title: No, you're not an elitist for gatekeeping normies, even if you're called as such
author: 寮
date: 2023-02-19
tags: technology,internet,webdev
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Have you heard about the whole concept of elitism?\
Seems to exist exclusively in technology.\
However, elitism doesn't actually exist.

Arch users are being called "elitists" all the time for being openly hostile towards Wintoddlers.\
OpenBSD users are often called "elitists" by Linux users for belitteling every single OS that's not OpenBSD (I like and use both, plus FreeBSD, and all 3 of them have a use and deserve the love for their merits, and I'd not consider any of them to the the ultimate go-to system for everything).\
Users of suckless software are commonly considered "elitists" for using simple software instead of over the top bloated soyware.\
Hell, veteran internet users are commonly called "elitists" for calling out the dystopian direction technology is going into.

I'd like to ask the following:\
Consider if Mr. Bean would just walk into an ICU unit and demand to perform heart surgery on somebody who might die in a matter of minutes, and the surgeon would tell him to fuck off, is the surgeon an elitist?\
If a 4 year old would want to edit Monna Lisa while it's 75% done, and Leonardo da Vinci would tell him to go play in a sandbox with his friends, is Vinci-san an elitist?\
Obviously, technology is far more accessible than an ICU unit at a hospital or a time machine for that matter, but the point remains the same; all we want is to preserve (well, it's far too late for that anyway, so we'd want to restore rather) the internet culture as it was intended, and having tech illiterate normies going around making demands is exactly what destroyed everything.\
And I'd honestly be much more tolerant towards normies if they would at the very least learn to adapt, or better yet, just adapt.\
So many people tried to make the internet and technology in general easier to use, and all it did was making it all harder to use instead.

I personally use the command line for everything except for web browsers, when I started using dwm on Linux (formerly i3-gaps) and FreeBSD, and cwm on OpenBSD, I have grown to hate GUI software.\
Only if the internet was more accessible from terminal browsers, and get Fcitx to work in fbterm (or get mlterm to work at all), I would probably just delete the window managers and go full blown TTY.\
I was using byobu on Linux and FreeBSD, and got disappointed that I couldn't get it to work on OpenBSD, so I decided to configure tmux to make it work, look, and feel exactly like byobu, except I'm using tmux directly now rather than as a layer within byobu, so it's even more based now.

And there's nothing elitist about that, it's just way easier to use because GUI's have been so nerfed down to the lowest common denominator, they accidentally became harder to use because they all got many layers of abstraction added to prevent normies from breaking stuff, and this comes at a very high price, which is freedom and control over your system.\
Sure, command line might feel hard and all that, but at the very least try to live in it for a month, I bet you'll never look back anymore.\
Right now dwm and cwm are just there to allow Fcitx, multi monitor setup, and web browsers, other than that I just full screen into a terminal with tmux running in it, and launch other programs inside of it, I can't imagine anything more comfortable than that!

Actually, there is!\
I have a couple of servers, each running either Devuan, or FreeBSD, or OpenBSD, plus my ThinkPads run either Artix, or GhostBSD, or OpenBSD, and I SSH into all of them in different terminal windows, and using DWM keybindings I switch between them, and they all run tmux with my custom config (which I'll finetune a little bit further, and then release it on Gitler and Ryogit).\
I even configured tmux to display the name of the OS and version number (with the obvious exception of Artix), and gave each OS a different color status bar, so Devuan got a pink-ish one, FreeBSD is red, OpenBSD is yellow, GhostBSD is dark grey, and Artix is blue.\
Top notch productivity, the levels of perfection is overflowing!\
Although I'm slowly moving all my Devuan servers to either FreeBSD or OpenBSD (depending on what's supported and what usecase each server has) as I no longer see Linux as a viable server OS (I mean kernel, whatever nobody cares), more on that in a later article.
