It’s not mysterious, nor rare, and it's not caused by "technical difficulty." It's caused by people: the loudest, neediest, most entitled LiGNUxers who treat volunteer developers like slaves.

When one tiny project collapses, it can bring down multiple others.
Ueberzug is the perfect case study.

FOSS developers start with curiosity, passion, desire to solve a problem, and pride in building something cool.

What they end up with is demands, complaints, entitlement, “fix this now”! -Rarely "how can I help?" They're attacked by users who don't read their README, think "Free" means they're owed something, and those that file bug reports with no logs attached!

The more useful the project becomes, the more abusive the user interactions get.

Ueberzug was a small Python tool that let terminal apps display images.
Not a huge project, corporation or even a team.

But because it worked so well, it became a dependency for file managers, terminal image viewers, screenshot tools, previewers, collage generators and the only thing I left that I preferred on Linux: ucollage

This one developer was responsible for keeping dozens of other projects functional, and they fell to the constant complaints, demands, and accusations. They quit, not because the code was difficult to maintain, but because of the users! -This doesn't typically happen with paid developers because at least cash is rolling in and complaints would be more justified.

The snowball effect when one FOSS dev quits

One single FOSS dev can cause breakage across multiple tools, forks popping up, downstream devs scrambling (with users yelling at them now), more burn out, more quitting.

LiGNUxers make it worse (when they think they’re helping). -Demanding features, arguing about principles, lecturing devs, insisting on ideological purity, and treating maintainers like employees. It's not support, its pressure, stress, and unpaid emotional labor.

Ueberzug is just the poster child because it was small, fragile, and widely depended on. It was a backbone for my favorite image viewing program, and losing its use for uCollage helped me move on from Linux.

Here are some other real life cases that apply:

ImageMagick is used by everything: web servers, desktop apps, scripts, packaging pipelines, CI systems. Every few years, a maintainer quietly disappears. No drama. Just burnout.

youtube-dl (DMCA drama + user entitlement). When youtube-dl was hit with a DMCA takedown, users screamed at the maintainers, demanded instant fixes, and treated them like a free streaming service. Maintainers were already exhausted from constant site breakage, entitled and poorly written bug reports, and people demanding support for obscure sites. Several maintainers stepped back permanently.

OpenSSL -Before Heartbleed, OpenSSL was maintained by one guy on a shoestring budget powering the entire global internet. The maintainer was burned out, overwhelmed, and blamed for the entire mess. Corporate funding only arrived after the catastrophe.

LeftWM (Window Manager). The developer publicly quit after endless feature demands, users complaining about “missing” features, people insisting he rewrite the project to match their preferences. He explicitly said the community’s entitlement killed his motivation.

mpv is the best media player ever made imo. It’s notorious for users demanding features, arguing with maintainers, and lecturing maintainers about design decisions. Several maintainers have quit over the years, citing: "burnout", "toxic interactions", and “I’m tired of arguing with users who don’t contribute anything”

PulseAudio -Poettering didn’t quit FOSS entirely, but he did leave the Linux desktop world behind, along with all the harassment, death threats, endless complaints, users blaming him for every audio issue, and distro maintainers shipping broken configs and blaming him! He eventually escaped Red Hat and went to Microsoft to work on systemd‑related tech in a calmer environment.

systemd devs have repeatedly stepped back or reduced involvement because: "every change triggers a flame war", "users treat them like villains", "they get blamed for distro breakage they didn’t cause".

Audacity maintainers were exhausted. They sold the project to Muse Group. Users accused them of “selling out”, attacked the new maintainers, and spite forks popped up. The old devs burned out and the new devs did too. -LiGNUxers weren't learning from their mistakes.

Similar stories exist for:

• GIMP has had multiple maintainers quit or go inactive
• NPM Maintainers (left-pad incident)

and office suites:

• LibreOffice -Chronic maintainer fatigue
• Apache OpenOffice - Mass maintainer exodus
• Calligra Suite (KDE) -Maintainers quietly dissappear
• AbiWord -Burnout, stagnation
• Gnumeric -Burnout
• Only Office / WPS -Sellout

Linux project dies as Linux user repeatedly bombarded the dev with attacks

I could go on and on...

