Linux is a dumpster fire — somebody call the fire department. | by Tuomo Valkonen | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

Medium Logo

Get app<br>Write

Search

Sign up<br>Sign in

Linux is a dumpster fire — somebody call the fire department.

Tuomo Valkonen

8 min read·<br>May 8, 2026

Listen

Share

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Illustration generated with LLM.I was a somewhat early adopter of Linux. In my teens, when Microsoft abandoned DOS for Windows 95, I ordered some Slackware CD-ROMs, and didn’t look back. For about a decade, until Gnomification — a form of enshittification without an obvious financial incentive — made Linux unbearable; made it lose its unix roots. Until it became practically impossible to install almost any software without a middle man, the precursors of app stores: the Linux distributions. I learned their wickedness both as a user and as a developer.<br>And yet, despite everything, moving to open systems is no longer optional.<br>The dungheap<br>Fifteen years after I gave up on Linux, I tried again.<br>And I found the same dungheap I had left behind.<br>In all that time, Linux has not improved. Not at all. If anything, it seems flakier than ever. It makes me sad and angry.<br>On Linux, in 2026, whether closing your laptop lid suspends reliably still depends on a roulette of firmware, drivers, kernel versions, power-management daemons, and desktop environments.<br>Same with Bluetooth, where the problem is exacerbated by a complete lack of documentation and an over-eager configuration that steals all audio from my phone, when I just want to use the Bluetouch app as an emergency mouse.<br>I learned this last year, when I got an Orange Pi with Armbian as a media station, and when my — bought when the times were still good — Retina iMac at the campus died, and I tried to use the provided Thinkpad with Ubuntu. I gave up, and dumpster-dived for my old 2014 MacBook Pro that still works with an old Thunderbolt display that only comes with a proprietary connector. But neither Apple nor Homebrew provide updates for that machine.<br>I am no fan of Apple, and would much prefer using open source software, only. To have the right to fix. Windows 95 was awful, but the state of current operating systems makes Windows 95 pale in comparison. Even macOS is so bug-ridden these days that core subsystems like AirDrop frequently hang and demand a reboot. And yet, corporations are too big to care.<br>I consider myself adept with computers, but I cannot fix Linux. Many subsystems are completely undocumented — unless you consider source code and GitHub bug reports documentation. Every architecture seems to be changed every six months. But it also doesn’t “just work”. After almost 40 years, it is not yet “ready for the desktop”, as common complaints go.<br>But worse: it also forgot about the capable — if deprived of time — hobbyist.<br>I do not have the time to figure out the complexities. I am sure the unpaid among the authors (many do now get paid by corporations) do not have time to fix bugs and document. But that is why, exactly, the aim should be<br>SIMPLICITY.<br>If you want to give users the control; if you want to enable self-help; if you want to create an operating system that is hackable in practise and not just in theory; if you want to realise the right to fix; if you want to be better than Apple and Microsoft, you cannot have OSS → ALSA → PulseAudio → PipeWire chains, or — a much more appropriate word — dungheaps. You cannot have a complicated Bluetooth stack (a euphemism word for a dungheap), where it is unclear what is responsible for what.<br>Is simplicity incompatible with the distributed model of development? I do not think so. Rust gets many things right. Nix tries to fix some things. The good old unix approach of “everything is a file” was a beautifully simple abstraction that — one hopes — everyone could have agreed upon. The gnomifiers did not.<br>The gatekeeper<br>Another reason I left Linux was the abuse by distributions — by the predecessors of app stores. Not only as a user do you get years-old buggy versions of software, due to the very static nature of the distributions, but the distributions abuse developers. They modify the software, do not indicate it, and leave the upstream developers to deal with user complaints.<br>Users think they are reporting bugs in version X. In reality, they are often running a heavily patched hybrid of old code, new fixes, and downstream behavior that exists nowhere upstream.<br>After years of dealing with downstream bug reports caused by distribution-specific patches, I changed my software license. My position was simple: if you provide a “convenient installation method” for my software, you must either<br>(a) distribute the software unmodified, in its latest released version; or<br>(b) if you distribute a modified or obsolete version, rename it, remove any visible association with the original author, and explicitly assume responsibility for maintenance, bug reports, and user...