I Should Have Expected PBS.org to be This Good #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-seventh post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

As I type this, I’m watching a well-made documentary about the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. It’s not on Netflix, Hulu, or even YouTube. Well, maybe it is, but that’s not where I’m watching it.

PBS has been building a rather impressive website, complete with streaming video. It has closed captions, different resolution options, and even playback speed controls.

It also has an option to go to the PBS site for my local station. When I first visited, it defaulted to WETA PBS, which is based out of Virginia. The first choice screen gave me WETA, Maryland Public Television, and Howard University Television (which is based out of D.C.).

Wanting to see what else was there I picked the “More Stations” button, and was prompted to enter a state or zip code. On a whim, I thought I’d check the PBS station I remember watching when I was younger.

Making the selection still gives you access to tons of shows, including documentaries and dramas, but also lets you select from their local shows (Scholastic Scrimmage, local interests, and more).

There’s more than one spot where I’m prompted to donate or sign in to watch additional content, and considering their current changes in funding I don’t fault PBS for this, but the thing is I didn’t know any of this was here.

I mean, I knew PBS was online, but I thought they mostly put selected shows on YouTube or the various paid streaming services.

I’m glad this is here. I need to come back to it more often.

Human Made Art is a Selling Point #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-sixth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

404 Media has an article by Emanuel Maiberg on 3d models (assets for graphic design, video game creation, etc.) and how a lot of the current ones being made for sale are AI generated, but no one is buying them.

This pairs with an earlier article by Justin Nelon over on Digital Citizen covering how video games on Steam that are marked as made with some AI content tend to get far less play time.

Said nicely, consumers are preferring things made by humans. A bit more rudely, no one wants to pay for AI slop.

This is a lesson I intend to keep in mind as I talk to my students about the tools they can use. They might think AI is great for cutting corners and getting more done, but the end result tends to be media that is less desired than anything else they could have done.

Where I encounter the most AI use is in research and script writing. Students hate those portions the most (at least in my class), so they try to pawn that off on a machine. The results get troublesome when they get dinged for not including sources (or including ones that don’t cover the content researched). I might not be the best at recognizing AI writing, but I can follow a source link just fine.

I’m looking forward to the bubble burst, when anyone wanting to use AI is more likely going to have to pay for the slop they’re getting. According to current data, they won’t be paying for it.

Free Play With A Plan #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-fifth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

The Hechinger Report has some great writers who hit important points as they cover news stories about education. They also have frequent “Opinion” pieces which tend to be guest essays, frequently written by someone with a vested interest in having you buy into the idea(s) they’re selling.

They might be good ideas! However, it’s always a good idea to understand bias exists and look at the work through that lens. (I don’t exempt myself from this. Everything I put on this site has bias, because it’s MY website. We tend to see news sites in a different light, though.)

Take, for example, a recent opinion piece by Lenore Skenazy on letting children play rather than providing guided instruction.

The author has a book on the subject as well as a nonprofit to promote these ideas. The bias is clearly there. This is not a news story so much as an ad read for their ideas.

They aren’t bad ideas.

One of the things I enjoy doing in my K-5 classes is giving students a day to just experience a new tool. Most times I’ll go over some basics “Your brush options are over here on the left, the color picker works like this,” but after that I let them loose.

I never go over everything. First, there’s too much. The only ones who’d get to play with the tool would be the ones who stopped paying attention.

Just as important, though, would be how the students learn after that. Invariably, someone does something they think is cool. They yell to the rest of the class in a way that, for other lessons, would be seen as disruptive.

Suddenly, there’s a crowd of kids around one computer learning how to do a thing from one of their peers. They all go back to their seats, eager to try it out for themselves.

This usually happens several times in the same lesson. On occasion, I learn something new as well.

Later on I’ll come in with a more narrowed scope, where we use that same tool to make a certain kind of artwork. They learn new skills and techniques, then, often ones that translate to a variety of media in an outside of my classroom.

But they remember the joy they got from trying things out. That sticks with them as they incorporate those first day lessons into the new one.

That sticks with them.

A Library’s Hidden Cost (& How They Help You Avoid It) #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-fourth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Edsurge has an article by David Weldon on Middle School reading scores and their continued decline. As much as I’m tempted to turn this post into another rant against high stakes testing and its effectiveness, I’m just going to ask you to review your notes for that chapter and move on.

