TL:DR; Reluctant to switch distros because of toxic member - Rude and unhelpful to newbies - Prevents people from participating and makes other users willing to help uncomfortable - Management and moderators have done nothing to address the issue
Sorry if the post is a little confusing. English isn’t my first language. Normally, I don’t do posts like these. I’m a package maintainer for the same distro, just a newbie, but yes, I’ve published a few apps with the help of kind app devs, who were happy with giving their own time to spare, to improve the aforementioned distro. I’m sick of it. I’ve had enough tolerating this, because this is one of the worst four to five months of experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m contemplating switching the distro that I’m using.
After that changes that Red Hat undertook, and the direction of Fedora, I decided that it was finally the time I switch to a community-based distro. This distro I chose is what most people would call the Arch of 2023, I’d say. This new distro is a niche, and one-of-a-kind, but it’s very popular, because it’s a valid research project of utmost importance.
Little did I know that one person, could ruin my entire opinion about a community as being the most horrible, unwelcoming, unsafe and unkind place I’ve ever seen. I’ve faced rude people from Mint, Debian, Fedora and the likes, but this person is the epitome of “asshole”. Let me explain why.
The “asshole” in my case is a senior “elitist” maintainer - the stereotypical problem everyone complains about, whom I’ve had the misfortune of meeting. Let’s call them person X. They behave just like the stack-overflow “elitist”. Also, they maintain the most important part of the particular distro I’m using. Are they knowledgeable? Yes. Can they solve most of the issues? Probably. Their responses are almost, always baits actually, to make you lose your composure and to also discourage/prevent others from participating and helping. The first part, I’m okay with, because I’ve always been able to maintain my calm. But the second, not at all.
X is active almost all of the time. Now, that you’d think is a really reliable person you’d say. Except that they’re not. X gives answers to people, and that answer depends on his personal feelings, and a bunch of other personal bias. If it’s a technical subject, you’d see X discuss about that. If it’s a project X does not like, X would say that this project should be thrown out of the repository. If there’s a newbie question, or a question about personal inconveniences in a distro, X will lose their shit.
X has previously replied to me, and a bunch of countless other people in a rude manner. About how it started for me, well, that was the first comment I’ve even posted on their chat server about how a certain file was corrupted, and what do I get? Angry comments asking me to explain everything in detail. Well, I never asked for a fix, because the fix was literally to wait for some time and download the newly generated file with newer timestamp. The worst first impression I’ve had about a community, but I convinced myself that I mustn’t be too judgy. As any respectable person would do, I did not reply to X, I did not comment anything about them being an “asshole”. Simply ignored them, and in this case, thankfully, a kind fellow gave me some directions.
I’ve been using this distro for about five to six months, I’d say. I’d ask a question, I’d get rude replies from X, and in rare circumstances, X would give proper reply or just wouldn’t respond, which is way better than listening to angry comments.
Well, today, I asked a simple question about the experimental stuff used in the distro. I got a really rude answer, with personal opinions I’ve not asked. Again, I did not respond. But I was really furious. I wanted to reply something rude and hurtful back. But I did not.
Why exactly am I so done with this community? Because:
- X has created a hostile environment for newbie users, who are genuinely looking for help, and this distro is very much undocumented, which means that you’re basically asking answers from a spiked wall
- When X replies, other user don’t help the one asking for assistance in fear of being judged for having some opinion
- X has enjoyed this power trip for quite some time, and the management, the overall team, especially the moderators have done nothing in their power to make the chat room a safe space. Granted, I did not inform that mods, so part of it is on me. But this person is an active participant, and by active, I mean, they’re online all the time, and they respond, and so this pattern is visible to everyone.
So basically, neither was my query answered, I had my mood ruined, and no one else wants to on the fear of being judged. So what if they’re a senior maintainer? Are we allowing bad actors now? People who make community that are against the principles of inclusivity and diversity? Are we now encouraging toxic and hostile eco-chambers filled with a bunch of Linux-bros, because newbies can’t stand next to you?
I don’t switch distro often, because I am very loyal to a particular distro for years, and besides, in my opinion, it’s pointless to change distros unless there’s a reason to. But this, I’ve had enough of this shit. I just feel like changing.
