No.

I did, regularly, up until a few years ago, when the article discussions and forums seemed to take a sudden and sharp turn towards being very antagonistic and then even hateful (racism, anti-semitism, neo-nazi slogans). The site operators and moderators appeared to be fine with that at the time. I don't want to be involved with that sort of behavior, even to the extent of being counted toward banner ad revenue, so I walked away and haven't been back.

Quoting: CatKiller[a] wonderful combination of toxic & clueless.

The drink that got me kicked out of Bartending School was was described with exactly those words!

No. The articles themselves aren't too bad for the most part, but sometimes they're clickbaity, & sneakily pave the way to the off-putting quarrels in the forums.

As many others who have replied here, I rely on GOL for general news, in addition to a few RSS feeds of specific things that I'm interested in.

For news & opinion pieces with a more technical/professional bent, lwn.net is probably the best choice. Though I must admit most of it goes *way* over my head, and many articles are paywalled (temporarily) as well.

Quoting: ChuckaluphagusThe site operators and moderators appeared to be fine with that at the time.

There’s just one person though, isn’t there? He can hardly moderate it all when he’s doing all the benchmarks and stuff.

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: scaineAnd yeah, Phoronix comments tend to be even more techy than Larabel himself, which isn't very helpful, nor welcoming.

It's not that they're techy - I like techy - it's that they're the wonderful combination of toxic & clueless.

There are a lot of major trolls there. Like you look at the KDE discussion on this site... pretty calm and useful conversation, and actually discussing the issues with desktop environments. Compare that to the Phoronix forums where it's very fanboy-ish. Bordering on the terrible idiots who post to Apple forums.

Quoting: slaapliedje

Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: scaineAnd yeah, Phoronix comments tend to be even more techy than Larabel himself, which isn't very helpful, nor welcoming.

It's not that they're techy - I like techy - it's that they're the wonderful combination of toxic & clueless.

There are a lot of major trolls there. Like you look at the KDE discussion on this site... pretty calm and useful conversation, and actually discussing the issues with desktop environments. Compare that to the Phoronix forums where it's very fanboy-ish. Bordering on the terrible idiots who post to Apple forums.

The Apple idiots are often funny in their innocence; & I don't recall people being mean to one another on places like macrumors. Linux trolls are a sadistic bunch in comparison.

Quoting: wvstolzingLinux trolls are a sadistic bunch in comparison.

In all seriousness, it's because we don't look after each other enough. There's a (sadly) standard and well-practised methodology for turning people into extremists: create some wedge issue as a tribal marker and use it to drive radicalisation. There's no shortage of contemporary examples. The demographics of gamers and Linux users both have populations that are particularly vulnerable to this - (often male), isolated, marginalised, and feeling unheard. With a whole bunch of Linux gamers... well, Liam's got quite the job.

He’s doing fine I think.

My take on Apple is that they get a lot right and some things they do are just brilliant. Since people like assessing things in binary terms, for many anything they do must be amazing, hence the naive fanboyism.

With Linux, if you’re not an elitist who’s happy no one uses it because it makes you feel special, you’ll want to show others how great it is and that means glazing over any issues it might have because you have some convincing to do. So we tend to ignore obvious problems and only show the unicorns and rainbows.

Especially since any negative will most likely be an immediate turnoff to an outsider. It’s a precarious position to be in for sure.

Google searches often take me there, I always seem to leave disappointed and/or confused. The take away must be they have excellent SEO but content that seems to be written for a very small circle of people.

Quoting: damarrinHe’s doing fine I think.

My take on Apple is that they get a lot right and some things they do are just brilliant. Since people like assessing things in binary terms, for many anything they do must be amazing, hence the naive fanboyism.

With Linux, if you’re not an elitist who’s happy no one uses it because it makes you feel special, you’ll want to show others how great it is and that means glazing over any issues it might have because you have some convincing to do. So we tend to ignore obvious problems and only show the unicorns and rainbows.

Especially since any negative will most likely be an immediate turnoff to an outsider. It’s a precarious position to be in for sure.

I have a near opposite view of Apple. Their products are insular and insanely expensive. This leads to various cognitive biases, such as choice-support and sunk cost. They paid £3K for that laptop, with that operating system and along you come suggesting that a free O/S is better? Pff, ridiculous. Go away.

I bought my last Apple product in 2006 - a newly launched Mac Mini which I bought as a (very expensive) media streamer. I hated it so much I wrote an angry blog post about back in 2008. Maybe some of those quirks have been ironed out over the years. Maybe.

(Should also say that I wrote that well before my revelation about "define yourself by the things you love, not the things you hate". So, my apologies for the negativity in the post.)