As of last Saturday, the infamous Linux Hater's Blog has signed off. Seekers of curmudgeonly wisdom about Linux cleverly disguised as flaming bile will have to look elsewhere. And, strangely enough, I already miss him.

Back in May or so, the LHB started posting a patented brand of blunt-nosed realism, foul-mouthed trash-talking, and brutal humor of the Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog variety. Over time, though, a pattern and (no!) a method to the madness emerged: he wasn't actually against Linux per se, but what he saw as the forest of inadequacies, incompetence, lame excuses, bad planning, and even worse execution that prevented Linux from being all that it could be.

His rants could tear the skin off a rhinoceros. He railed against the insane maze that was Linux audio, he showed up the fallacy of choice as being a primary reason Linux was doomed to never make headway on the desktop, and let fly at the Linux graphics layer for being a mess of hackwork. (Warning: all of those links contain Denis-Leary-in-concert levels of swearing.) He also was that much more technically informed about his subjects than most of the people who go on anti-Linux tirades. And when he dialed back the vitriol and made his case plainly, it was hard to see how he was wrong:

[C]urrent lusers [his euphemism for "Linux users"; you can guess why he chose this particular term] don't want choice between two or more options that are broken. They want a working baseline, and then they want to be able to make all the choices they personally care about. Unfortunately, there are very few projects that are concentrated on developing this working baseline. Instead they usually try to build one small piece of the puzzle, then make it interface with as many other parts in numerous and useless ways.

You know why I'm going to miss him? Not because he had the potty-mouthed outlandishness of Andrew Dice Clay -- although some people love that sort of thing, what can I say -- but because he went places few others dared to go and didn't apologize for his excesses. One of William Blake's most-repeated quotes is, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," and while I don't always agree that's the only way to get to wisdom's palace, it can be one of the most entertaining ones.

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