https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/51t7z6/calling_all_linux_copypastas/d7ex2bd/ The sole reason to install Linux is to free yourself from the idiots that infest inferior platforms. Unfortunately for the Linux user community, distributions like Ubuntu have made it too easy for your mom to get a working Linux box -- so they are all running in horror. Installing a working Linux box used to require over 550 man hours, learning a Nordic language, sacrificing a goat, wading through hundreds of pages of (purposely) inscrutable help files, and in some cases programming a new driver in UNIVAC SLEUTH II assembly code using nothing but punch cards while walking miles through the snow barefoot on the wrong side of the tracks and uphill both ways. Today, Linux distros are so idiot-proof that you can put their install CDs into the floppy drive upside-down and the fucker will still work. Old-school Linux users were desperate to find a new way to feel superior. Some migrated to versions of BSD, others gave into baroque feats of self-torture like multi-booting 4 different operating systems from one USB drive. But it didn't have the same appeal as abusing other operating systems for their lack of 1337n355. In this dark hour there was a new hope: Gentoo Linux, a distribution designed for users possessing that delicate combination of insecurity and masochism that results in an obsession with obscurity, optimization, and huge dollops of pain and frustration. Gentoo has sated all of these urges. Enter the idea of a "hemorrhaging edge" distro: Gentoo. It is the exemplar of the term "hemorrhaging edge" -- there is no piece of software too advanced, too experimental, or too downright dangerous for the main tree. In fact, if the users don't crash their box at least once a week due to new and untestedsoftware they will swarm onto the forums and accuse Gentoo of "going all Debian" on them. After the separate Stable and Unstable branches were created, every user switched immediately to Unstable which became the new de-facto Stable. As a response, the Gentoo developers invented a new Super-Unstable overlay system and made it as hard and annoying to use as possible in order to keep the stupid masses out, thus cementing their own position at the top of the hobbyist heap. This has worked, to a point, but a group of developers has formed in order to create a Gentoo offshoot, Exherbo ("Cannabis Withdrawal") where the system tools are in erudite Latin instead of plain English and normal users are instructed on the web page to stay far away for fear of spoiling the 1337.