My own love of reading stems in part from my mother. She was a kindergarten teacher and frequently read to us before bed. (Sometimes she sat in the hallway so all of her children could hear the same story at the same time.) On long car trips, SHE was the audio book.

I read my first book without assistance because I’d gotten so tired of my sister asking for the same story over and over again that I just grabbed something else and read it to myself out of spite. Not the best motive, perhaps, but I was a child and that was the memory.

This of course required a lot of books. We had a bunch, sometimes found at yard sales and flea markets, but as someone who’s recently taken up thrifting as a hobby I can tell you that still takes money, and what you save in finances you lose in time and energy.

Fortunately, we had a solution: Our town’s public library.

My mother left the classroom when she had me, so she had the time to bundle us kids up and drive us to the most exciting building in town once a week. We each got books that seemed interesting to us, with the curation mostly limited to “get it from the children’s section” up until I was old enough to walk there after school on my own.

This seems idyllic in part because I’m viewing it through the lens of nostalgia, but also in large part to my mom’s hard work.

… and there’s the cost.

Libraries are free to the public, but if my mom had still been teaching I’m not sure we’d have been able to go once a week, or even once a month, during the school year. My father worked much harder to make ends meet so that we could have the privilege of growing up with a stay-at-home mom.

Finances aside, wrangling children is an adventure of its own. My sister (not the one mentioned earlier) is the most put-together makes-the-right-parental-choices person I’ve ever met, and I’m not saying that lightly. It still takes her a significant amount of time to load her two small children into a vehicle to go on a short trip.

She’s also a stay-at-home mom.

So how do two income families manage library trips?

How do single parent families manage library trips?

There’s an ongoing theme of people below a certain economic threshold having a very hard time to get above it. Everything requires money, it seems, and if you want to save money you either need to already have enough money or have enough time.

Those who are struggling frequently have neither.

Libraries are painfully aware of this, and are here to help.

The last place I lived, I signed up for a library card without ever walking through the door of their local branch. I went to the website and entered some information, then *poof,* I had an identification number that was effectively my card.

(It was faster to go into the library near my current place and get a card, but I’m privileged to live very close to that library.)

At the time, I used it to sign up for Libby. It’s a great service provided by many libraries that offers free books in both text and audio formats. These are still considered loans from your local library so if 4 people want to check out a book and they have authorization for 3 copies, one of them will have to wait, but you’re not paying a monthly Audible subscription or Amazon membership for the privilege of downloading books to your phone or tablet.

I’m not going to say Libby’s a perfect solution because there isn’t any. It still requires you to have an online device and, as ubiquitous as phones tend to be these days, they aren’t always available.

But my love of reading comes from my mother reading to me, with weekly trips to the library.

If Libby or something like it had been around back then (and the internet … this was before then, too), those weekly trips could have been daily.

She wouldn’t have even had to load up the car.

The Medium Alters the Message #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-third post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Raf Lopes wrote on PetaPixel about his experiences with a camera designed to shoot square photos, and how it affects composition choices.

I’m old enough to recall a time when TVs were 4:3 and movies made for big screens were cropped down to that aspect ratio to get them to “fit.”

This was done in two ways: If the person doing the conversion was overworked or lazy, they set a camera up to film the movie and let it run centered for the duration. Any action on the edges was lost, but oh, well.

If the person doing the conversion had the energy and time to do better they would pan their camera to follow the action as it went closer to the left or right of the composition. This required some editorial and aesthetic decisions on their part that might not made with consultation with the original makers of the film.

Later on we got “Letter-boxed” versions that were seen as better because nothing was cropped out, but in the days before HD video being a universal thing this still meant a lot of detail just wasn’t there any more.

I remember cassette tapes, which often had the same album art as records but cropped to be rectangles. Then CDs became more popular and we went back to squares for everything. We still have that legacy, it’s why album art for music today is always a square, even if it’s (almost) all downloads or streaming.

I remember programmers working hard to get their creations to be less than 1.44 MB (technically a little less than that) because if you went over and needed two floppy disks you doubled your distribution costs. The innovations they made because they had to were amazing.

This isn’t a “good old days” or “things are so much better” blog post, but it’s interesting to see how creativity flows to fill the shape of different containers. Sometimes it’s begrudgingly (cassette tapes), other times, like in the article linked above, it’s transformative.

My classroom is a container, regardless of if I want it to be or not. Try as I might, I still have students submit videos where the actual text on the title card is “Project 2” instead of “The Great Escape,” “Bob Finds A Thing,” or anything else that makes it be less “I did this for a grade” and more “I have created documentation of my own creativity.”

