There's a long history of people telling Linux users "to grow up" and "do what normal people do."

Linux wouldn't exist if people submitted to that argument.

The vast majority of desktop Linux users run Ubuntu (initial motto: Linux for human beings). So one may argue the literal opposite of what you wrote, in that if Canonical didn't invest into making a Linux distro that's accessible to normal people, it wouldn't have the relevance it now does. On top of that, Linux has (or had) a number of clear advantages over Windows that dwarf the presumed upsides of compiling everything from source vs. downloading builds.

There's not much of an argument for adopting obscure niche practices for their own sake

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Brian_K_White 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The rather large giant collosal planet sized argument that you somehow missed despite that, is that every single thing that you consider good and normal today doesn't exist except for the fact that at one point it was the obscure niche thing that annoyed intolerant "normal" people.

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t43562 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Linux was obscure and niche for a very long time before Ubuntu existed and Ubuntu only existed because someone bothered to use and develop Linux when it wasn't normal.

The Ubuntu users are only there because after they had told the rest of us how silly we were for using Linux they eventually had to use it themselves for work.

Now we're going to listen to that sort of stuff again without rolling our eyes? ....

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BigTTYGothGF 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

> The Ubuntu users are only there because

I started using linux in 1994 with slackware. Nowadays I use ubuntu, I've spent too many hours of my life tweaking my linux installs.

	▲	t43562 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		SLS for me. haha. :-) But now at least you have the choice! It's great really. I can use Artix because I like being nearer the bleeding edge but even that is really a lot easier to use than Linux was in the days when I had to compile my kernel. Nevertheless I remember lots of my friends who started off saying Linux was hopeless and ended up using it and Ubuntu was their gateway. The Linux world now is full of people who are fairly conformist and don't care about how it all began and who don't value the idea that open source has margins from which who knows what world beating things might eventually come. The fact that margins can exist is what makes open source great.