Dear Linux and Afficionados,

You first flirted with my ideas in a school club as nonsense from a bunch of computer geeks punching the keyboard on a black screen reminiscent of my dad’s 3-and-half-inch floppy-booted laptop, without a mouse, without a gooey GUI floating about my face as in my modern Samsung laptop. At the time, you were Linux the other one, outside in the cold looking at Bill’s dream float in the minds of young and old, and it made sense to me: you were way too complex, despite my light fling with DOS.

Later I got to know your personality, and you were Red Hat or Mandrake or Ubuntu and frankly, it still made little sense: was this 3.1, 95, 97, Me, XP, Vista, or what were these names intended for? Wikipedia told me they were actually flavours, and not versions, and within each vanilla or hibiscus or chocolate flavour came various versions based on what else was tucked in within you. Linux. Linux. Distros, flavours, versions, and stable and long term versions within the versions….Linux: have you ever heard of “Divide and Conquer”?

When you look at your distros you see innovation, possibilities, custom-made OSes but all I see is egoistic innovation, wasted possibilities, and custom-made confusion. I see precious metals lying about like in the war-torn mine belt of central Africa, where the locals see disjointed Cobalt, Gold, Uranium, Diamonds, but the wiser put them together to drive the price up.

What do I dream of for Linux, the OS I’m growing to love? Yes LOVE. For the potential I see wasted, for the fact that hours of non-profit love and work went to make it what it is. I’m rooting for Linux as the mainstream OS. Why? I think we’re being taken for a ride by all the others, and Windows 8 was the final nudge to make up my mind to start experimenting with Ubuntu, realising that I could get stuck in the modern EI crazed world where beauty = functionality even when you just want a bloody OS which goes fast so you finish your work in time, not stitching up my threads into animations which slow me down when I have my 20 web pages open, 3 Excel instances analysing data into one Powerpoint presentation being fed by another 2 Powerpoint presentation, and collaborating with a colleague via Skype.

What do I dream of for Linux? Find a way to make Linux compete with the rest by putting your energy behind the scenes and ensuring that less effort is spent in forking as is done so often, but spooning all OSes together, no matter how different they are, to different front ends, to customisable backends. But fully functional and less buggy!

Why do I rant? I nearly saw Jolla die. Ubuntu went over the top on the phone and it went nowhere. Mozilla’s phone isn’t really it. Tizen is not yet ready. However, for each open source baby about to leave the womb of the community to shine in the world, and stop being what I perceived way back as geek toys, which dies, it’s a bit of Linux that dies.

What do I want? That you Thunderclap #ISupportJolla if you are down with Linux. This is the baby of the two “pure” Linux phones ever made by that once grand company Nokia. The Sailfish OS is the closest “pure” Linux has come to being mainstream. Ok Ok ok. Android is Linux. But that’s not the real deal here. I think Sailfish is safe and open, but can’t share all their secrets yet, because they’ll get beaten by the big boys (cf Apple’s latest battery pack “TOH”). To me pure Linux is about productivity (which doesn’t mean Uglifiability). You can build something truly productive and cute, and this is what Linux does. Not something cute then productive. It’s about priority. Pure Linux ensures you can do what you want to do as quickly as possible; Android has the most atrocious multitasking, sadly replicated in the rest.

What do I want? That you Thunderclap #ISupportJolla for you Linux guys have been suicidal for too long, holding on to your horses while the other horses on your team struggle…it’s time to push more Linux distros to the fore, whether you love Wayland or not, whether you love Mer or not. Hell, they forked whatever to get here, and you’ve forked whatever to get to where you are, like Unity, Gnome 3 etc. Just support these guys. They could screw us and Android the whole Sailfish OS in the future, or even Windows it, or even (whoa!) iOS it. Well, but by the time they get there, there’ll be another Maemo in the works, because I know you guys fork everything. Let the Kernel dominate then spread everywhere to compete against but still for itself.

Crazy thoughts from me…#ISupportJolla, please do.

Sincerely Yours,
(c) Nyonglema