In the other extreme, sometimes I have to talk with a student about what “G Rated” means, and why we need to make videos conform to that for the district Film Festival.

(It’s not just because of the student code of conduct, it’s also because elementary students participate so they WILL see the videos. Blood and death are neat and cool to a 13 year old, but perhaps not a good idea to show a 6 year old.)

What I write here is shaped by the container I’m in as a teacher. The content I cover, the words I use, are all done with the understanding that a student, parent, or administrator who knows me will find this website.

It’s happened. Multiple times, in fact. I don’t tell anyone at school where this is and my name’s common enough that Googling me will find other, more famous people first (adding qualifying terms leads to sites maintained by my employer more than anything else) so it would be easy to slide into a false sense of security through obscurity, but then I remember I’ve been found before.

(You’ll notice I never use profanity. I’ll even warn the reader if a link goes someplace that does. This is why.)

Sometimes, when the container/media changes, the art changes with it.

I’ve only a few years remaining before I’m ready for retirement. I’ve thought a little about what that will look like, but I can’t predict how.

I’ll flow into that new container when I get to it, I guess.

“Bad” Art > AI “Art” #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-second post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Luke Plunkett has written a piece over on Aftermath that’s formatted as an open letter to small businesses using AI to advertise. It does not pull a lot of punches. Profanity is involved.

The article mentions other options that could have been explored, primarily hiring a local graphic designer and/or photographer. (Do you know you have local graphic designers and photographers? They’re everywhere!)

The response I get when I say something similar is that artists are too expensive, and my knee-jerk reaction is they’d rather lose a lot of customers than pay an artist what they’re worth. It’s an odd business choice, but it’s your business.

But this isn’t helpful. People who don’t have the money don’t have the money, and some small businesses are struggling a lot, especially right now.

Instead, I suggest people who can’t afford artists should do the unthinkable thing that’s older than AI (No, not art theft. The other unthinkable thing older than AI.):

They could just make it themselves.

Cameras are ubiquitous, they likely already have one on their phone and another built into their computer. You take a photo of your business, slap some text over it with a free, web-based editor, and call it a day.

Heck, you could manage this in a copy of MS Paint that was made before Copilot got integrated into it.

“But it won’t look nice,” they say. More frequently, I’m told “Oh, I’m no good at art.”

I have a 4 year art degree and close to 30 years experience teaching it. I say this so that you understand my next statement has some weight and authority behind it: Art that shows effort and interest was applied will always be better than “art” made by writing a prompt. Your “bad” art isn’t actually bad, and the AI “art” isn’t actually art.

(This knowledge is why I can honestly praise a 5 year old for their scribble drawing. At their skill level it’s an amazing accomplishment if their “circle” only has 7 corners. Heck, freehand circles are challenging for adults!)

Sure, the text might not be aligned professionally, and maybe your thumb is visible on the edge of the photo, and it looks like your favorite fonts are Comic Sans and Papyrus, but you know what? That work is yours, and those are mistakes that will be less common the next time you try.

AI art for a business says that not only will you not pay an artist, you don’t want artists to be your customers. Unskilled art says you’re still learning. Not everyone is kind to beginners, true, but they’re wrong for being unkind.

I’m not saying you have to abandon one job to pick up Graphic Design in order to avoid AI use. I’m saying the democratization of digital art creation happened decades ago, and you don’t need a slop factory to make something that’s good enough, so long as you’re willing to try.

So try.

Get Your Data Out of the Cloud #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twenty-first post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

Over on PetaPixel, Jaron Schneider just published a review of an external SSD. I don’t tend to read too many reviews of new gear mainly because I tend to buy it after it hasn’t been new for a year or more, but this did get me thinking how I store things.

Over the years I’ve gotten increasingly disillusioned with cloud storage services. It’s said that “The cloud is just someone else’s computer,” which is very much true unless you’re putting your own Network Accessible Storage out there on the internet. (I will not be going over how to do that, I’m happy with my NAS being Intranet only, thank you very much.)

So what happens when the cloud storage company decides to just delete your stuff? Yes, that’s happened. Recently, in fact.

(Saving you a click: Dropbox was likely using AI to scan accounts for illegal material and it allegedly incorrectly labeled an image of the user’s son riding a Roomba as something evil. No appeal, all content not backed up went poof.)