This is one of the problems with open source projects that not enough people are talking about.
There are plenty of kind and helpful people in the community, but there are also a huge number of people that have the attitude of “I had to suffer to learn this so you should too”
At the end of the day though it’s a numbers game. The larger the community is, the smaller the chance that you will run into people with that attitude.
It’s not really a secret why distros like Ubuntu and Mint are popular when there are people out there that unironically hold the belief that you shouldn’t use Linux unless you compile it from source yourself.
I think I know which distro you reference (are we keeping it a secret for good reason?). If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I’ve also reached out to admins about toxic messaging in the forums, and the response was hostile, dismissive, and disappointing.
Unfortunately, despite being interested in some technical aspects of the distro, I doubt the sanity of some of the team, and don’t want to deal with their hostility either.
I’d be interested to know what distro this is so I can avoid it, tbh. I understand the impulse to avoid stirring up shit by naming names, though.
I’m not sure if Andy got it right, but it’s NixOS. I’m going to be taking a break from contributions anyway, there were a few pending PRs left for a library, but maybe I’ll address it next month.
Ok I figured out how to send a direct message in the Lemmy app I’m using.
It’s Puppy, isn’t it. I always knew they were up to no good.
You may be joking but I gotta say for everyone else: no, it’s not Puppy!
From the description to me sound probably like nixos
It’s funny and sad that we all have stories like these with so many different projects.
I was wrong, my experience was not with the same project as OP (not Nix OS in my case).
Yes, you got the distro right. Getting a job isn’t easy in a populous country, and as a graduate, it is really stressful. Open source contribution is what I enjoy to make myself feel busy and not have negative thoughts, while I keep hearing rejection from recruiters. And just having another toxic person ruin the experience for me is just disheartening.
Yes I’m contributor too, not on distros tho, even tho I have tried to contribute to mint some time ago, never had a bad experience with contributions and trust I have made many many mistakes while trying to contribute, maybe it’s better if you don’t find the environment to be good for you to just contribute to something else that at least isn’t uncomfortable and isn’t discouraging, yes I know the problem shouldn’t have existed to begin with but we can’t do much about it if they don’t even acknowledge the problem.
Honestly sounds like my experience with VOID Linux. I just stick to Arch now.
I’m sorry to hear that! VOID is not what I had in mind.
Asahi?
No, never had any experience with Asahi, positive or negative.
That is informative and unfortunate.
In reality, leave it, if they don’t want to deal with toxicity, they want a toxic project.
Arch users are often quite proud of what their distro says about them. A spin off will likely have people who’s ego is a little too invested in this. Many great distros exist that don’t encourage toxicity. You can follow this project without being in messaging. Many messaging groups can be toxic.
They behave just like the stack-overflow “elitist”
stereotype 100% established, and it’d be completely understandable for you to want to distance yourself from them asap. It’s already hard enough for any larger body of work to reach any semblance of completion, even without external factors like that acting as motivational vampires eating up your brainspace
I haven’t read all of your post, but personally I don’t usually mention what distro I run because there isn’t really a point to. As far as I’m concerned, we’re united under one kernel. Whether you apt, yum, yay, pacman or whatever else, it kinda doesn’t matter as long as it works for you.
There are elitists everywhere for everything, and their hostile attitude isn’t worth your time. The best thing you can do IMO is look for other discussion platforms with individuals using your distro, where hopefully they’ll be more welcoming to newbies and long-time users alike.
My old workplace had a person exactly like this. We all had enough of the bullshit, but our boss didn’t care. In the end, I moved on.
Later I realised it wasn’t just that one person, it was actually a bad culture overall which wasn’t being moderated well. The managers were just really bad at their job. So I’m really happy I moved on.
There are lots of cool Linux and OSS communities out there. Even if they are not exactly about the particular distro you are interested in, there will be ways to learn and share about it.
Hey, if you’re talking about Nix, Guix is a similar niche and I’ve had a great experience with the folks in the IRC chat and mailing list. Do try it out.