Do I feel bad for OS developers? -Not really. They are their own enemies killing their own paid development jobs and perpetuating entitlement. Sorry, they have to learn the hard way. They're a lot like LiGNUxers -Their Own Worst Enemas!

Telemetry helps developers find bugs, prioritize features, understand hardware, prevent regressions, and improve performance. -LiGNUxers: HATE IT! If you want your software used by LiGNUxers, don't use telemetry!

Don't you dare proprietary that! How dare you try to make money off of the software we don't donate to! Linux users bully developers into avoiding SDKs, proprietary APIs, codecs and even firmware! -Even when they're required for hardware acceleration, GPU support, audio/ video compatibility, anti-cheat, and modern peripherals.

-Don't you dare use Electron, GTK, Qt, SystemD, Flatpak, Snap, Python either!

Developers are expected to support every distro, package format, init system, display server, audio stack, file system, etc. If not, they're seen as not caring about Linux! Developers rightly burn out, get pissed off, proprietary devs avoid Linux entirely, and users blame everyone except themselves.

Anyone who’s spent time around desktop‑Linux culture has seen this play out with repeating patterns.

It’' a community that wants more users but treats every new user that isn't posting a 'I just switched to LiGNUx and love it!' or a fetch screen like an intruder.

"Linux is easy bro", "it just works", "it's better than Windows in every way" swiftly pivots to "well, Linux isn't for everyone", and "your fault".

Instead of uniting around a few polished grand-daddy distros, the cult celebrates 400 distros! -There's always one in that shit pile that you haven't tried. You haven't confirmed that that other one is indeed shit yet! "IT'S NOT LINUX FAULT!" -Or have you tried every combination of package formats, init systems, display servers, and audio stacks? -No? -Then how dare you blame Linux!

Problems are treated as personal attacks. Bad nVidia support, broken suspend, inconsistent theming, missing apps, regressions in updates all result in "shill", "troll", "too stupid to use Linux" accusations (despite all being valid enduring issues).

The culture rewards cleverness over usability. If something is complicated, obscure, or requires editing a config file, it’s considered “powerful”. If something is polished, or simple to use, it's considered "bloated." Complexity is a badge of honor instead of a problem to solve. -But Linux is 'ready'. -You're just expected to know Sudoedit, Timeshift, the commands used in the script you need for audio, the hardware you can and cannot use, etc..

A little honesty upfront and a little understanding after the fact, would prevent the whiplash. LiGNUxers can't even leave us alone in a (their term) 'hate sub'.

Moms: Kick your adult children out of the basement! Their 'learning Linux' won't get them anywhere. Lucrative jobs because they 'learned Linux' would realistically be around 0.1–0.3%. If you want evidence: Look at Linux Youtubers. Aside from DistroTube, you have some even prominent Linux Tubers like Brodie Robertson. -Observe the background (cheap kids bed), and obviously sharing a residence. Not to single him out, but many are like that.

Sure, there's odd ones like DT, and Mutahar of SomeOrdinaryGamers, but Mutahar was a millionaire off other things, and DT appears to have been in the right place at the right time. They're also making money from YouTube where simply having Linux skills wouldn't be enough (others show that if their skills were lucrative on their own; they're obviously not working those jobs).

DT is also a poser that claimed, "I use Arch", while cheating with Arco (and still uses garbage like Cachy). You're supposed to use the AUR gingerly (checking packages with scrutiny) and he has a recent video where he's obviously stressed about NOT doing so.

Assuming 5% of desktop users actually use Linux (but we know they're manipulating stats as they do so openly): Global desktop user base would be 2.2 billion and 5% of that would be 110 million Linux desktop users. How many of those 110 million become high‑earning professionals because they used Linux on the desktop?

