Let’s pretend something outrageous. Let’s pretend somehow Lady Gaga saw me, and said I was hot. I’d be horrified, sick to my stomach, insulted. Naturally, it will never happen. Not only do I not appeal to very many women, but I’m not likely to come within several miles of where she’s known to travel. Not if I can help it. Lady Gaga represents a concerted effort to destroy what little is left in modern Western culture. HuffPo rightly said she was the antithesis of “sexy” because she did her darnedest to destroy what it meant. Without dragging this out too long, I’ll cut to the chase: Her sense of taste is so perverse, anything she recommends is by definition a threat to society.
A few days ago it was announced she liked Ubuntu. And in response, a whole slew of new teenaged users began experimenting with Ubuntu. Meanwhile, a large number of Linux technicians are increasingly disgusted with the direction Ubuntu has gone. Sure, it’s high profile and draws a lot of attention to Linux, but so did a handful of other distros over the past couple of decades, and always for the wrong reasons. Linux users despised Lindows/Linspire because it did everything wrong. It still does, and now Ubuntu is going down the same path. At every turn their developers and packagers are defying the best and sanest traditions of Linux. Not in an independent streak of careful thought, but a heedless rush down the first diversionary path which makes it different from the rest, always grabbing recklessly at whatever is currently labeled “cool”. Ubuntu is not good for Linux.
I’m not hostile to the Ubuntu Community, and they shouldn’t care a whit if I am. What once held so much promise has become the plaything of someone I find too often acting like the psychopaths who rule this world. It’s been documented they contribute next to nothing to the core functions of Linux, and precious little to the desktop. Making Linux high profile as they do comes at the awful price of making it something I don’t want to be a part of.
Granted, I still recommend the older release of Lucid Lynx (10.04) LTS. But when that runs out, so will my patience with Ubuntu. The blessing of Gaga is the kiss of death in my eyes. If Linux as it is, and perhaps as it ought to be, is not appealing to the masses, that is as it should be. Lest you think I’m reversing my condemnation of Open Source for not caring about the masses, you miss the point here. The masses I care about are the ordinary folks who can’t afford the best and most expensive; they don’t buy the trendy stuff. Their numbers are growing daily as the oligarchs brazenly suck the lifeblood out of our economy. These more ordinary folks simply want to get things done, and computers tend to help. It doesn’t help if the computer doesn’t do what they need. Open Source does not care what they need; Open Source seems to want all the fame without meeting people where they are. They claim they don’t want the adulation of brain-dead fashionistas, but many lie to themselves, because it feels the same as the love of the fanboys. They want to take credit, or at least take a share in the glow, for anything which puts Linux in the limelight. Gaga has done so, and I’m pretty sure lots of Open Source folks are just tickled. It simply proves my point: The most well known distro of Linux appeals the worst elements in our society.
Let the flames begin, because I really don’t care.
