spoiler
I am personally against gatekeeping anything Including linux , but young naive me from 6 years ago felt this way, and I wanted to see if opinions had changed from back then
I asked this same question 6 years ago on Reddit just wanted to see if general opinion has changed now as Linux has arguably gotten way more mainstream
Edit: Progress meant 3rd party hardware and software support, innovation etc. I decided to rerun this question because of the new discourse surrounding LLM use in the kernel; the pretext being a smaller community would have easily taken a binary decision regarding the matter, for better or worse
No. I don’t want it small. I just don’t want it to welcome fascists.
There is also not “the Linux community” there is thousands of communities of varying sizes.
“Linux community” is a similar term in its dimensions like the term “Gaming community” or “Programmers community”. It’s more of a “meta community” (and I don’t mean the company). In a sense all of Linux brings us together with similar shared interests rooted in Linux. So it is no unreasonable to talk about “Linux community”, but it depends in what context. If its about supporting Linux compared to other operating systems, then it makes sense to talk about a unified meta community like “Linux”.
Then why not just talk about Linux adoption?
It bothers me because there is often little understanding or communication and sometimes even an antagonistic relationship between contributor communities and user communities. Users because they see themselves as presentative of THE COMMUNITY often think they get to tell contributora how they run the project.
With Linux as a whole it’s even more abstract since the Linux kernel development and distro development is so disconnected and most people don’t have a strong connection with the kernel or it’s development really.
So what does that leave for the Linux community. I think the comparison to the gaming community isn’t bad since while gaming is fine, making being a gamer an important part of ones identity is often very much not fine.
Linux adoption is more of technical side of things in my personal opinion. It makes a huge difference to talk about Linux community versus Linux adoption. In example Linux is adopted a lot in webservers, maybe in professional fields and so on. I think the person asking the question is more interested in the effects on and for the community from a user perspective (as we are in a Linux community ourselves right now, context is everything). I do not think the term “Linux community” is precise or the best choice in most cases, but I can understand the context in which way it is meant.
Overall I do not have a better suggestion for the term. The entire question is borked anyway. If you change the term “Linux adoption” then people might think in terms of percentages of adoption, and less about the social impact on a personal level. Overall it would just be the same question actually and everyone interprets it differently anyway. “adoption” or “community”, it’s the whole Linux. I’m not against any of them, so don’t care about it. My problem with the actual question is more about the “making progress” part.
Linux adoption is real. THE linux community isn’t real. You can break down Linux adoption into more detailed metrics like Linux desktop adoption, Linux adoption among gamers, etc and those are all real things that we may or may not be able to put numbers on and may or may not desire to grow.
Adoption and community are separate things. The guy asking seems to be concerned what the community things and what effects it has to them. As for me, I don’t care which term you or anyone uses, as long as it is clear from context. I don’t know why you say the Linux community isn’t real though. As I explained earlier, its just a meta word for collection of communities related to everything Linux.
OP uses community instead of explaining what they mean. They also oppose the growth of said community presumably because of some unexplained concerns which would likely be immediately clear if they would explain what they mean.
And the linked reddit thread actually suggests that OP is opposed to wider adoption because they want to be part of some Linux elite.
I agree its vague title and the body text should have been used to clear things up. The question in this form is not satisfying to me either, and leaves too much for interpretation. I am not arguing against that. I’m just saying that I think I know how to understand the first part of the question and don’t have an issue myself, because there is context to it. But its not optimal.
This is why the term “Linux community” makes sense, if we talk about being part of and ‘Elite’. That is what I thought, its about the community and its effects and how to deal with the grows, rather than the growing numbers alone. Either way, both terms “Community vs Adoption” are unclear what the intend of the question is for most people. But the distinction makes only sense when discussing, because both terms are about adoption in this context and its doesn’t really matter.
Please let’s not pretend that makes sense. I’m loosing my mind here