Love Quote by Miguel de Icaza

The line lands like a gentle pin in an overinflated balloon: yes, Linux inspires devotion, but reality has its own veto power. Miguel de Icaza isn’t dunking on open source; he’s puncturing a kind of tribal certainty that often surrounds it. The opening clause, “We all love Linux,” is doing social work. It signals in-group membership, disarming the audience most likely to bristle. Then comes the hinge: “but it’s also a fact.” That phrase isn’t romance or ideology; it’s the language of constraints, the scientist’s move to drag a conversation back to observable conditions.

The subtext is about migration as lived experience, not a slogan. In the mid-2000s, when de Icaza was a prominent voice around GNOME and Mono, “just switch to Linux” was a common rallying cry in tech culture. This quote answers the moral pressure embedded in that pitch: if you haven’t migrated, you’re lazy, compromised, or insufficiently enlightened. De Icaza reframes non-migration as sometimes rational: legacy software, specialized hardware, workplace mandates, accessibility tools, training costs, and sheer risk tolerance. “Some people” is deliberate vagueness that widens the moral circle without enumerating excuses.

What makes it work is its quiet inversion of the usual superiority narrative. It grants Linux affection while insisting that ethical tech choices aren’t evenly available. In one sentence, de Icaza sketches an ecosystem truth: technology adoption isn’t decided in forums; it’s decided in budgets, dependencies, and the messy specifics of people’s lives.