Monocultures Considered Harmful or: Why Linux Nerds Should Give BSD and Other "Weird" OSes a Try
Sun 11 January 2026
In yesterdays's article, I described the benefit of having a large supply of physical hardware to try different OSes on. Now I would like to talk about why it's important to run more than just various Linux distros (although just trying different distros is a great way to start broadening your horizons.
To begin with, you have to have a certain appreciation for inconvenience. If convenience is your god, I don't think you'll benefit much from this article, or nearly anything I have to say. Then again, not everyone has the time or wherewithal to get their jollies from trying out different operating systems. Neither convenience nor inconvenience should be the point, but rather the ability to learn, expand, and grow; and no one avenue for doing so is the correct one. So let that be a palliative for my otherwise polemical disposition. 😄
I think the thing that is driving people away from Windows and to a lesser degree MacOS into the Linux world is what will also someday drive people away from Linux to other alternatives: monoculturalism.
I'm absolutely NOT saying that BSD is perfect. I'm talking about inconvenience, remember? I still haven't figured out how to get the headphone jack working on my FreeBSD laptop. Headphone jack, guys. I'm not even talking about Bluetooth. Speaking of Bluetooth? OpenBSD? Doesn't have it. At all. Not supported. Probably never will be. And even on the BSDs that do have it, I surmise it probably doesn't work terribly well. Also, I have random freezes on FreeBSD that I haven't figured out yet (particularly when opening some web pages), and swaylock will randomly lose its mind and not accept my password, no matter how carefully I enter it. I have to force shutdown my laptop, as it doesn't let me switch to a virtual terminal, either. At least zfs is bulletproof.
Am I selling it? Probably not. Linux is easier to set up, requires a lot less thought to get configured, and other than the default/typical filesystems (zfs > (btrfs|ext4), all day long), seems to be a lot more stable.
So why?!? Why accept the inconvenience???
Simply put, because "A" is not "B." And while "A" may be better than "B" in many ways (though certainly not all), a world consisting only of "A" will always be vastly inferior to a world consisting of A's, B's, C's, and so on.
I've used Linux for over a quarter century now, and it's still my favorite operating system. But a world that's just Linux isn't any more tolerable to me than a world that's just MacOS or especially Windows.
Monocultures stifle innovation, promote cultic thinking, and cut off the broad horizons of color and variation in the world. In the real world, monocultures make life tragic and intolerable. I came from a country that was a monoculture, and I live in a country that is rapidly approaching the same kind of cultural stagnation.
Monocultures are the stuff of cults, dictatorships, and fake "theocracies." So why would we want our digital life to look like that?
I'm with the Vulcans on this:
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations
🖖
Category: Philosophy Tagged: BSD Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) FreeBSD Hobbies Linux Non-religious post Philosophy UNIX
Modified image of a stack of thinkpads taken originally from https://old.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/17xf8kl/my_thinkpad_stack/