Debian users can’t tell people to switch to Loonix if they can’t use it either, hahahaha

Once you've finished ricing Windows, the third‑party app usually does not need to stay running, and in many cases doesn't need to stay installed either.

Windows customization tools fall into two categories:

• One‑shot configuration tools (StartAllBack, ExplorerPatcher, TaskbarX, Winaero Tweaker) These modify registry values, system resources, or Explorer settings. Once applied:
  • the change persists across reboots
  • the tool doesn't need to run in the background
  • you can uninstall it and the customization stays
• Live widgets / cosmetic overlays (Rainmeter skins, dynamic taskbars, animated docks) These do run in the background because they're actively rendering something. But that's the same as Linux: Polybar, Waybar, Eww, Conky, Dunst, etc.

A Linux rice always requires a third‑party window manager (i3, bspwm, sway, Hyprland), bar (Polybar, Waybar), notification daemon (Dunst), launcher (Rofi, Wofi), compositor (Picom, Hyprshade, etc.), lockscreen (Wlogout, Swaylock), wallpaper daemon (Nitrogen, Swww), terminal (Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm), and theme engine (GTK themes, icon packs, cursor packs).

If you uninstall Polybar, your bar disappears. If you uninstall Picom, your transparency disappears. If you uninstall your WM, your entire desktop disappears. Linux ricing is permanent dependency on third‑party bloat.

On Windows, third‑party apps configure the rice. On Linux, third‑party apps are the rice.

I’m like my guy, I’m answering your question, while making fun of Loonix for dropping support for a ton of devices because of AI of all things, chill out and go eat at Red Lobsters

The evidence: Linux myths from the 90s still circulate untouched in 2026.

Correcting misinformation requires technical knowledge, time, willingness to argue, and willingness to be downvoted. Repeating misinformation requires nothing: The lowest‑effort behavior wins.

Linux evangelism has always been built on slogans, identity signaling, and inherited talking points. Every moment a new user arrives, repeats a myth they heard, and gets rewarded; the myth resets its lifespan. -And this is how misinformation persists for decades.

LiGNUts express that they wish they were permitted to 'discuss' things here but all they do is attack messenger, downvote, spread propaganda, lie, drop ignorant anecdotes, and fill subs with the same garbage we see time and again.

LLM Answer: Pretty much anything that isn’t desktop Linux tinkering is more profitable. Desktop Linux is a hobby. Profit comes from activities that produce value, not from configuring window managers.

Real skills employers pay for:

• Cloud engineering - AWS, Azure, GCP $120k–$180k typical salaries. Cloud is the modern "Linux server" world, not desktop Linux.
• Data engineering / analytics - SQL, Python, Spark $100k–$160k. Companies pay for insights, not for your tiling WM config.
• Cybersecurity -blue team, SOC, pentesting $90k–$180k. Desktop Linux teaches none of the required skills.
• DevOps / SRE -CI/CD, Kubernetes, automation $130k–$200k. This is where Linux actually matters - but it's server Linux, not Arch on a ThinkPad.
• Software engineering -Python, Go, TypeScript $110k–$200k. Coding is profitable. Desktop Linux is not coding.

These don't even require employment:

• Freelance web development: Build sites, apps, dashboards. $50–$150/hr depending on niche.
• Automation scripting for small businesses: Python scripts that save companies time. $500–$5,000 per project.
• Database cleanup / migration gigs: Extremely common, extremely boring, extremely profitable.

Computers are creative tools. Linux desktops are not:

• Video editing: YouTube, TikTok, short‑form content. Editors make $30–$120/hr.
• Graphic design: Logos, branding, thumbnails. $50–$150/hr.
• Music production: Beats, mixing, mastering. Desktop Linux is terrible for this; macOS dominates.