Initially, I would have gone for Guix. But the biggest hindrance is the lisp language. I’ve never used it, and coming from a C-like background, it is a radically different way to look at programming.
Another issue is the non-availability of proprietary software. I believe that there’s probably a non-free repo out there, but it may be not as large as Nix right now.
Perhaps I could start learning some basics about Guille and start my distro transition. I’ve stopped with all PRs anyway, and resume any activities starting from next month. I’ll see if I’m still comfortable with contributions. Till the time, I’ll be working on my job profile.
Check out https://toys.whereis.みんな and nonguix which have a ton of proprietary stuff, and the tools in nonguix make it simple to package binaries for personal install if you want something quickly
I’ve started making some progress on GNOME Boxes using Guix, and this would definitely come in handy.
You’re going about seeking change via a dramatic diatribe trying to create as much shade and animosity as you can while not addressing the people who you have grievances directly. Do the distro a favor don’t try it or use it
Agreed. The FOSS/LinuxS community can be extremely toxic at times. I saw a Reddit post recently removed as “non interesting” from /r/linux because the OP (a Linux user) said that he preferred to use Edge and O365 over FF/LibreOffice. The OP also explained their reasons and said that privacy concerns were obviously being obviated in his posts.
I myself have been often downvoted to oblivion or attacked for saying that I dislike FF AND Mozilla and I prefer to use Brave instead. These fundamentalists are not doing a great job to make the community grow or even survive.
Brave tho is not better than Mozilla and FF, at the end of the day they are all companies, not our friends at all, the only thing they care is profit, and as everything else on this world there are positive and negative fact about it.
Just want to leave this here: Brave is a Corporation, which is profit orientated and Mozilla is a Non-Profit-Organisation.
Fine, I just prefer Brave over Mozilla.
Of course, downvoted by some idiot here as well. As expected.
Yeah it sucks when ppl power / ego trip sorry to hear that. I have been there on a similar FOSS situation and it’s shocking to realize there are some bad attitudes out there.
your are right to leave. your time is the most valuable thing you have, spend it where and when you are appreciated! You will find another project who will welcome you.
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I’m sorry that this happened and that you feel like leaving is an only option…
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I spent over an hour scouring a Matrix room, the Discourse, and even trying to skim through GitHub issues over the last 3 days and I really can’t figure out what or who you’re talking about. (and that’s after finding a certain Japanese-influenced username, if you know what I’m referring to).
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I don’t really understand the point of these posts. They’re too vague to be actionable, unfortunately, sorry to be pointed about it.
EDIT: I’ve been in the community nearly a decade, I have a tree of folks that I’ve brought into the community by way of transitive education, encouragement and community building. Reading this post in the 3 days before NixCon is breaking my heart. I care a lot about this community, and wish there was something more I could do to help you here, and the community.
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I’ve decided to take a break for now. It would not be that easy to leave. Most of my personal repo use Nix flakes, and I’m guilty of making other project maintainers adopt flakes for dev shell.
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I’ll personally message you a hint. I don’t want to doxx anyone, so forgive me for the cryptic message. It’s not a anime-themed profile, however.
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Actually I never wanted to make this post. But as I said before, I don’t want to unnecessarily doxx anyone or confront them. I also really don’t care if some person is rude. But my gripe is with people who give answers, that aren’t “answers”, and then add a few personal opinions that don’t let others to participate in the discussion.
I definitely have observed the behavior you describe, across a couple of decades in OSS, and I know how morale killing it can be. I’m sad that you need to step back, but also, self-preservation is critical and I’m glad you’re doing what’s best for you.
I just want to say sorry again – that this happened and that the community doesn’t have better mechanisms for self-policing. I hope I don’t come off as tone-policing either, I think spaces to vent anonymously are important, and it’s not your responsibility to take on the burden of confrontation.
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Mmh. Usually talking to other people helps. See if you’re alone with your opinion. Or if there are many other people you can bond with, maybe address the problem together. In the end either you can explain to the higher-up people why they need to solve this problem and they do it, or sadly you need to go or find a way to deal with it. Other projects also had multiple people leaving and sometimes starting a fork, because of things like this. But this just sounds sad and unnecessary.