-Not "people who already wanted to be engineers." -Not "people who got jobs and also happen to like Linux." Specifically: people whose Linux desktop usage caused the career outcome. -The number is microscopic.

Linux users tend to be tinkerers, students, retrocomputing people, privacy nuts, distro-hoppers, and people thinking they're reviving old laptops. (old versions of Windows and Haiku are better options). -These are not pipelines to high paying jobs.

Employers don't hire Linux desktop users: they hire backend engineers, SREs, cloud engineers, DevOps, embedded engineers. They require serious Linux server skills, not "I installed Pop!_OS on my ThinkPad". Desktop Linux ≠ professional Linux.

The job market overwhelmingly uses macOS and Windows. -Even in Linux-heavy industries Dev workstations are macOS or Windows, corporate tools are macOS or Windows, mobile dev requires macOS, game dev requires Windows, design requires macOS, enterprise requires Windows. -Am I getting a high paying job for knowing how to install and use Windows?

Using desktop Linux teaches package managers, terminal basics, config files, and systemd quirks. -Stuff that can be learned in 15 minutes (like learning Vim which is just a text editor). Employers want Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, cloud platforms, networking, security, automation, and distributed systems.

Even people with computer science degrees and real technical education are often not getting those lucrative jobs. Many employers want at least a year of experience because people don't learn until they make that one typo that brings their shit down. Only about 20-40% of CS graduates end up in high-earning roles. Social skills, or Trade skills are far more valuable!

I'm a former 'advanced' Linux desktop user. I ran Arch for ~2 years, with a heavily and manually customized DWM. I've even graduated from a tech school with certificates and high honors. I've been making my money by doing freelance work for landlords doing plumbing, electric, cleaning, painting, cooking, etc. -It's decent money, yields a huge rent bonus (for being useful on premises), keeps me active, and isn't a pipedream. I occasionally dabble with their computers and tech, but it's not my bread and butter.

Or just use Komorebi on Windows and hide the Windows bar. It's not like Windows doesn't have fastftetch, yazi, btop4win,etc., either.

Open‑source communities don't behave like engineering teams. They behave like ideological micro‑societies with their own rituals, taboos, and status economies.

Fragmentation is the natural from a system where disagreements turn to forks, forks turn into identities, identities turn into loyalties, and loyalties turn into more disagreement. Linux as a result has 300+ distros, 20+ desktop environments, and 5+ competing packaging systems.

In theory, "anyone can contribute." In practice, contributions are filtered through seniority, mailing‑list reputation, ideological purity, and alignment with maintainers' preferences.

-Open‑source ideology is the operating system underneath the operating system.

"Software must be free, even if it becomes harder to use." -Firmware blobs are rejected even when hardware requires them. Telemetry could improve stability but is outright rejected, and UX research is just to 'corporate'.

-Ideological purity is prioritized over user experience.

Attempts to unify or standardize triggers suspicion. Systemd, Wayland, Flatpak, etc., solve real problems like boot consistency, sandboxing, and dependency hell, but the fear of "control" supersedes practical benefits.

"Volunteers build better software because they're passionate." -MYTH!: Foss Devs Quit and Sellout on Userbase. -This leads to abandoned projects: Abandoned Software is Dangerous (and common on Linux), unmaintained libraries, delayed security patches (for months), and critical infrastructure being maintained by a single person.

-Sustainable software requires sustainable labor.

When Systemd became dominant -"Monolithic design is actually fine now." When Flatpak solved dependency hell -"Sandboxing was the goal all along." When progress stalls, communities retreat into nostalgia and romanticize Gnome 2 as perfect, 'KDE 3 was peak'.

Understanding FOSS requires understanding social mechanics, not just code.

For all the pud-pounding over "community‑driven innovation," some of LiGNUxers most acclaimed software only exists because a corporation got bored, went bankrupt, or needed a tax write‑off --and dumped their proprietary code on the FOSS world like a box of ~~chocolates~~ old clothes at Goodwill.

