 The most influential and popular piece of content about Linux, in my humble opinion, is called Linux Sucks. You probably heard of it, it started as a talk in 2009 given by tech journalist Brian Lunduk at the Linux Fest Northwest, and behind the obviously troll-ish title we have, a genuinely interesting compilation of, yes, all the achievements of the Linux community, but also all the issues that a community still had to work on. It talks about audio problems, Wi-Fi issues, updates breaking core functionalities and so on. The talk was so popular that Lunduk has had almost one every year since then, and in 2016 he even had Richard Stallman as a guest, along with the then Red Hat CEO. However, in 2017 he decided to do the very last Linux Sucks show at the Southern California Linux Expo. He told the audience, as well as the OVE event organizer, that this year was the very last for Linux Sucks. Next year he said, psych, and still went on. In 2020 he stopped doing them in front of a live audience for obvious reasons, but he kept recording and is still working on them. In fact, there's one live streaming at the exact time this video comes out. However, something changed since then. Linux Sucks never went back to being recorded live, and the tone of the video significantly changed. The 2021 edition is titled The End of Linux is Night. This year we are only going to be talking about something that is very sad. That the end of Linux is indeed at hand. I'm not talking about today, not even tomorrow, but the beginning of the end of Linux has already happened and I'm going to show you in point-by-point ways, I almost pronounce that correctly, exactly why Linux is just about to end and I want to be clear about something here. When I say the end of Linux is night, this is not some inflammatory statement. It switches from poking fun to Linux issues to claiming that the core idea of Linux itself is under attack. It talks about an attack to the leaderships of Linux. Richard Stallman being kicked out of the Free Software Foundation, Eric Raymond Ben Band from the Open Source Initiative, and even Linus Torvalds would be at risk. He says that at Linux conferences the audience is no longer made of nerd neckbears and there are business and PR people instead. And even worse, there aren't really any community conferences being organized anymore at all and we can't go around and talk to each other anymore. He talks about Linux kernel development being too fast to be sustained, with too many features being added. His own summary of the Linux situation is founders banished, community in shambles, companies losing Linux focus, Google building a replacement, statistically unlikely to stay active much longer. This video is usually finished on a positive note and encouraging one. Not anymore. Linux sucks, the end is night is extremely serious. Next year, similar story. He attacks Canonical for snaps and for killing hoax and dreams and he attacks the Linux Foundation itself for spending more on vaccine passports than on the Linux kernel. And he makes fun of OpenSUSA for receiving an award about COVID-19 safety for employees and women intact initiatives from a charity that they donated to. And honestly, some of these things are quite easy to agree with. Take snaps. Okay, I don't like them, especially because they are proprietary on the server side, something that I feel goes against the idea of Linux. Some other things are a bit more debatable. Let's briefly focus on the attack of Linux leadership argument, since it's a pretty important one. Are we under attack? So let's start with Eric Riemann from the OpenSUSA initiative. He was actually kicked away from their mailing list because he violated the code of conduct by being rude and aggressive. He replied to the ban by creating a webpage called the right to be rude, claiming that we have to embrace the right to be rude. Not because rude in itself is a good thing, but because the degenerative slide into suppression of disfavored opinions has to be stopped right where it starts at the turn policy. Or to rephrase it, he should be allowed to be as rude and as aggressive as he wants without consequences because the alternative to unpolicing is as light into suppression of disfavored opinions. Okay, take Stolman. There are multiple reports of Stolman harassment and uncomfortable behaviors such as handling hard pleasure cards, offering tender embraces. And he has a history of extremely inappropriate claims such as the idea that children can consent to having sexual relationships. He did take that back, but only partially so. The reason behind his resignation from the FSF board was that he claimed that the children at the Epstein Island probably presented themselves as entirely willing and thus using the term sexual assault for those who did have sex with them would be unjust. As through devolved notes, Stolman seems to have no understanding of the role of power dynamics in sexual harassment, assault and rape. There's more example by the way on his article. I don't think that his removal from the board has to be seen as an attack towards Linux ideals rather it's proved that our sensibilities around the topics of sexual harassment and violence changed over the years, whilst Stolman hasn't. Either way, he joined back the FSF board a couple of years later anyway, so... Crisis averted. Regarding Torvalds, he took Ayatou's in 2018 to work on improving himself by learning how to better understand people's emotions and respond appropriately. He came back, everything is fine, there's no visible attack on his role in Linux. There are statements when similarly analyzed or unconvincing. He says that Google will replace Linux with Foxia, their own kernel, something that even years later isn't even close to happening. That kernel only shipped in one product, the Nest Hub. Or Linux will end soon because it has had an unusually long run compared to other kernels and is statistically likely to die off. You can check out this very nice thread on Twitter by the embedded Linux kernel developer Caleb Connolly, who summarizes the whole thing as, here we have 44 minutes of baseless claims and fear tactics designed to chase clout and defend bigots. And even if you agree with Lunduk, there's still the question of what happened, like why did the style, the tone of voice, so suddenly change? Well, I believe we have to take a deep dive into the author himself, Brian Lunduk, to truly know why. Betty Botter bought some butter, but she said the butter is bitter. If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter, but a bit of better butter will make my batter better. So she bought a bit of butter better than her bitter butter and she put it in her batter and the batter was not bitter. So it was better, Betty Botter bought a better butter, but a bit of butter, ah god damn. Throughout the years, and increasingly so since 2019-2020, he often showed his political views which he strongly believes in, which is fine by me and I do the same. We are on different ends of the political spectrum, since I'm part of the left wing Italian party, whereas he's part of the American right wing community, but that's fine really. Nonetheless, he makes an extremely strong point of separating his tech journalist involvement from his political involvement, and I could. I do, however, run a publication focused on tech that has no politics about it whatsoever. He has a blog post called Technology and Politics, let's keep them separate, and he even has two different websites entirely, one for tech-oriented content and another for any politics-oriented stuff. Being able to keep his own politics away from his content is a value that I can admire, really. It's certainly not something that I would be able to do, which is why I don't even try. There's an issue, though, he's not able to either, and there are so many examples of this. The most obvious one is just whenever he makes an exception, which is somewhat frequently. Here's him in December 2023 saying that yes, he strives to stay politics-free on his publication, but this story is just too big to ignore, or here's another example. I like