happen that its users or fans can seem somewhat religious towards it. But, again, compared to religion, religion is based on pure belief (otherwise it would be called fact). There's nothing religious about Linux or open source software. It's simply a special operating system, and not in a bad way at all. And closely related to it is, of course, the whole free/open source software movement. Which every user, even those of closed operating systems, can and do benefit from.

And since today's commercial software continues growing more and more user hostile (ads, spying, bloat, dark patterns, high prices/software rental models), it's getting increasingly important to have at least the option of a true alternative. Even users who absolutely hate Linux and open source software should be glad that alternatives do exist, so that once the food they are being fed by Microsoft and so on doesn't taste good anymore, they at least have an option to switch to something else entirely.

All hail Saint Linus, the prophet of the only true kernel!

Does that mean that those people who paid a random dude on the internet for GIMP are the altar boys?