June 14, 2026
I recently finished watching the conclusion of Linus Tech Tips's second Linux challenge. Unsurprisingly, much of the series focused on criticizing the overly-aggressive online Linux community. This is by no means a new criticism, but it did become a very central theme of the series. All three of the challenge's participants for example, admitted to relying in LLM's for some amount of Linux trouble-shooting, specifically to avoid having to sift through forums or Reddit posts where they might run into the stereotypical linux-brained neck beard who silently shouts things like: "RTFM!"
To be clear from the start: I'm not here to make the case that the online Linux community in places like Reddit or StackOverflow is some perfect utopia, which is only toxic to Windows snowflakes who just need to toughen up if they're going to us the world's greatest OS. It makes all the sense in the world that a user-base that makes up roughly 3% of desktop market-share world wide, would be full of very opinionated users. MacOS itself has just over 10% of desktop market share as of May of 2026, and that community is also known for its own collection of contrarian and sycophantic members. However, I do think that this online conversation is a great lens by which to talk about the best skill I've ever developed, and one that I think everyone could benefit from: an ability to take good advice, even when it's delivered in the worst possible way.
In May of 2020 I decided to catalog my own attempt to switch to Linux full-time. I had spent the last few months learning how to control my Mac from the command line, and falling in love with CLI apps like Vim. For the first time, I thought it might be advantageous for me to abandon the OSX set-up I had come to love. I made the somewhat ill-advised decision to jump straight from a proprietary child-proof OS, straight to good ol' Arch Linux. In a two-part video appropriately titled: "A Clueless Arch Linux Install Guide" I successfully managed to get an Arch install to boot, only to read the comments below the video and realize I'd made a long list of pretty critical errors in the install process. I immediately wiped the hard drive and started over again. I say this was an ill-advised decision however, only because there wasn't anyone advising me to do it. Nearly every online listicle or thread in 2020, and in 2026 advises that new users wade into the Linux waters with something like Linux Mint or Pop!_OS rather than jumping in head first with Arch.
The truth however, is that jumping straight to Arch Linux was the best decision I could have made, specifically because I did it in such a public way. Over the next year I uploaded all manner of clueless Linux guides. I focused on everything from setting up Proton and its various forks, to hacking on X11 window mangers, to creating miscellaneous bash scripts and hyper-niche ricing projects on my new Linux install. I learned an insane amount about Linux, and computing in general, because I thrust myself into the deep-end with tools that I barely knew how to use. But also, specifically because of the Reddit-posters and YouTube comment dweller's that everyone else seemed so eager to punch down on. All the way back in 2020 (it feels as if I might as well be talking about 1920), the option wasn't available to simply use an AI agent or LLM if I found the Reddit threads or YouTube comments to be rude. If I wanted to trouble-shoot a problem, or learn how to do something new on my system I had to dive head first into the very same waters that everyone complained so much about having to occasionally dip their toes into.
Part of my position here has nothing to do with the "Linux community" itself. I have worked more than a few jobs in construction, law enforcement, retail and even a restaurant job or two when I was younger. Across all of these industries, it's very rare to have anyone sit a new employee down and give them nice and gentle instructions for doing their job well. In retail or the restaurant industry, employees learn what not to do by getting yelled at by a disgusting Karen who has nothing better to do. In construction it's a foreman or GC doing basically the same thing. During my time as a prison guard, I was equally likely to be cursed at by the inmates I was in charge of and the officers worked with. But in all of these cases, I eventually realized that most people didn't get upset for no reason whatsoever. No matter how unnecessary or ridiculous an outburst might have been, it was pretty rare that there wasn't something I could trace the anger that was being directed at me back to. It didn't take me long to learn that my best move, if I wanted to be better at my job, or just wanted to avoid having to deal with unsavory people any longer than was absolutely necessary, was to find a way to accept the truth in an insult, and forget about the insult itself.
Throughout my years, I have often found that the most passionate, aggressive and down-right rude comments are often the ones that I could potentially learn the most from. For example: one of the most obnoxious comments that people tend to complain about follows a very specific format: (a) Person A asks for help with Software X, (b) Person B berates Person A for using Software X in the first place, and tells them to use Software Y. Clearly this is just about the worst way for Person B to go about spreading the word about Software Y. But it occurs to me that during the height of my brief career as a Linux YouTuber this was my favorite type of comment to receive. Finding cool tools for streamlining my workflow or ricing my window manager was a big part of the difficulty in using Linux, not because cool open-source projects didn't exist, but because they didn't get a lot of clicks, and certainly weren't going to pop up at the top of any search engine results. I've lost track of the number of tools that I use on a daily basis, which I only discovered because of a snarky comment that followed this exact template: "Why are you using X? Y exists and it's way better." Even as recently as last month, when I uploaded a video complaining about GitHub's increasing unreliability and lamenting the fact that I didn't know of any good alternatives, I was thrilled to find that I immediately had a comment below the video providing exactly what I had said I wanted: good alternatives to GitHub:
As I have learned to expect from being in situations like this many times before, both SourceHut and Codeberg are much closer to the kind of alternatives to GitHub I was looking for. Even the most objectively rude parts of the comment above were also, 100% true. My proper microphone's audio was corrupted while recording (Pulse Audio weirdness), and rather than re-recording the video, I opted to clean up my laptop's on-board audio as best as I could and run with it. I also did leave in much more explanation than I normally would have in that particular video, as I was attempting to aim for a target audience that was slightly less tech-savvy than the audience that my videos usually reach. This is precisely the kind of comment that I love to get. Would it be better if it were phrased a bit kinder? I guess. But the crazy thing is, after years of conditioning myself to view every comment or piece of feedback through a lens of just extracting what's helpful for me, I barely even register the parts that are objectively insulting. I read a comment like the one above, note the resources that could be helpful for me (SourceHut and Codeberg), accept the feedback that's true (the lower than average audio quality), and ignore the parts that are irrelevant (the pacing of the video being slower than normal).
"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions."
🙡Marcus Aurelius- Meditations 2:1 This is a problem as old as time, but the good news is that a fix has existed for as long as the problem has: Accept the fact that certain people - most people - are horrifically bad at articulating themselves clearly. It would be wonderful if every teacher was patient, every boss with a great leader, not just an ill-tempered martinet, and it would be great if every online commenter was empathetic and kind. But they aren't, haven't ever been, and likely won't ever be. Rather than evaluating feedback in it's totality, ask yourself: "Is any part of this valuable?" It's easy to waste an enormous of energy trying to improve the quality of feedback we receive, but it seems more than worth spending a bit of this energy on improving our ability to parse imperfect feedback as well. If we can learn to strip out the worthwhile content from even the most aggressive exchanges, we can become the world's best students. We don't need to have perfectly trained, well meaning instructors, we don't need instructors at all. Our desire to learn more, and willingness to accept human nature has already given us the ability to learn anything, from anyone, at any time, no matter how difficult they make it for us to do so.