Meanwhile, I’m here telling my students to put all of their work in their school-issued Google Drives.

This year, I’m trying something different.

Well, mostly different. My district is heavily embedded in the Google ecosystem, if I try to throw that out the window too many things will break. I can still move a bit further away, though.

Teaching in a computer lab means we don’t have much of a supply list, but I’m adding a 16 GB or larger flash drive to it. That “or larger” is hopefully going to do some heavy lifting, but I think we can get by with 16 if we have to since we don’t do any 4k editing.

“But Aaron,” I ask myself, because I’m the only one here, “What about the families that can’t afford a flash drive with the current prices skyrocketing due to on-again-off-again tariffs and AI data centers hogging all available storage manufacturing?”

I’m glad I asked! In my regular trolling of Goodwill, I’ve amassed what’s effectively a class set of flash drives.

(My method for bringing costs down, if you’re interested in knowing, was to search for the word “lot” on ShopGoodwill.com. One thumb drive would be too expensive to ship, but every now and then someone tossed a dozen of them in a box to sell together for the exact same shipping cost.)

Ideally families will be getting their own, at larger sizes than 16GB, but if they can’t or don’t, I have some they can sign out in the same way a band student might get a school instrument.

(With the same punishment for losing/destroying it, because they’re not so cheap any more.)

These drives won’t be for everything; At that size, they can’t be. But they CAN be for current projects and commonly used files, at the very least. This will free up space on the lab computers (they’ve got 256GB each, not a lot by today’s standards) while also allowing me more flexibility with seating arrangements. I can move a student as needed and if their important work can’t move with them, they’ve been saving it in the wrong spot.

On top of that, they can take the flash drives home to get things done as well.

“But Aaron,” I hear me ask again, “Couldn’t they just back things up in Google Drive to manage the same thing?”

Well, yes, but that requires decent internet. My school has it, I can’t guarantee it for my students at home.

(If you listen to my students, internet outages are the primary reason assignments cannot be handed in after 11pm on the night they’re due. Or at least, that’s what the emails sent at 11:50pm tell me.)

My hope is this method will help them better understand file and folder structures, so they can move away from the “toss it all in Google Drive and find it later” strategy that has been hit or miss for some time now, especially with how raw photos and video files are not given rather descriptive names by their cameras.

And maybe, just maybe, I can get some of them to rely a little bit less on putting everything on someone else’s computer.

(Final note: It is not lost on me that my blog description now reads “Old man yells at cloud computing” and it still took 21 days into Blaugust for me to complain about cloud computing.)

Maybe Toss a Little Bit in the Photography Money Pit #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my twentieth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

The day after I typed perhaps a bit too much on saving money while getting into photography, Mathew Anderson on DP Review posts an article highlighting someone who’s taken things to an even greater extreme.

Now I do feel somewhat vindicated by seeing Gordon Pritchard, the subject of the article, lists the Nikon P950 (a Coolpix camera) as one of his personal favorites.

(The P950 is a newer model than what I tend to get so you’re looking at a cost, even used, that’s more than a lot of DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, but if you’ve no intention of swapping out lenses this is a good model.)

However the bag he uses … it’s a choice.

Does it work for him? Sure, and that’s what matters. I do not recommend that others do the same.

Ignoring the low durability and environmental impact, plastic bags have a tendency to generate electrical charges. I hesitate to put any electronics in a plastic bag, traditional or the kind you find in the produce section (the kind shown in a photo in the article).

This doesn’t mean I’m saying to spend money on a new, fancy camera bag, though. If you already have ANY kind of fabric bag, I’d go with that first. The best camera bag, just like the best camera, is the one you have on you.

If you’re lucky, you bought a used camera that came with a bag. I’ve had that happen a few times, but as much as I love ShopGoodwill.com I wouldn’t send you there to get a bag. Whatever you end up paying for one as the winning bid, you’ll likely pay more for shipping. I don’t consider that worth it.

My local Goodwills will usually have a shelf, stack, or in one specific location, pile of backpacks that are amazingly inexpensive.

Will these be ideally constructed to protect camera gear? No, but the ones that aren’t 100% plastic will be less prone to static buildup, easily carry a camera and related equipment, be more durable, and as they’re usually opaque, keep others from noticing it’s a camera you’re lugging around in there.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky and find a fancier bag built for camera use, but don’t sweat it if you don’t.

