Linux Video of the Week: Linux Sucks (But Actually It's Awesome)

Get ready for an entertaining – and possibly infuriating – examination of Linux desktop distributions from the perspective of community insider, writer and commentator, Bryan Lunduke.

In his annual “Linux Sucks” presentation at LinuxFest Northwest last Saturday in Bellingham, Washington, Lunduke unabashedly took aim at some controversial targets – Ubuntu, Fedora, Gnome, Wayland and X, to name a few – while simultaneously praising their accomplishments.

The talk highlights the Linux community’s capacity to gripe and moan about the very same software that it faithfully uses and loves. And Lunduke, well aware that he’s making himself a target of ridicule, conveys this dual nature well by going through the same set of slides twice: once to discuss how Linux sucks and once to hail how awesome it is. He does this well, with an air of showmanship (and a sprinkling of expletives.) But he ends on a sincere note.

“I think it’s absolutely amazing that we have a multi-million person community out there that’s rallied around one core set of an operating system, a piece of software, that we feel entirely invested in. For a lot of us it’s an identity,” said Lunduke, a social media marketing manager at SUSE (and a guest blogger for Linux.com). “And yet we yell about Linux on Reddit and every other website we get a chance to… and we still at the end of the day love Linux… and each other.”