Blender is the FOSS Cinderella story because the original company, NaN, sadly failed. Blender began as a closed, commercial 3D suite. The company went bankrupt, and the code was released because the community bought it out of liquidation.

-Linux advocates ignorantly brag about Blender as if it proves open-source and what it can accomplish.

Quake III Engine is the Linux FPS ecosystem: ioquake3, Tremulous, OpenArena, Urban Terror, and half the "native Linux games" people nostalgically cite all exist because id Software decided to open their old engines for PR and goodwill.

Take a look at the biggest "Linux successes":

• Firefox: born from Netscape’s corporate collapse (and funded by Google)
• LibreOffice: born from Sun Microsystems dumping StarOffice (and it's still a dump)
• OpenSolaris tech (ZFS, DTrace): released by Sun, not invented by Linux
• OpenToonz: released by a corporation, not built by the community
• OpenCascade: proprietary CAD kernel turned open source by Matra
• Unreal Engine 1 source release: corporate decision: not community effort

-Corporate trash is LiGNUxer treasure!

If corporations stopped open‑sourcing their old stuff, the Linux ecosystem would lose its:

• flagship 3D suite
• historical gaming engines
• office suite lineage
• browser lineage
• CAD backbone
• animation pipeline
• filesystem innovations

Almost yearly there's another fad distro. -Not because they resolve anything, but because LiGNUxers haven't shit talked enough about it yet.

When a project is abandoned, it means no one is watching for vulnerabilities. Unmaintained code accumulates unifixed CVEs, depends on outdated libraries, relies on deprecated crypto, and may break silently in ways that create new attack surfaces.

No one is watching distribution channels. When a package is orphaned, low-visibility, niche, or unmaintained, it becomes trivial for someone to request maintainership, push a malicious update, or rely on users blinding updating. (Imagine thinking the AUR is a convenience when you have to scrutinize the initial package and every update as well as keep track of whether it's abandoned or not!)

LiGNUx culture encourages "just install it from the AUR", and up until recently people did it. -It was crazy convenient if you didn't bother with scrutinizing!

The AUR isn't the only place you can find abandoned software. -FDROID is another.

FOSS advocates love to say: "If it's open, someone will notice." Abandoned software proves that no one is looking, reviewing, maintaining, or monitoring.

Advice if you continue using the AUR: If upstream hasn't updated in years, assume risk. Inspect PKGBUILD diffs before building. -This alone would have caught the malicious updates.

Paru, yay (with config), and aurutils are helpers that warn about maintainer changes.

Prefer official repos or Flatpak when possible. They use signing, review, reproducible builds, and maintainers that don't disappear in the wind.

Why is it common? - Foss Devs Quit and Sellout on Userbase

It’s not mysterious, it’s not rare, and it’s not caused by “technical difficulty.” It’s caused by people: the loudest, neediest, most entitled liGNUxers who treat volunteer developers like slaves.

When one tiny project collapses, it can bring down multiple others.
Ueberzug is the perfect case study.

FOSS developers start with curiosity, passion, desire to solve a problem, and pride in building something cool.

What they end up with is demands, complaints, entitlement, “fix this now”! -Rarely “how can I help?”. They're attacked by users who don't read their README, think "Free" means they're owed something, and those that file bug reports with no logs attached!

The more useful the project becomes, the more abusive the user interactions get.

Ueberzug was a small Python tool that let terminal apps display images.
Not a huge project, corporation or even a team.

But because it worked so well, it became a dependency for file managers, terminal image viewers, screenshot tools, previewers, collage generators and the only thing I left that I preferred on Linux: ucollage

This one developer was responsible for keeping dozens of other projects functional, and they fell to the constant complaints, demands, and accusations. They quit, not because the code was difficult to maintain, but because of the users! -This doesn't typically happen with paid developers because at least cash is rolling in and complaints would be more justified.

The snowball effect when one FOSS dev quits

One single FOSS dev can cause breakage across multiple tools, forks popping up, downstream devs scrambling (with users yelling at them now), more burn out, more quitting.