Just … maybe don’t use a grocery bag to carry a camera around.

Avoiding the Photography Money Pit #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my nineteenth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

It has been said that every hobby is a bottomless pit that one tries to fill with money, and there’s some truth to that. Even one of my favorite hobbies, Tabletop Role-playing Games, can be done with virtually no overhead using free rules and a dice rolling app on your phone, but don’t ask how much I spent on TTRPGs last year.

The saying seems particularly true for photography, to the point where Leonard Skapp has a whole article over on DIY Photography on how we got here and what we can do about it.

(Spoiler: Part of the problem is AI. Shocker, I know.)

I’m going to skip all of the reasons (Leonard Skapp does a thorough job, there), but suffice to say I’ve had a need for getting inexpensive cameras more often than most people.

As a digital media teacher I have the additional problem of not needing merely one camera, but enough so that students don’t need to share too much.

And then of course there’s students who want to take photos at home, because they actively enjoy the subject. They aren’t all independently wealthy, so how are they going to manage that?

Thrifting can be another bottomless pit hobby, and I’ve lost a few Saturday mornings learning this. It isn’t something I recommend (at least the way most people do it) because you’re going to use a lot of time and gas going from store to store for not a lot of reward. In this economy, you’ll burn all of your savings away on fuel costs.

As the gentleman behind the Farming While Beige YouTube Channel has pointed out on occasion, people who are strapped for cash are going to be working instead of using up their time trying to find the best deals.

The Simplest Solution

So here’s the baseline: If you have a phone with a camera, you don’t have to spend a dime. You can start taking photos now.

That’s it. There’s no price point that’s a minimum entry fee to become a photographer. If you take photos, you are one, and gatekeepers don’t get a say unless they’re drawing the line at AI use.

… Hm. You’re still here.

You probably want something more involved than a phone, then.

Bridging The Gap (Do you see what I did, there?)

OK, next step up from a phone is going to be a bridge camera. These are seen as the “in-between” models that bridge the gap (hence the name) between the more simplistic compact cameras and the more advanced DSLRs and mirrorless models.

If it looks like the lens isn’t detachable but the form factor won’t fit in your pocket, it’s a bridge camera.

They’re supposed to be priced between them, also, but with the high demand for “vintage” compacts and DSLRs being DSLRs, the prices for used bridge cameras are remarkably affordable.

Quick And Cheap: KEH

The first place I’d suggest trying is KEH.com. It’s not where I go, but I’m comfortable absorbing a little risk so that’ll be the next option further down.

KEH has a decent selection of compact and bridge cameras, though the cheapest cameras I’d say are “bridge” are included in their “compact” section. Remember to sort by “Ascending” price or you’re going to get some sticker shock.

A nice thing about this vendor is they also do repair work. If you’re buying something from them, it should darned well work.

Slower, But Possibly Cheaper: ShopGoodwill.com

If you’re looking for even cheaper prices but you’re willing to take on some risks, Go to ShopGoodwill.com’s camera section.

ShopGoodwill.com is nice because it’s like Ebay, but all of the sellers are Goodwill stores based around the US. I’ve been burned exactly once by a fraudulent listing on Ebay, that’s never happened with Goodwill.

The featured image above is a recent Goodwill find, in fact. It has a 16 megapixel sensor, 30x optical zoom, and while the microphones aren’t the best it’ll record the lower end of HD video. I paid $35, including shipping costs.

At this point when I’m looking for bridge cameras I specifically search for the Coolpix line. They have a good form factor, appear to be workhorses, and many of the older models can run off of 4 AA batteries. (I buy rechargeable Lithium batteries to keep the long-term costs down.)

I’ve still wasted money, there, but that can be avoided with a few ground rules.

The Rules of Acquisition Shopping Goodwill Online

  1. Use the filters.
    At the time I’m writing this, the filters are over on the left hand side. Even if you only use them to limit your category and set a maximum price you’re willing to pay, this will save you a LOT of time and aggravation.

    Sometimes I’ll limit my search by adding Coolpix as a search term. There’s lots of good brands and models out there but I’ve had good luck with those and it limits my time spent browsing through entries.
  2. Always check the shipping estimate.
    This isn’t Amazon Prime. I’ve found shipping for cameras tends to be around $15, so when you’re budgeting, assume you’re going to be paying your maximum bid PLUS another $15 on top of that. Even knowing this I’ve still occasionally gotten a bit of sticker shock at checkout.