to avoid politics at the Lunduk Journal of Technology, so I'll just mention this once, and it does it again. In June 2023, I typically keep politics to my other accounts and publications, but this story impacts a lot of people. If we go ever further back, we can see a multitude of very strongly political tweets from his account, such as this one about MAGA, but believe me, there's a ton. Even on his YouTube channel, which is probably where most people will start following him, all of the tech and political videos are mixed together without any ways to distinguish them. So maybe, maybe, the no-politics is enforced only in the actual tech website, and his tech talks and nowhere else? Well except it isn't. Let me make a couple of examples. In his conservative nerds, so the political website, he talked about leaks about the Red Hat IBM about diversity hiring and diversity training. It's very political, which is why it's on the political blog post. However, on the 10th of January, he hosted a podcast with DistraTube and Brody Robertson, and one of the things they discussed at length at the request of Lunduk himself was exactly this topic. Because over the course of December, a series of leaks came out that showed that both IBM and Red Hat had very discriminatory hiring practices, including in their engineering departments, where they specifically were hiring and firing based on skin color. And then we had a number of leaks, exclusively to the Lunduk Journal, where they talked about their training programs, where they told people that some people were evil based on their skin color. They discussed leaks and criticized diversity hiring, which is very much political. And yet, the podcast is on the tech website, or summaries. For some weird reason, the article on the tech website that talks about the most popular stories of the year also mentions all of the big stories of the politics blog. It somewhat disclaims this by putting warning political next to the links, but why have them in the first place, given that this is your tech blog, and you want to keep the two separate? Explains the exception by saying that, yet again, these news are just too important not to talk about them. And even at first glance, his website avoids politics except when it's too important not to talk about them, which is constantly, there's so much more, so much more. One common type of content is him going into deep analysis of how big and open source companies such as Mozilla manage money. However, some of these companies or organizations make donations towards non-profit, left or center political organizations. In all of the blog posts about this, it clearly makes a point that this shouldn't happen, and it's pretty clear that he strongly disagrees with this ideologist. Take the following sentence. That founder, Neil Lewis Jr., appears to have focused his career on vaccine acceptance, with white people, and this theory that white people cannot be victims of discrimination. This paragraph clearly makes a political point, even just through the use of quotes. When he says vaccine acceptance in quotes, you immediately understand what he thinks of vaccines, more on that later. When he says his theory that white people cannot be victims of discrimination, it's 100% clear that he disagrees with him. This paragraph is political, and he does this constantly. Mackenzie Mack is a public speaker who regularly discusses her anger at white colonialism and her dislike of cis men and women. Yes, cis was all uppercase. Again, you cannot read this paragraph without immediately knowing that Linduk has an issue with the term cis, which by the way just means non-trans. By the way, the description is widely inaccurate, as Mack mostly talks about the issues behind systemic racism and the importance of trans visibility. The framing itself, how the sentence is written, gives away Linduk's political views. Another example. In an article about the expenses of the Linux Foundation, he complains about how the Linux Foundation spends too little on the Linux kernel development. Now or more on that later, because this article completely makes up some numbers, but a clear complaint from Linduk is that the Linux Foundation spends money on its public health and energy branches. It's very telling how he describes these two organizations. The first one is tasked with creating a vaccine passport system, and the latter is tasked with climate change-related initiatives. When he decided to promote this verb post on Twitter, he made a cover art that pretty much said, hey, did you know that the Linux Foundation spends money on vaccine passports instead of developing the Linux kernel? He likes this point so much that he even talks about it in the Linux Sux talk from 2022, saying that the Linux Foundation is working on vaccine passports that they want people to use. Now again, try to guess what's his opinion on vaccines or climate change for that matter. Please know that I'm not saying that is wrong yet, or that the articles are incorrect yet. I just want to really showcase examples of his inability to keep politics out of his blog posts. Again and again, his political views are pretty evident in pretty much any piece of content published on his tech website, even talks. You probably remember him making fun of the COVID-19 Employee Safety Award or criticizing Copenhagen for the woman in tech initiative. Another example, you know about the idea of toxic masculinity, which is the notion that some people's idea of manliness perpetuates domination, homophobia and aggression, while he decided to propose a talk with this abstract. We've all heard the term toxic masculinity, but what about awesome masculinity? Let's take a whirlwind tour through some of the most awesomely nerdy men with their awesome manliness that I've helped make the computing world free software and Linux in particular extra awesome and manly, compared to make manly noses, grunts and well more grunts. Which is a sure sarcasm, but it's still a pretty ton-deaf way to put it, considering the political context of America, which is why surprisingly enough, none of the Linux and open source conferences he proposed the talk to accepted it, thus he decided to publish it on his own website, the tech one, not the politics one. During the talk, he claims that man-made computers, which is factually incorrect, whatever, that femininity is also not a bad thing, but that's a different topic and that ladies are awesome, but they aren't men. Even makes a list of women who he'd like to sleep with, who he thinks are awesome, featuring Chloe from 24, and Penny from Inspector Gadget, which is this girl, by the way, she's in the awesome girl's list of Brian Lunduk. The rest of the talk is a summary of the man he considers to be very cool and manlier in the Linux world. None of this actually has to do with tech, and sure, he and maybe some of you might consider this whole thing not political. However, when you consider the political context about these kind of issues, they need to claim that men are good and manly, and that man-made computers and that ladies are cool as well, but there aren't men. It's very much a political statement. And it just keeps on going. There's a subscribers-only post, which I still managed to read thanks to a whistleblower, I just paid for a subscription, about 2024 tech predictions on the tech website. One of those is that Linux companies will keep discriminatory hiring practices, which he uses to refer to diversity hiring. This is extremely political, and he talks specifically about the leaks published on the political blog. Even worse, his website domain itself is extremely political. And no, I am not joking, so let me explain. The address of the tech blog is lunduk.locals.com. Initially, I thought it was pretty cool. Instead of using famous but closed-source platforms, he actually prefers to have his own subdomain on an open-source platform. Except locals isn't open-source. Quite the opposite, it's proprietary and has a privacy statement that clearly states that they use third-party web analytics to do industry analysis and demographic profiling. Yay! They