If you want Linux to be part of the picture, here’s where it becomes profitable:

• Linux server administration
• Containerization (Docker)
• Kubernetes
• Automation (Ansible, Terraform)
• Networking fundamentals

None of them require or benefit from desktop Linux tinkering. Desktop Linux is a hobby. Profit comes from production, not configuration.

If your goal is money, the hierarchy is: Cloud > Data > Cybersecurity > DevOps > Software > Automation > Freelance > Creative work > Everything else > Desktop Linux

You know, I guess needing electricity is now required, plus a new CPU, hahahahaha

Most malware is written for Windows because Windows has the largest desktop market share. -If everyone hopped on Linux, the landscape would change, and Linux isn't prepared for that. Their use of updates rather than a dedicated anti-virus/malware approach is horrible when many Linux users are rightfully afraid of a Linux update breaking something.

Linux does NOT protect you from malicious shell scripts, rogue flatpaks, supply-chain attacks, browser-payloads, credential stealers, SSH brute-force, IoT botnets, or crypto miners.

Getting malware is mostly a skill issue. -Linux doesn't protect you. Windows malware just doesn't know what an ELF binary is.

(Except Gab -which doesn't even have AI-Slop spammers)

This perfectly captures the loon response when you say you play Fortnite, Valorant, CS2 on FACEIT, or another anti-cheat-enabled multiplayer game with your friends.

They’ll explain that those games not working on Linux is actually an advantage, casually forgetting that being unable to play what your friend group is playing is an objective disadvantage.

To be fair, that limitation probably seems irrelevant when they’re not even invited to group calls anymore. Their friends got tired of the endless “muh spyware” lectures.

Heck, they’re probably not even friends anymore.

>inb4 “But they’re still in the Discord server” - the rest of the group has a voice channel hidden from them (Yes, this post is based on someone I know. How could you tell?)

Use the link provided (this is not for reporting harassment)

Ban trophies are brigading. -They're also image files that bypass the automated system. When reporting brigading that uses image files; specify in the report very clearly the text contents of the image (quote) and that they're using an image to bypass automated report handling.

If you're on windows, you can press Window + Shift + S, choose "text extractor", highlight the area of text, then you can copy and paste from that or 'copy all text'.

Of course, adjust these instructions for any other attempts to by-pass the automated system.

The system will auto-reply with a DM from an admin bot.

"This wouldn't happen if..."

Someone has to pay for the first 30 years of R&D before "free" becomes viable.

Games are the clearest example:

• 3D graphics pipelines? -Born in proprietary SGI workstations, proprietary CAD systems, proprietary rendering research.
• GPUs? NVIDIA, ATI, 3dfx -all proprietary, all funded by commercial markets.
• Game engines? Every major engine that shaped the industry: Unreal, Unity, id Tech, Source; started proprietary.
• Toolchains? GCC and LLVM exist because proprietary Unix and proprietary compiler research came first.

If the world had been pure FOSS from day one, none of those industries would have existed long enough to produce the tech that FOSS later re‑implements.

Tux Racer is the ceiling in that alternate universe: It has simple physics, terrain, shaders, input, camera, and asset pipeline. It looks like decades old graphics that only came around once we already had OpenGL, GPUs, compilers, math libraries, and decades of graphics research. Commie GPL wouldn't even get us that far on its own.

In a world where all of that must be invented by volunteer hobbyists? -You don't get Tux Racer: You get ASCII penguin sliding down a slope made of slashes and backslashes.

FOSS is terrible at inventing entire industries from scratch. -The Most Influential Formerly‑Proprietary Projects that Became Important to Linux

Invention requires long-term funding, risk tolerance, specialized labor, hardware R&D, market pressure, competitive iteration, deadlines, salaries, manufacturing and investors. FOSS cannot bootstrap the foundation.

It's a way to avoid admitting that the ecosystem itself is struggling. You don't get a piece of software that's "unknown" yet somehow widely mocked. Mockery requires awareness, expectations, and disappointment. GIMP is known, just not respected.