    (Still worlds cheaper than buying new, though.)

    Occasionally you’ll find an item that’s local pickup only. It’ll be made clear that’s the case when you look at the shipping info, but in my haste I haven’t always done this. If you’re the winning bid and they’re not shipping it, your options are limited for how to resolve things.
  3. Don’t overbid.
    As a personal rule I won’t bid more than $25 on a bridge camera or $50 on a DSLR or computer. You’d think this would keep things affordable, and there’s the problem.

    At those caps, I’m going to not win most auctions. This is fine, a lost auction costs me nothing and I can always bid again.

    But bidding doesn’t cost me anything, either, and it’s easy to bid on too many things with the hope that I’ll win one of them. That’s what happens if I’m lucky, but I could also end up having to pay for 20 more cameras at $25 each plus $15 for shipping. On a teacher’s salary, that hurts.
  4. Look at the pictures, read the description.
    This sounds like it should be obvious, but there’s a non-zero chance that great deal you think you’re getting is for a non-working camera because you missed the “for parts” or “functionality not tested” text.

    When I’m buying bridge cameras for my classroom I specifically want the ones that run off AA batteries because of all the rechargeables I have in my lab. This usually isn’t mentioned in the description, but the photos might show the housing for that as well as if it looks like an alkaline battery ever leaked in there.
  5. Step Away
    There can be an addictive nature to auctions, with bidding wars and such. When I’m in the market for something, I’ll check once every day or two, around the same time of day, and then close the darned tab. If I have enough active bids to feel uncomfortable I don’t look for more things. This might sound like common sense advice but sometimes one still needs a reminder.

    I’ll spend more time looking at the “Open Auctions” section, but that’s where things show up after I have the winning bid.
Battery compartment for a Nikon Coolpix bridge camera.

So there you go, all of my secrets for how I manage to supply my classroom for photography products on the cheap, without spending too much time doing it.

5 Things I Dislike About Daily Driving Linux #Blaugust2026

Posted on by Aaron

(This is my eighteenth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)

I don’t try to hide the fact that I use Linux as my OS of choice, but it’s not because I’m a rabid fan. It’s true what they say about it: “Linux would be the worst OS if it wasn’t for every other OS.”

So while I’m sitting back and relaxing using my ad-free, bloatware-free computing experience, I thought I’d list some things I dislike about the experience, limited to the traditional 5 but not necessarily placed in a particular order.

5: Hard-Coded Incompatibility

I figure I might as well start off with one of the major complaints about Linux: That so many things won’t work in it.

The truth is far less severe. Thanks to Wine and Valve’s work on Proton (which is Wine with more effort to get video games to run), if I can’t find a version of the software or a suitable replacement, I can usually still just run the Windows version on Linux.

Sure, Proton is meant for game compatibility, but I’ve gotten other software to run in it just fine. Even so, this usually isn’t much of an issue because there’s almost always something coded for Linux that is either a suitable replacement or, frequently, is the same software, made by the same programming team, but for Linux.

But this isn’t about what’s working. Some companies have hard-coded checks in place, and unless I have a full emulation setup (read: I open Windows in Linux so I’m running 2 operating systems for the price of … 2 operating systems) so that the software’s running in Windows anyway, it just won’t work.

This has only personally been a problem for me with one program: The software I use for my vinyl cutter. This isn’t enough to drag me back to Windows, but it’s annoying.

(Bonus complaint: Some web-based apps will do this as well, but for Chrome. Google Meet has no problems with audio or video in Firefox-based browsers, and yet some 3rd parties insist they can only access your camera and microphone if you’re using a Chrome-based browser. I fail to see how this is anything other than lazy programming when the stance is coming from a rather large company.)

4: Driver Compatibility

This is, again, a rare occurrence, but most of my troubleshooting on Linux, if measured in hours or frustration, has been spent solving this problem.

A lot of hardware just works when I plug it into a computer running Linux. I’ll have the occasional hiccup with Bluetooth, but no more than I did when I used Windows because the problem’s with Bluetooth, not the OS.

There’s two exceptions to this: The new and the niche.

I’ve rarely had the opportunity to install Linux on a freshly manufactured computer, but most of those times something failed to work. The drivers (bits of software that let the hardware talk to the rest of the software) might be out there, but not incorporated into the OS quite yet. Sometimes I’ll find a forum post where someone managed or discovered a workaround and I’ll install some hope-it’s-not-shady code with the terminal so *poof* now I have Wi-Fi on this new machine, but frequently, if I can afford to wait, the problem gets solved in a way where an update will come down the line without me having to do anything strenuous.