even say that they have a relationship with advertising companies who may collect information about you and even identify you. Why on earth would a Linux fan, especially one that considers immutable distress bad because they take away the freedom from the user, use such a website? Well, well, well. Apparently, locals was founded after Rubin and Jordan Pedersen left Patreon. Between his most notable creators, we have Steven Crowder, Charlie Kear, and a giant bunch of far-right-wing creators. Take this quote from Calcalistech, a website covering the platform. There are those who are de-platformed for using the wrong pronouns, hypothesizing the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic or posting memes about a certain person called Brandon. Locals.com is an omission to change that. Yeah. Even worse, the current owner of locals.com is Rambo, a closed-source alternative to YouTube that got popular due to Republicans being banned from YouTube after violating terms of service and flooding to Rambo as a result. Finally, and I cannot make this shit up, Rambo is the company that currently hosts Truth Social, the social network of Donald Trump. Other fun facts, they had exclusive rights to the online stream of the Republican presidential primary debates, and they're currently under active investigation of U.S. Security and Exchange Commission. Wow. And you know what's funny in all of this? Since Linduk cares about the Linux world, he actively complains about companies who violate GPL. Truth Social is actually based on mastern. They tried to hide it, they failed, they eventually had to admit it. They violated GPL and they're still doing it. They are the ones that are abusing the open-source world and making money out of it. Quick digression. There's another thing that bugs me here. He has two blogs, one about tech, one about politics. Fair enough. You can subscribe to them by paying $6 every month, which I did, which I guess is a fair price. However, the subscriptions are separate. If you pay for one, you do not get the content of the other one. If you do like his politics, you have to pay actually double the price to actually have access to all of his pay-word content. He has a very strong economic incentive by having two different blog posts. He actually makes double the money on his politically oriented fans. On top of that, it now makes sense for him to soften, make exceptions to his no politics rule for mentioning articles from the political website. He makes sure that those who both access to the tech website get some sort of fear of missing out on the political one as well and have to give him even more money. I'm not saying this whole thing was intentional for me, but that's how it developed. And I really don't like it personally. It gives him an economic incentive to have two separate blogs that constantly link to each other, so you have to pay both of them. By the way, after I started paying, this is not in the script, after I started paying, I keep on getting emails about subscribing to the other ones. I constantly get emails about sales, about paying more money and just paid you constantly. He even tried to create a third website called Nerd Entertainment, which I did not mention so far and I won't do it again because it's not important. That website also has its own subscription model. So that's another six bucks a month to pay if you want everything from Lunduk. There is a discount. Yes, he keeps emailing me about it. If you buy a subscription from all three websites, but only if you buy yearly, not monthly, I think. I did a double check that. End of the digression anyway. You know, maybe it's just that coincidence that Lunduk is using very known for right platforms to us this non-political content and I mean hell no. But let's pretend. Lunduk actually has a history of constantly moving between platforms that have issues, let's say issues, moderating extremist content. Well, unsurprisingly enough, it did create a through the social account, but let's actually talk about things he actually used. Another channel he used to have is Substack, which is currently refusing to moderate Nazi content at all. To quote the Verge, they allow Nazi supporting and white supremacist newsletters on the platform, including some with paying subscribers that generate commission for Substack. Many users are complaining about this in public letters and moving away from the platform. But Lunduk can only appreciate it. Even earlier, he used to be on Odyssey. This is a platform that other content creators are living as well, with reasons such as Odyssey doesn't moderate anything. It's one of the main selling points to put forward. They even actively defend certain types of content like white supremacist videos. If your platform's community guidelines allow videos that openly incite others to enact violent acts against beings of a certain skin color, sorry, but your platform is horrible. The global network on extremism and technology has a piece titled Odyssey, the new YouTube for the far right. The most popular channels, and I quote, include a spectrum of far right commentators ranging from right wing academic journal, Jordan Peterson, alt-right YouTuber, Tarle Warwick, and mega pound idiot, Elia Schafer, who participated in the US Capitol Instruction and popularized the false narrative of the 2020 election result as illegitimate. Brian Lunduk, however, left Odyssey. He left for a different reason. The team at Odyssey decided to repost a video which contained very explicit swearing, and Lunduk decided that it was too much. He does not want to be associated with a platform that promotes videos containing very explicit swear words. And you know what? Let's talk about that. Lunduk hates swearing. And the reasoning is, well, to quote him, Lunduk believes that real men do their best not to swear around women or children. Look, when I'm 100% fine with avoiding swearing, which I'm really trying hard to do in this video, but it's really telling that he believes the issue with swearing is that it's inappropriate for real men to do it in front of women and children. Okay, I can understand that women. The issue is, of course, that Lunduk swears a lot. Here's a compilation made by the Brian Lunduk's Fact Checker Twitter account on all of these tweets containing a very strong swear word that I would never say in any of my videos. If you go through the Lunduk sucks videos, you will find swearing in those. Lunduk swears. End of the digression. Hello. Oh, there we go. Move the camera down. You now know that Lunduk has very strong political opinions that can be found throughout his works. Still, you could agree with those opinions. And even if so, there's another issue with his blog posts. They are very offensive, sensationalized, or just straight up false. Or as I call it, misleading or bullshit. That was easier. Let's get back to the Linux Foundation article. The beginning of the article says, ask yourself this, if there is a foundation named after a specific thing, what percentage of that foundation's revenue would you expect to be spent on that set thing? And then he says, with that in mind, let's look at the Linux Foundation funding of Linux, compared to their investments in blockchain and artificial intelligence. Your eyes do not deceive you. Linux 2%, blockchain 4%, AI 12%. He uses this graph, which he made. There are small issues with these numbers, though, they are false. The Linux one is actually correct, which I guess is the point. Fine. But the blockchain and AI ones are completely made up. The Linux Foundation, as far as we know, does not spend 4% on blockchain and 12% on AI. Let's take a look at a 2023 annual report. The graph is referring to is this one. You can see indeed that the values match. However, what is the title of the graph? What is this graph about? Well, the title of the page is serving over 1133 open source projects communities. On the right page, we have the open source projects divided into project type. And on the left side, we have the number of projects divided into technical segment. Nowhere, nowhere does this graph ever talk about