Anarchists develop structures and agreements that discourage concentration of power

MLMs believe that they must use the state, capitalism, and by extension coercive control

Are these not different words for the same fundamental concepts?

I fail to see how “the state” and “capitalism” aren’t just a more developed form of “structures” and “agreements”. And if the community decides punishment is an appropriate response to breaking an “agreement”, how is that any different from “coercive control”?

And if you’re community gets large enough (say even like a couple hundred people), how are any decisions gonna get made even remotely efficiently?

Feel like you’re a hop skip and a jump from a representative democracy. And as soon as bartering becomes too inconvenient, I’m sure a new “agreement” still be made to use some proxy as a form of current and boom now you’ve got capitalism too.

I really hope stepping down as CEO leads to Linus surrounding himself with people he trusts to call him out when he’s missing something.

He strikes me as the kind of person who is susceptible to a few certain mental traps you kinda don’t want to see in a leader of a large influential organization:

1. Taking an “ends justifies the means” mindset (e.g. stepping on the “growth” gas pedal and accepting sloppiness because it will get better later with Labs)
2. Letting “objective facts” justify big subjective decisions w/o much consideration (e.g. thinking the Billet Labs video didn’t need to be re-shot because the “objectively” product rec conclusion wouldn’t have been different)
3. Substituting actual solutions to problems w/ commitments to solving them (e.g. implementing “Accuracy KPIs” instead of slowing the pace of video releases)

None of these constitute outright malice, IMO, but boy can they lead to a problematic working environment.

I’m sure there will be quite the flame war as a result of this, which I think is a bummer. Linus strikes me as someone who’s acting in good faith, but has an unshakable habit of making rushed decisions without considering the full scope of their impact, and is (or has been) lacking the appropriate feedback structure to help him learn to either a) make more thoughtful decisions, or b) fully delegating those decisions to folks who are better equipped to make them.

Here’s hoping this leads to positive change.

Most of the comments here are talking about the x% of time Linux gets messed up it can be really intimidating for new users and getting the right help can be a challenge, or simply more time than it’s worth.

I think this is true, but I think there’s another thing that irks people:

Software Compatibility

The general public primarily interacts with their computers through established applications that commonly aren’t available on Linux w/o intimidating work around (if at all).

A noob who switches to Linux isn’t going to know the limitations up front, and the second they decide they want to learn Adobe Premier for work, they’re kinda fucked. They’ll either spend hours/days of online research trying to figure out if it’s even possible, or they’ll ask for help only to have someone tell them they’re wrong for trying and to use some FOSS alternative because Adobe is an evil megacorp.

It’s a recipe for frustration.