(I’m impatient, so waiting is not something I tend to do.)

And then there’s the niche products. Personally, I’ve encountered this with some older (before 2008) tablets and one specific portable USB monitor I picked up at a thrift store. Other devices in those categories will work just fine, but if there isn’t a programmer interested in getting it to run on Linux (or a company willing to pay a programmer to do this) then best case scenario I have something for someone else to use.

3: “Helpful” Instructions

While there’s a lot of incredible resources online for the novice Linux user, most are created/shared for free, by amateur enthusiasts.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and they’ve gotten me out of a jam multiple times (see #4 on this list), but a guide isn’t always written with the assumption that the target audience is a novice.

Or also possible: The author has a different bar for “novice,” and it’s higher than where the actual novice can reach.

On many occasions I’ve found a tutorial for solving an issue that listed step after step after step, with commands I could copy/paste into terminal, but then the whole thing didn’t work because there was something so obvious to the author they didn’t include it, but it was kind of necessary if you wanted a good result.

You know, the classic “Step 1, Step 2, ?????, Step 4” scenario, but the question marks weren’t even implied and Step 4 was labeled Step 3.

(And this is all from people who by all accounts legitimately want to be helpful. I’ve seen others complain about Linux gatekeepers but because I spend less time asking for help on forums than I spend looking for solved problems, I don’t tend to encounter as many of those. When I do see them, it’s because I scrolled past the response that included the solution.)

2: AI Slop

Here we go, the bane of my existence is coming for me even here, in my sanctuary.

One of the many aspects of artistic expression that is getting hit hard by prompt writers posing as creative geniuses is coding, and the advent of “vibe coders” legitimately thinking they’re being helpful by submitting code when they can’t explain how it works is putting a lot of extra strain on the people in charge of approving/denying proposed changes.

It’s not just that those approving the code have a lot more things to sift through, it’s also that the quality of what they have to examine is greatly reduced, with the people “writing” it unable to explain how it works.

If you don’t understand how it works, you’re not going to be able to maintain it. And no, “I’ll just ask an AI to maintain it” is not the solution. You don’t solve a slop problem by stirring the slop around a bit.

The whole thing is stressful enough to make some maintainers want to leave, and any time that happens the brain drain on a project can be intense.

Some projects are implementing “no AI code” policies, either as outright bans or at least limiting the AI assistance to changes that can be explained by the person submitting them to compensate for this.

You might think “Oh, well people will just lie about the AI stuff, then,” but unexplainable code is still unexplainable, and also the vibe coders seem to really like to brag about their lack of talent.

1: Less Than Progressive Personalities

I was very generous with the name for this section, but yeah, some of the heavy hitters in the Linux world are less than savory.

Let’s look at the GNU Licensed Image Manipulation Program, frequently touted as an excellent alternative to Adobe Photoshop for those who want to get out from that particular corporate entity’s subscription racket.

Thing is, almost no one calls it the “GNU Licensed Image Manipulation Program.” That’s what its acronym stands for, in theory, but it’s actually a “backronym,” where the person behind it really just wanted to name it after an abeleist slur they’d seen used in Pulp Fiction.

There’s alternatives to it (I really like Inkscape), but none of the actively maintained ones have the same feature parity. On a whole the FOSS community ignores that its name is a slur, isn’t aware, or begrudgingly uses it anyway because for what it does there isn’t a lot of good competition. Those who abandoned it for an alternative seem to be few and far between.

And then there’s Framework, which has made a name for itself as a computer company driven to make repairable laptops that you can build yourself. I really want to like Framework, and I want to see other companies trying to compete with them to bring the cost of repairable computers down.

And then they went and gave money to a right-wing extremist. When confronted, their CEO said they’re trying to maintain a “big tent.”

There was some initial push-back about this, but outside of a few vocal pockets this seems to have completely died out. Those who care enough will likely not buy Framework again (if ever). Those who care but not as much as having a repairable laptop when there’s practically no competitors in that niche will silently keep buying Framework. Everyone else decided it was a non-issue or got very, very vocal in support of right-wing extremists.

Do I think this is typical of all Linux users? Of course not, but it bothers me that any percentage of them are like this and that good alternatives to what they provide aren’t readily available.