funding. There is a graph about funding 137 pages later. And it tells us that Linux kernel support is indeed 2% of the expenditures. That's correct. But then we have stuff like community tooling, organizing events, training and certification, project infrastructure, the biggest expense with 64% is project support. We don't know how that 64% is actually divided between the 1133 open source projects the Linux Foundation works on. Even if it was evenly split, which it obviously isn't, then blockchain and AI funding percentages would be almost half of what Lunduk claimed. And it's not like I might have interpreted Lunduk's article incorrectly as he specifically says that those are the expenditures numbers, which they aren't. And of course, the whole article is very since that word again, since such sensationalize sensationalize. The point is to discredit the Linux Foundation. But if you go through the report, you see that many of those 1133 open source projects are really moving the Linux ecosystem as a whole forward, which is essential. There's several the web engine that Mozilla decided to stop developing and that Linux Foundation picked up and managed to reignite development. This is amazing news since this is really the only hope of having an independent browser engine that can be embedded into multiple open source web browser instead of relying on chromium really. They have worked to make sure that the Linux world is safe from European legislation that could have harmed it such as the cyber resilience act, which now has a much more sensible definition of open open source, by the way. They found projects like open SSF or the open open source security foundation. They work on open hardware such as risk v community, an open source instruction set that could really help in producing user respecting devices. There's the development of real time capabilities in Linux. There's Yachto. There's so much more. We can still criticize the Linux Foundation for how they decide to spend their money. And we can still argue that 2% on kernel development is too little. By the way, that's $7 million. But the article by Lunduk employs all possible techniques, even making up data to make the LFC worse that they actually are if you go through the report. And there's another major recent example of Lunduk making stuff up on his political block, which, by the way, gets also posted on his YouTube channel. So no way to distinguish between the two. Let's look at the title of this article, leaked Microsoft document reveal effort to gender transition young children, including toddlers as young as three years old. Holy shit. Again, this is on the politic website of is so it's fine to have politics. And if the title were true and Microsoft were advocating for gender transition of three years old children, that would be in a pretty big news. So let's see the article. The Lunduk journal has received leaks from a confidential whistleblower within Microsoft that show a concerted effort in gender transition children as young as three years old. By the way, we have to trust Lunduk and actual content reported since this whole article is based on a leak that was provided to him only. He claims to have independently checked the truthfulness of the leak. So let's just trust him on it. This comes from a 2019 report commissioned by Microsoft. Okay, look, come on. My crtos. Look, journalist. Double user spell check or something commissioned by Microsoft. Okay. In title, gender identity and dynamic workforce, creating an inclusive workplace. The report was written by W F D consulting and paid for by Microsoft specifically for Microsoft internal use. This report was not released freely to the public, but was made available to Microsoft employees and management. Okay, this is pretty standard stuff. If you are a company as big as Microsoft, you might want to have guidelines for having an inclusive workplace where people don't get discriminated. The document contains one chapter about employee parents of transgender children. It's titled navigating new family pathways. He claims this chapter is 15 pages, but he only provides a few brief extracts. I'm a little bit worried about him chirping stuff, but still, we get this quote from the document. When he was about three years old, he would get super serious and said sometimes at night. He asked, why did God make me a girl when I'm a boy? We had no idea how to respond. At around four years old, he started asserting his preferences. He didn't want to wear dresses or bows. Preschool was miserable. He was said all the time. When he was old enough to choose clothes or toys, it was clear that it was a tomboy. He would appear longingly at bold, masculine clothes and ask why he could not wear them. We want instead for simple female clothing without any frills or pink. Wait a second, I know what's happening. Linduk, did you take a story about a three years old boy who simply said, I don't like being a girl and just assumed it was about transitioning, even though it doesn't talk about any kind of transitioning at all, especially not the medical one, and decided that Microsoft was not just, you know, talking about why you shouldn't discriminate against them, but somehow thought they were putting effort into this non-existent transition. Like, Linduk, did you just made up the title of your post? There is no transition. Linduk, none. Actually, it's depressing. The poor boy wants some masculine clothes, and he still had to go for girl stuff, just not too girly. Even the summary completely makes up a fake story. Microsoft paid for reports which encouraged employees to transition their children, no it doesn't. It talks about how it's thing that exists and you shouldn't discriminate against. And it's not medical transition. It's letting the child buy the frigging clothes they want. Honestly, wondering whether you forgot to publish the part of the documents that support your cause, because you seem to be convinced about something that's not very natural. I can't even speak. This is especially important because gender affirming treatment is over there and to a certain extent illegal for children under 18. That report suggests that Microsoft should offer to cover the expenses for such treatments in their health care plan. But come on, the title is completely clickbait. The report also suggests that there should be a group created where parents of transgender and non-binary children should be able to talk to each other. Lunduk summarizes this fact like this. Support group using company resources were, according to the report, to be created for transitioning children. Lunduk, using company resources is a group for people to talk each other. What the fuck does using company resources mean? And for transitioning children, no, it's a support group for their parents. And the best part is this. Microsoft added a non-optional health plan which specifically covers gender affirming care for small children. Non-optional? You don't have to use an health plan provided gender affirming health care. You can just not using. Lunduk is complaining that Microsoft did not provide an option not to have the option to have gender affirming health care expenses. Like what? Let's go for another example because I'm having fun. Lunduk had a long talk on Chris Titus Tech Channel which starts with them saying just how important it is to avoid politics in their tech channels. And Chris saying he does not express political opinions. What is a company like? Let's say I ran a big company. I would just try to be as apolitical as possible. Is that even possible? Like why do these why do the companies even bother with a lot of this stuff? That's the thing that kind of blows my mind. I don't get it. Because to me, I'm just like I don't care either way. I'm apolitical and I'm independent. And I just I don't get why people. I'm not a member of any political party. Right. I don't care. And I'm just like nothing that divides us right now mattered back then. Right. And now it matters. Yeah. A ton. Yeah. Everyone's talking about politics, all that. And I'm you know I've always I've always been like anti-politics. Like