LiGNUxers make it worse (when they think they’re helping). -Demanding features, arguing about principles, lecturing devs, insisting on ideological purity, and treating maintainers like employees. It's not support, its pressure, stress, and unpaid emotional labor.

Ueberzug is just the poster child because it was small, fragile, and widely depended on. It was a backbone for my favorite image viewing program, and losing its use for uCollage helped me move on from Linux.

Here are some other real life cases that apply:

ImageMagick is used by everything: web servers, desktop apps, scripts, packaging pipelines, CI systems. Every few years, a maintainer quietly disappears. No drama. Just burnout.

youtube-dl (DMCA drama + user entitlement). When youtube-dl was hit with a DMCA takedown, users screamed at the maintainers, demanded instant fixes, and treated them like a free streaming service. Maintainers were already exhausted from constant site breakage, entitled and poorly written bug reports, and people demanding support for obscure sites. Several maintainers stepped back permanently.

OpenSSL -Before Heartbleed, OpenSSL was maintained by one guy on a shoestring budget powering the entire global internet. The maintainer was burned out, overwhelmed, and blamed for the entire mess. Corporate funding only arrived after the catastrophe.

LeftWM (Window Manager). The developer publicly quit after endless feature demands, users complaining about “missing” features, people insisting he rewrite the project to match their preferences. He explicitly said the community’s entitlement killed his motivation.

mpv is the best media player ever made imo. It’s notorious for users demanding features, arguing with maintainers, and lecturing maintainers about design decisions. Several maintainers have quit over the years, citing: "burnout", "toxic interactions", and “I’m tired of arguing with users who don’t contribute anything”

PulseAudio -Poettering didn’t quit FOSS entirely, but he did leave the Linux desktop world behind, along with all the harassment, death threats, endless complaints, users blaming him for every audio issue, and distro maintainers shipping broken configs and blaming him! He eventually escaped Red Hat and went to Microsoft to work on systemd‑related tech in a calmer environment.

systemd devs have repeatedly stepped back or reduced involvement because: "every change triggers a flame war", "users treat them like villains", "they get blamed for distro breakage they didn’t cause".

Audacity maintainers were exhausted. They sold the project to Muse Group. Users accused them of “selling out”, attacked the new maintainers, and spite forks popped up. The old devs burned out and the new devs did too. -LiGNUxers weren't learning from their mistakes.

Similar stories exist for:

• GIMP has had multiple maintainers quit or go inactive
• NPM Maintainers (left-pad incident)

and office suites:

• LibreOffice -Chronic maintainer fatigue
• Apache OpenOffice - Mass maintainer exodus
• Calligra Suite (KDE) -Maintainers quietly dissappear
• AbiWord -Burnout, stagnation
• Gnumeric -Burnout
• Only Office / WPS -Sellout

Linux project dies as Linux user repeatedly bombarded the dev with attacks - Kapitano, a Linux GUI for the ClamAV antivirus engine, has been discontinued after its developer, "zynequ," faced personal attacks over false malware accusations.

I could go on and on...

Do I feel bad for OS developers? -Not really. They are their own enemies killing their own paid development jobs and perpetuating entitlement. Sorry, they have to learn the hard way.

The ISS laptops run Debian Linux. Critical systems use custom real‑time OSes on radiation‑hardened hardware.

The RAM impact of mixing apps from different toolkits is real, and measurable, but not quite as bad as the storage footprint issue.

Every toolkit brings its own runtime baggage: When you launch a KDE app inside GNOME, or a GNOME app inside KDE, you're not just launching the app. -You're dragging in its entire ecosystem of background libraries. Typically 80–250 MB of extra RAM is needed the first time you launch an app from the other ecosystem.

Launching a KDE app inside GNOME often also starts:

• kded5
• klauncher
• kioslave processes
• sometimes baloo_file depending on the distro

Launching a GNOME app inside KDE often starts:

• gvfsd (multiple instances)
• dconf-service
• xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

These daemons keep occopying ram even after you close the app. -Adding an additional 50–150 MB depending on which daemons get activated.

