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my friends. mates. comrades. colleagues. buddies.

i do not need distro advice. i have been through the list. i have not needed distro advice since i went along with a handful of friends literally making our own distro in like 2006.

my first linux was gentoo — yes, stage 1. i have had SuSe because it was the only that came with out-of-the-box ISDN support that allowed me to go online with a fresh install. i have had arch, and our handmade distro was an arch fork. i have done LFS a handful of times; i have done LFS on an alpha; i have done LFS on an ancient PC with ISA cards.

i have even had NetBSD on a 32-bit SPARC. i have had OpenBSD too, on a Jornada.

i have had a collection of grml rescue CDs. i have had debian (and learned that nothing breaks as reliably as debian does). my first ubuntu was, what, 8.3? i have had fedora too.

please just take 3 seconds to consider that the person you are talking to may not, in fact, be a bloody beginner who has never done a manual kernel configuration, tinkered with package manager source code, or repaired their hardware with a soldering iron.

this kind of behaviour is exactly why i eventually stopped engaging with the FLOSS community at all. any kind of communication, any kind of venting or asking questions is seen as proof that you have no idea what the fuck you are even doing.

this is why FLOSS is a bunch of white men who will frown at anyone who admits not knowing something or having made a mistake. y'all make damn sure to show the rest of us that doing these things means we don't belong. means we're not as good, as smart, and as knowledgeable as you. means any unsolicited advice you pull out off your literal ass will be valuable as gold to us.

this is why i left. 10 years later, nothing has changed. not one thing. i livepost my hysterical experiences after my mint system got completely fucked up by doing an upgrade, and y'all swarm me to ask if i have considered trying a distro that isn't aimed at beginners?

i have, actually. in two thousand and fucking FOUR. there's a reason that i didn't ASK.