I don't care. Yeah. Conservative, liberal. I don't care what what people believe. As long as you just don't try to impose your beliefs on me, we don't have a problem. You might not be surprised to know that not even 15 minutes in, Lunduk has started a long monologue about how the left trying to boycott right wing companies actually makes those companies sell more products. But it's fine because it doesn't use the term left wing or right wing. I really don't want to go too political on this. Sure. I'm going to I'm going to abstract this out. All right. And people can just inject whatever politics they have into this. I don't care. OK. All right. So there are a lot of companies outside of tech that have been canceled, right? And and there's a lot of companies outside of tech that have pandered to audiences. Now, who got canceled, by the way? What companies was it? Not not a person, but company. That's a company. No. Company got canceled. Companies got attempt attempted to be canceled. Now, every time every time a company attempts to be canceled, whatever they're making, things that make you comfy, things that you put on tacos, whatever they are, those companies always, whenever they get canceled, do better. The next month, their sales usually skyrocket by like 50 percent. It's crazy. It's like the Chick-fil-A thing where they asked the founder that was super religious if he supported gay marriage and he's like, no. And then and then sales went up. Right. Except it does name specific companies. It does so in riddles such as the products that make you comfortable, which is referring to Mike Lindell's conspiracy fueled pillow company. You really have to be politics ignorant to think this whole segment wasn't political. Later on, they start criticizing the government. But hey, again, not in a political way, I guess. Sorry. What is this? Just the government, man. You know, like I said, it doesn't matter what side you fall on when it comes back. You get the government involved. It's just always ends up bad for everyone. The last two paragraphs were a digression. What I really wanted to say is during the talk, Linduk starts attacking free VST for their now changed code of conduct. This was a couple of years ago. They spent a ton of time on this new code of conduct that brought in all the stuff from the geek feminism side of things and all the other stuff. And it included a statement that you can't have digital representations of hugs. So you can't type the word hugs, like to express a hug to someone or have an animated gift of hugs. If you did that, it would be akin to I kid you not. And I hate saying this word in a podcast rape. They said it was the same basic thing. It's essentially digital rape. And they went not. He claims that according to this new code of conduct, even writing hugs on a chart would be considered rape. He literally says rape and he makes a big fuss of it. Like I don't want to say that word rape. OK, let's leave aside the fact that attacking code of conducts every five minutes is a habit of him. And to me, that tells me a lot of his political beliefs, even ignoring that it's false. It's simply false. The actual quote is harassment includes but is not limited to physical contact and simulated physical contacts, such as textual description, like hug or backdrop without consent or after a request to stop. First of all, there's a giant difference between rape and harassment. I can't believe I have to explain this. They are just completely different things, even if just because rape is sexual in nature, whereas harassment is a much, much wider spectrum of behaviors. Moreover, it's harassment only without consent or after a request to stop. If you send hugs to someone after they specifically ask you to stop, or if you out of the blue start describing in a text message intimate physical contact with them, that's harassment, not rape harassment. Sure, it could have been worded better, and now it is. But come on. The claim by Lunduk is simply made up and he keeps on being misleading. As an example, back then he had moved away from YouTube since then he started publishing there again. Well, he defends this in many ways, such as by seeing that YouTube and Twitch don't give creators hardly any of the cuts of ad revenue. YouTube and Twitch are the opposite of respectful of creators. Not only do they gouge creators, they don't give creators hardly any of the cuts of their ad revenue. It's insane. There is an ad revenue apocalypse happening right now. He doesn't say any number. Now, there's actually a contract that we have to sign that tells us exactly what that cut is. And it's 45% for YouTube and 55% for Twitch. Around half of the ad revenues goes to the content creator. You can say it's too little compared to other platforms, but personally, I'm fine with it, but hardly any of the cuts. Again, all of this is either very misleading or just made up. And I'm not even trying to argue against the politics of this article, even though I disagree with it. It's just I'm just pointing out it's wrong. But you know what? Now that we have started reading his political blog, I think it's time to actually talk about the politics of Lund. We simply have to because those politics constantly spill into his non-political tech content as well. So if you plan to consume any kind of Luduk content, you really should be aware of these political views to better understand where does that content come from? And oh, boy, am I going to get yelled at? Probably why? I don't know because jokes. I like jokes. I don't know. I get yelled at for jokes. It's OK, though. It's OK. I like you. Whoever I want to be this very, very clear. Whoever you are, I like you. Lunduk is against vaccines. He proudly says that he hasn't got any and that he has zero regrets even though he did get COVID a couple of times when 75 doctors in South Florida had a protest about how their hospital is flooded with unvaccinated people with COVID. Lunduk replied with pardon my French, but what a bunch of turds. Zwering. Lunduk, you shouldn't zwer. He also denies climate change. Here's him replying to Edward Snowden himself by saying that the headwave of the 1300s would like to have a word with you. Again, here's him replying to Greenpeace, saying any kids from the 70s and 80s remember the impeding ice age looks like the whole global warming thing didn't pan out back to the impeding ice age. When that doesn't happen, we can try the warming thing again. I'm sorry, I just cannot correctly pronounce stupid tweets. He also believes that the Democrats rigged the 2020 elections. Here's a tweet about it. Here's another one. And one more, one more, one more, one more, one more, one more and one more. And by the way, yes, it did participate in the was it 8th of January? You know, that, but not in the instruction itself. Just another place. It took a video explaining how friendly the whole thing was, you know. So January 6th right now. Little before noon to stop the steel rally here. Sacramento, California at the state capital, which you can see behind you behind me. That's the direction it's in. Over there. Right now speaking is one of the guys who wants to replace the government of California. Fair to give you guys a little tour. Yeah. He's transphobic and always that names trans people and refuses to use the correct pronouns. He considers C.S. to be hate speech and believes BLM to be racist. Whenever he covers elementary U.S., whose co-founder, Danielle for is a trans person, he always that names her. When he is accountable about this, he literally plays dumb, pretending not to know what dead naming is and claims that he didn't notice that Danielle is called Danielle, even though there's literally a tweet in the article with the correct name. Even when he got explained, the meaning of that naming is still placed dumb. He often publishes memes that make fun of non-binary folks. He called being trans a sexual fetish. Sexual fetish. I am laughing because I don't want to cry, by the way. Don't. Finally enough, his old Twitter account, he deleted that and then created a new one and then deleted it again and made a new one