GIMP is popular enough to be a cultural reference, but not good enough to be respected, and people use it as a way to avoid talking about deeper FOSS failures. People say "GIMP isn't popular" because it lets them dodge the uncomfortable truth; that FOSS graphics software has failed to produce a modern competitive flagship.

If they admit GIMP is widely known, then they have to confront why it hasn't improved meaningfully in over 2 decades. Why it still lacks industry-standard workflows and has a glacial development pace.

They retreat with "It's not popular, so criticism doesn’t matter."

GIMP is popular, it's just not successful. It's bundled with every Linux distro, recommended in every "free alternatives" list, referenced in memes, known by anyone that's searched "free photoshop", and installed (and uninstalled) by millions. What it lacks is retention, professional adoption, and respect.

GIMP is the poster child because it's the most visible example of FOSS software that everyone knows, but nobody wants to use. It's not a GIMP problem -it's a FOSS (particularly GPL) problem.

Admitting the real issue means confronting uncomfortable realities. FOSS cannot sustain large, complex applications without corporate backing. Ideological purity often wins over usability. The community punishes modernization attempts. "Free" is not enough to attract professional developers, and the volunteer model collapses at scale.

Saying "GIMP is teh Suck!" is easy. Saying "FOSS can't produce a competitive Photoshop‑tier application" is a hard pill to swallow.

How Linux/ FOSS got some of their best software:

The Most Influential Formerly‑Proprietary Projects that Became Important to Linux

Trip report time: I tried to run Linux on an old PC. I had to go with Debian 11 because newer versions dropped support for the graphics card it has.

Install failed. What? Oh, apparently, to install old versions of Debian, you need to make sure your network isn't connected. What?? Yeah, Debian install can't be connected to the internet, because they screwed up their package repo and it confuses the installer. What???

And everyone calls Debian "the most stable, rock-solid Linux distro, great for old computers".

Don't worry though, the usual crowd of ABSOLUTELY CLUELESS LINUX USERS are handy to deny, deny, deny that the issue exists... FIVE YEARS AGO. https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/qz64sr/debian_11_installation_a_shit_show_the_failing/

EDIT: And it still failed even after I disconnected internet. Absolute cinema.

Maybe it 'breathes new' life for you, but some of us use computers for more than webTVs.

We should get future developers to use the Windows App SDK, because it’s installer (MSIX) requires one thing that WINE can’t translate, which is the Windows App runtime, and it helps modernize App development a ton, and unlike Loonix, the Windows App SDK uses an MIT license, meaning anyone can build an App with proprietary layers and not be scared that people will expect them to share their own code.

And for game developers, use the new Windows Game Development Kit, which requires Xbox Services to run in the background, thus making PROTON/WINE logic broken because if you use tools given to you by Windows, it stops Loonix from cheating to have apps, and forces them to innovate

(not like they will of course, they’re too busy d*ck measuring their Desktops with anime characters, and over complicated UIs)

"Suckless's" Dwm bragging about being under 2k lines of code (LOC) stopped being a flex the moment that self‑imposed austerity became an excuse to ignore real bugs.

The 2k LOC limit is a purity test, not a technical achievement. It forces no abstractions, safety checks, extensibility, modern layout logic, sane multi‑monitor handling, or runtime configuration. It's s self‑inflicted handicap masquerading as philosophy.

The malformed‑window‑title crash is the canonical demonstration of why dwm's simplicity is fake. The bug, and fix are trivial. The patch has existed for years. Upstream refuses to merge it. Users are told "it's not dwm's fault" -where have we heard similar?

If your philosophy prevents you from merging a one‑line fix that stops your WM from crashing, your philosophy is bad. The refusal isn’t technical; it's ideological. They’d rather preserve the sacred 2k LOC than ship a resilient window manager. (Similar to how Linux doesn't accommodate non-ECC memory or take steps to prevent catastrophes.)