alt Hacker NewsThis is the Linux equivalent of “corpo speak”—as in, it’s complete bs.
The absolute VAST majority of Linux users are not out there forking their own distros or creating their own WMs. They, more often than not, are just fine with using whatever is being cooked up by the big names in the Linux space, people aren’t giving up the “they” just because the “they” is now KDE or GNOME.
Hell, even Torvalds himself has gone on record to say that he just wants his computer to work and is happy using Fedora and GNOME (the very definition of a “they” Linux).
It's not "corpo speak", it's a principle. It's fine if most users use popular stuff instead of creating their own. The point is to empower them to make different choices if they want to. Whether or not they actually exercise this power is irrelevant. The important part is the fact they have this power at all.
I built a freestanding lisp interpreter that runs directly on top of the Linux kernel just to prove this. Zero dependencies, native system call support. I know that everyone is going to want stuff like glibc instead. But it was possible, so I did it.