and then he keeps on making accounts and deleting them. Like, that's not getting into that. His old Twitter account has pronounced Duder in this bio. Linduk is vocally against abortion rights, C.E.R. and also against heuthanasia, C.E.R. There's also his wife publishing lots of and lots of similarly anti-vax and conspiracy tweets on his header profile. When confronted about all of this, he always placed the victim in all of these situations, sometimes to an extent that feels awkward. As an example, Linduk believes that Wikipedia is not only so bad that he avoids it like the plague, but Dude also believes Wikipedia to have a personal vendetta against him. There's no further explanation of this, but his page was actually removed multiple times since it didn't meet the guidelines for inclusion. Maybe Linduk is disappointed Wiki doesn't consider him important enough? Or again, an open-source member wrote in reply to someone asking to please not celebrate pride. This, I want to be a bigot, a homophobe, then this community is not for you. If that means loss of users, so be it. Cutting out rotten flesh is healthy. This was not directed at Linduk, but he still managed to get extremely offended at this sentence. And, you know, almost as if bigot and homophobe mediums say, hey, that's me. And of course, it started complaining loudly that it was being oppressed and discriminated against with titles such as Open Sousa declares conservatives to be rotten flesh. And it's sad to see this sort of hate in the Linux world and saying that both Open Sousa and Sousa have a long history of discrimination against those with conservative leaning values. And he concludes the article with this sentence and that sort of hate and bigotry appears to be what Pride Month is all about. A few days after I tweeted that I had read an homophobic post by Linduk and he immediately replied to me, very offended if someone calls an entire group rotting flesh that needs to be cut out, that is hate. Nicolo here made support using that sort of language about anyone he disagrees with. I do not. Or again, on the same topic, indeed, but elementary US and Hasi Linux have made extreme declaration of their hatred for a large number of their users, supporters and contributors in the past few weeks. It's a major bummer to see so much hate. All of this because people who celebrated Pride said that they didn't want bigots or homophobes. Even worse, when I actually replied to him that the whole point is to drive away people who discriminate against marginalized people like he does. He told me to either present proof to me or be prepared for legal action. Linduk threatened to sue me. Of course, it took about 20 seconds to find examples of this proof of him being transphobic. But before he could even reply, he deleted the tweet. So I guess I'm safe. He constantly does this. He deadnames trans people. He actively makes fun of jokes of non-binary folks. He talks about trans being sexual fetish, violators, code of conducts and then immediately start acting like he is a victim as soon as it gets criticized as if it was him who, you know, has been discriminated against. At the same time, he has an outstanding superiority complex and a giant ego. Sometimes he introduces this in a jokingly way. Let's get back to the beginning of the 2021 Linux sucks video. This video was about Linux sucks originally. That's the video where a foresee the imminent ending of the Linux community. Well, here's here's my credentials for such. I've spent years and years working in an official capacity in the marketing departments of Linux companies. I spent years and years as a software developer building software for Linux, among other operating systems. I spent years and years in tech journalism focusing almost entirely on Linux, including being one of the editors of Linux Journal magazine. I spent years and years as a dev manager in various levels, dev lead, dev manager, dev director, you know, all the different little variations on middle management, the kind of people that got to go around and make Gantt charts and make make plans for how we got to do things in the future. And then I spent years as an executive of tech companies with fancy schmancy titles like vice president of technology or engineering or what not. It was all very pretentious. But in the end, what that all means is I have approached the world of Linux from more angles than just about anybody. Now, that's not to say that I'm I'm Mr. High and Mighty here, but my career has been weird and that weird career has allowed me to approach Linux and approach technology and approach operating systems from a really wide variety of stances. In fact, I don't know of a single other human being who has worked as a technology executive, a developer, a journalist and in the marketing department of tech companies. I don't know anyone else who's done that, not one human being. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm the most qualified individual to say whether or not Linux has any future left in it on planet Earth, and that includes Linus himself. In order to give himself an authority to make such bold claims, he says that he's literally the only person to have worked as software developer, marketing person. They have team lead, journalists and exact roles in Linux companies. He has, and I quote, years and years and years of experience. And if anybody wants to criticize him, then maybe they should first have the same work experience he accumulated. He also frequently acts as if his stories are the most important things ever. You can see it very often in live streams, but to make a specific example during the Birdie and Distur2 podcast, he says that the above mentioned leak from Red Hat is probably the biggest story of the year, I think, in the context of Linux. The fact that Red Hat held an internal internal presentation about white privilege is the biggest story of Linux in 2023. Sure, sure. Or look, here, this is an amazing example. He did a summary of 2023, and he concluded with this amazing sentence. Worth nothing, the craziest Linux stories of 2023 were all broken by the Linux Journal, exclusive whistleblowers, deep research, topics that other tech publications are afraid to touch. Stay tuned, because the Linux Journal is just getting warmed up. I wanted to congratulate Linux in my own way. I can't even... Did I get the... Let's try again. Sorry. If you catch up any live stream, he always talks like this about everything he publishes. He acts truly offended that there's no other Linux Journal talking about these super important leaks. And even better, he truly believes that these big companies like Microsoft and Red Hat are absolutely scared of him. He keeps on mentioning having access to secret chats with, like, top execs talking about how bad it would be if Linux discovered their secrets. It was extremely telling to watch the live stream where he talks about when will he publish the next political leak from Microsoft? He says that he's got one ready that Microsoft is absolutely terrified of it and that they told Microsoft employees not to talk about Lunduk. And that actually he doesn't know when to publish it, because probably he's going to wait, because this way they will be even more scared. He is... I don't know how else to say this. Like, he's completely delusional. 