GTK and Qt don’t share theme engines, icon caches, font rendering stacks, or accessibility frameworks. So you end up with multiple UI stacks in memory. That's typically another 30–60 MB.

Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage all waste RAM. Some are aware of the disk bloat, but not the ram bloat.

Flatpak apps run inside a sandbox and rely on:

• Flatpak runtimes (GNOME, KDE, Freedesktop)
• xdg-desktop-portal + backend (GTK, KDE, GNOME)
• Bubblewrap sandbox
• D-Bus proxy processes

So, the first Flatpak app you launch loads the entire runtime into memory. That’s ~80–200 MB depending on the runtime. Portals spawn multiple helper processes (GTK portal, KDE portal, file chooser portal, etc). Another 30–60 MB.

You're wasting a total of ~120–260 MB the first time you launch a Flatpak app in a session. After that, additional Flatpak apps reuse the same runtime. (The penalty doesn't stack.)

Snapd daemon runs constantly in the background consuming ~30–80 MB idle, and more when managing updates or mounts. Every Snap app is mounted as a squashfs loop device.
The kernel caches these aggressively: ~50–150 MB of page cache depending on how many snaps you have installed. This cache does count as used RAM (but is reclaimable)

AppArmor + snap sandboxing adds ~10–30 MB per running Snap app.

Total RAM waste for Snaps ~120–250 MB baseline
+ 10–30 MB per running Snap app

-Snap is the only one that wastes RAM even when you're not running any apps.

Each AppImage bundles its own libraries. It loads its own copy of Qt/GTK/etc, and nothing is shared with other apps. Unshared Libraries make it lighter per app. Typically +20–60 MB compared to a native package.

Like with any brand-new install of an OS (without OEM bloat on a recommended spec computer), Linux is going to feel lean and fast. But when you start mixing and matching these different packages, you're not just bloating the footprint, but the ram consumption as well.

• You don't have to install it because its already there
• All games just work without extra steps
• Drivers install for you without having to find them
• No need for the terminal just to make things work
• A Professional systems not a hobby project

or both

Has Linux caught up to Windows 1 on font smoothing / spacing?

Core Isolation (enabled via Memory Integrity in Windows 11/10) is a virtualization-based security feature that isolates Windows' core processes in a semi-virtualized environment to protect against kernel-level exploits. While it improves security, it can impact performance, especially in gaming and certain workloads.

Performance Impact Overview

Intel 13th-gen examples

• 3DMark Time Spy: No measurable difference in average scores between Core Isolation on/off.
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: ~4.4% average FPS boost when Core Isolation is off, with minimal change in minimum FPS.
• AC: Valhalla: Average FPS largely unchanged, but minimum FPS drops significantly in the semi-virtualized environment.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Smaller variability between runs, but still noticeable differences depending on game engine and settings.

- Core Isolation/VBS benchmarks in 2023 (13th-gen Intel) | GPCB

General CPU/memory benchmarks

• AIDA64 tests on an overclocked Intel 9600K showed ~8.7% average performance drop when Core Isolation/Memory Integrity was enabled, with some workloads (e.g., AES, SHA3) hit harder.
• Memory latency increased from 50.4 to 57.9 ns, and memory read/write speeds dropped ~8–9% 

- Core Isolation/Memory Integrity has a MAJOR effect on performance | Overclock.net

When to Turn It Off

• If you prioritize FPS stability and low-end performance in competitive or high-frame-rate games.
• If you notice stuttering, input lag, or frame drops in gameplay.
• If you use overclocking tools like Intel XTU, which require virtualization disabled.

When to Keep It On

• For maximum security against kernel-level exploits.
• If you use Windows Sandbox, Subsystem for Linux, or virtualization.
• If the performance hit is acceptable for your use case.

Core Isolation can yield 4–12% average FPS gains in some games and significant lows improvements when disabled, but it comes at the cost of security.

So, when benchmarking against Linux...