100% Lulu. He thinks he's the only one doing actual Linux journalism and that all big tech corporations, even Microsoft are scared of him. And to end this section, I would like to say just one thing. Let's get... You read this sentence so I can clip it and put it in the video I'm editing. I'm missing one random clip. Okay, sure. We're just going to keep the music in the background. Betty Butter bought a bit of butter, but she said it's a butter's bitter. If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter. There you go. Just like conservatives have lots of gay friends, I also have lots of conservative friends. One of them even told me, yes, Ben Shapiro sometimes is a bit cringe, but you have to admit that he's really fair in debates and always has a point. That's not what I'm criticizing. People can have different political opinions than me. Take Chris Titus' tech as an example. We have some wildly different opinions on some topics, such as whether pornography hurts those watching it. Yes, we discussed about that. I still respect him. And I also currently respect Distortube, even though he made a video called If You Support Free Software, You Should Support Gun Rights, something I truly disagree with. It's fine. However, anti-vax climate denial, election rigged stuff is different. Those are opinions that have been factually proven wrong and are not shared by anyone that is any kind of expert on those topics. Anti-vax is a great example. I would suggest that you watch each Bomber Sky video on it, which is great. And the gist of it all is that it started from a study that was done with no scientific data that has since been retracted that abused children to be made most importantly only existed because a company wanted to make money by suing pharmaceutical companies about insecure vaccines. So they paid a lot, one doctor, one no longer doctor, to completely make up data to support their lawsuit. Amazing story, by the way, and watch that fucking video. And here's one on climate change denial too, because why not? Surprise surprise, there's people making money of climate change denial as well. All of these completely debunked theories hurt us a lot. So many people's lives could have been saved, maybe I shouldn't, so many people's lives could have been saved if they had vaccinated. Climate change kills people too and we cannot afford inaction. And claiming that the 2020 elections were rigged undermines basic trust towards democratic institutions and allows for disasters such as the January capital insurrection that Lunduk thought was very nice and everything. Lunduk applies the same logic and behavior towards the Linux world. He constantly, constantly talks about how we are under attack, the leadership of Linux as falling to the threat of politically correctness and the code of conducts and we are losing the actual nerds that used to be the heart of the Linux community. New projects like immutable systems and snaps and flat packs are taking away our technological freedom and big corporations are using our donation to push left-wing agenda. It's tiring, really, really tiring. The worst thing is that sometimes we get a glimpse of the old Lunduk, the one poking fun at the technological issues of the Linux kernel, the one that was actually a good writer and who can actually go through reports of hundreds of pages and rightfully criticize the spending of open source companies and organizations. He's there, I can see it, but it's said that all of this content is written purely from this alarmistic, conspiratory mind view and yet the video ain't over. There's still one important point to be made. Having recognized this important issue in the Linux space, what can we do? Can we just ignore it? Well, yeah, but we aren't doing that. The Linux community is still giving space and visibility to Lunduk. And I'm not talking about you, users, I'm talking about us, YouTubers and content creators. We are giving him space and credibility. On Substack you can find all of the episodes of a podcast called and titled Nardi Chat Show. These are all hosted on locals.com and they include content creators known to be somewhat right-wing conspiracy. Like there's Rob Brexman who said that we should not use any kind of two-factor authentication because they are designed to track us. He said that we shouldn't download Signal because it makes you stand out and attract attention and that you should keep a real identity where you pretend to be a sheep. That's a lot to take. But then there's the actually popular and cool content creators. There's Distortube, there's Brody. A few months ago there was Chris Titus. It hurts on a personal level. So, let's talk about the Brody and Distortube episode. I feel like the episode is inappropriate multiple times. The structure is simple. We have Lunduk with a list of topics to talk about. He briefly explains the topics. He asks for opinions to the guests and then he gives his own. Sometimes a brief conversation starts about it, but standard stuff. My main issue is that he mostly looks for confirmation on his personal opinions and tries to spoon-feed the guest on how to agree with him. It's most evident in the section about immutable distributions. Lunduk really dislikes them and can feel it. The guests don't, really. Distortube replies that he wouldn't use them now because they aren't really ready, but maybe in the future. Brody says that he wouldn't use one on his main device, but they do have reasons to exist for different use cases. Lunduk does not like that. He asks Brody again, more aggressively, whether he would use an immutable distro on his personal system. And really puts focus on the fact that such systems take away your freedom. Brody replies that no, he wouldn't use it on his personal system. And Lunduk says, sorry Distortube, but Brody replied to this question correctly and you got it wrong. The whole thing is like this. Lunduk doesn't like Wayland, he doesn't like the Linux Foundation, he doesn't like big Linux companies, he doesn't like flagged packs or snaps and so on. Especially Brody does try to contradict him as an example. He tries to be more constructively build a discussion about Wayland and I appreciate that, but it's not effective on the overall episode. There's also some other weird stuff. Like I didn't mention until now, but Lunduk does not have just an obsession with Zwering, but really about good language, I think. As an example, here's Lunduk hitting on how popular the word cohort is for some reason. A word that Mozilla has been using in 2016. In the episode, he interrupts a guest a couple of time to fix the pronunciation of a certain project. He goes on a rant about how GNOME should be pronounced GNOME. Now the project is called GNOME and Lunduk knows that, but he doesn't like it. And when Brody uses GNOME later on, he again interrupts him to ask him to use GNOME, it's that. Between these interruptions asking to use the incorrect pronunciation and spoon feeding answers, the whole thing, the whole first half felt extremely irritating to listen to. It's a bad episode with very little informative value. Of course, it then starts talking about politics and we get back to the discussion about the red hat leaks, diversity hiring and there's pretty much no space for disagreement. Only Brody says that is somewhat skeptical of those leaks, which by the way I tried to check in various ways and they look legitimate to me, but they just aren't that important. And Lunduk immediately starts talking about how everything was independently verified by him. That's the most disagreement we'll have on the politics part of it. Again, it was hard breaking for me to watch, especially Brody take part of what I perceived to be such a bad episode hosted on a far right platform with an anti-vaxxer and climate-changing denier. After the episode I sent him a message that was the slightly more professional version of dude, what the fuck? It's not the first time I do that, actually. A few weeks ago, the web review blog on Planet KDE included an article by Lunduk. Back then, I also contacted Kevin, the author, saying hey, are you really sure you want to link to Lunduk? Turns out, he didn't know who the guy was and he decided to remove the link after discovering it. You could say that I'm such a big hater that Lunduk lives rent-free in my mind and you know, it's true. My main worry is that Lunduk journal position itself as a politics-free website and if you just link to it, people might start relying on that assumption that it's indeed politics-free. However, it's not. I've talked about how biased it is, how it misleads, it claims, sometimes making stuff up to sustain them and all of this is how you indoctrinate people, I think, without them realizing. You give them content that you think is skeptic, draw your own conclusion, are political and yet it is none of those things. Linking to the website without giving any kind of context is dangerous because of that. But going to his podcast also is because both Brody and Distro2 published the link to the episode, obviously and still without a single word of context on who Lunduk is. Thus, they are exposing their wide audiences much wider than mine to a heavily biased and yes, political content trusting them to realize it themselves. But it won't happen. Many of the viewers will like the podcast, they'll start following Lunduk and without any kind of context about who he is they will believe his false no politics disclaimers and they will be constantly presented with incorrect or misleading articles that are written just to justify Lunduk's extremist word view. There are reasons why you might want to be part of this podcast. I think Brody actually did an outstanding job at replying to my vague, what the fuck message. I like to know why people think a certain way and how they came to that conclusion. Not just say this a person stands or throughout how they got to that point. Without knowing why a person thinks a certain way, you can never hope to change their perspective. If you think they're wrong and they think you're wrong, nobody is going to make any progress, you'll just both be screaming past each other. People need to be approached like adults and have their perspective listen to if they're willing to come to the table. It's very reasonable and very well written, apart from the year. I think everybody's going to hate me after this video. However, I find it really hard to believe. If your goal is really to understand him and his reasoning, then there are plenty of better ways to do it. There's a great amount of content behind the psychology and the reasoning that radicalizes people into factually incorrect conspiracy theories. If you're interested in how Lunduk applies that mindset to the Linux word there's again plenty of documentation on his own blog. There's nothing, nothing in that podcast episode that we didn't already know about him or how he thinks or behaves. I could still understand the I want to understand his reasoning if the conversation happened privately. But it didn't. You're making content for him, you're asking your viewers to watch that content, you're giving no context about how biased it is, you're not learning anything about him, you're just giving him credit and visibility. And the worst thing is that when somebody is that much into such incorrect conspiracy theories, when people around him, such as his wife, are that sold on those same conspiracies, there's hardly anything we can do. There's literally, I think, no way to convince him during something like a podcast that is wrong. By going to their podcast, by linking to their podcast website, you do the very opposite. You give them platform and visibility. On this tech blog he says, which means no matter what your political leanings you can read the articles on the Lunduk Journal without slowly, slowly going insane. It's the exact opposite. His blog only pretends not to talk about politics by avoiding any name of big politicians or parties. But it has very clear political settings and you won't be able to read these articles if you have a solid left-wing view, honestly. But if you don't, which is fair, you don't have to, and if you don't know what you're getting into, you will have no way to realize you're being brought into a political setting, which is going to change your political views. It's the same on my channel, but I'm very open about it. He tries to hide it, which in my mind is what makes him so dangerous. The whole reason this video exists is to give an extensive documentation you can pick from whenever you see somebody that might be giving him further space and visibility in the Linux space. He doesn't deserve it, and it's extremely risky to give him any. It's also a request to any fellow content creators to please please not give any further credit. And if you do, please, please point out how you're thinking to a politically biased website who will twist words to justify that world view. Your view I think your viewers deserve to know, and they might be deceived by you. This is part of the responsibilities of being a content creator of having an audience. Now, of course not everything is sorry, not everything is as simple as I put it right now, but you know, there's more to it. I could have made another hour of content out of other Linux YouTubers were very active politically, but you know, they actually state they are politically active, such as switched to Linux. Actually, when I was doing this video, I was contacted by another Linux another Linux content creator, Traffatin, who told me that he was actually working on a video all about switched to Linux and I didn't know anything about it. So I was like, oh there's more. Fuck me. But yeah, I don't know when it's going to get published, but you should check that one out and yes, I also like, we have a video about us together talking for one hour and a half. We've got that as well. And outro. Let's end the video. I now have to end the video. I talked about Leon Duke playing the victim already, so let me make yet another example. During his latest live stream, he talks, at the time of writing, obviously, he talks about how he used to have sponsors. It's true, he used to be sponsored by tons of very cool Linux companies. To be fully honest, I wish I was sponsored by companies that cool. I really wish I could get the money by promoting, I don't know. Still, sometimes Leon Duke would say political things in a video and people would check who pays him and they would notice sponsored videos and they would complain about that video to the sponsors. Obviously, Leon Duke acts innocent as if everything he said was perfectly reasonable and it's insane that people got mad at him for saying it. He never actually says what it made people so mad, but you know, we can guess. So, lots of people asked the sponsor to please stop sponsoring Leon Duke. He presents this whole thing as lots of trolls started harassing my sponsors or raping my sponsors so much that they started to have trouble paying the bills. And so on. So, now he has no sponsors. Because he prefers to have the freedom of seeing everything he wants. Why did I bring this up? Nico, why did you bring this up? Well, you know who else doesn't have any sponsors and you know who is going to donate 100% of the ad revenue made by this video that you are watching to some LGBT non-profit thing. Yes, I'm getting nothing out of all of this. Great. And yet, I still have to pay the editor at double the rate, probably giving how long this video is. And I spent two weeks doing deep research on every article and every video of Lunduk. Even worse, I paid for a Lunduk membership. I paid him. I'm really in the negative for doing this video. I think this user from Mastodon sums it up very nicely. When I said I was watching Lunduk's videos for research, even whilst I was studying, he replied Jesus Christ, do you need to make a fundraiser for your therapy after this? And honestly, yeah, fucking yeah. And you know what's the best part? Not only all of my videos are completely free and available ad free on PeerTube, but those who do subscribe to my Patrons, Co-Fi and LibraPay also get monthly ish blog post talking about how I'm constantly burned out and lagging behind. Amazing. You also get a pdf of videos before they're published, so there's that too. And yes, jokes aside, I actually am going to donate 100% of their revenue to some LGBT non-profit because that's the best thing to do for such a video. I would really love if you could suggest in the comments which one you think would be best for me to donate to as I don't have any eyes on yet. This is the longest video I've ever written by far. I'm not even sure if I'll be able to record this. This is the script and let me tell you that it wasn't easy. I had to change battery like five times. Let alone get it edited. But if you're watching it, it means I managed too. And I really have to thank you for having gone through more than one hour probably of my rumblings. It truly matters. Yeah, I have to clean all of this now. Shit.