Lunduke sent me

Coffee break Introduce yourself
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I can’t say I had ever heard of Lunduke until he came crashing into the Mastodon instance I use like a thunderclap. Since he was a cancel culture refugee I knew he must be right about something so I started watching his content and here I am.

I’ve been using Linux since 2006 or so. The beginnings of Ubuntu. I had no idea what Linux was before then but I loved using that LiveCD at school to boot up and bypass whatever hardware, software or network restrictions were in place lol!

In the beginning I distro-hopped every couple weeks it seemed. I definitely remember Mandriva as my first experience with KDE. What a treat that was compared to Gnome2.

I’ve tried everything from classics like Puppy, Knoppix, TinHat, OpenSuse, Springdale and Arch to modern and ecentric distros like Venom, Void, Devuan, and Artix.

Eventually I settled on Mint for many years now. I liked the Cinnamon desktop and I grew tired of the “power user” style setup from near scratch process of some distros or the reverse process of stripping back crap you don’t need from others.

I was getting worried about wokeness in Linux around 2018-2019, mostly based around the online ravings of Linus himself about political opinions and certain realities of nature and later, one specific contagion.

I was involved briefly in 2021/22 with OpenSuse until someone dared to question the use of a symbol in their public discord/telegram/matrix channel image. They were told to buzz off and join the Russian channel if they were going to be so terrible. My contributions fell off shortly afterwards.

Luckily Mint stayed clear of all that as far as I could tell. Their Discord is moderated by wokesters and did the same thing OpenSuse did a year later. Though the man in charge of Mint has never used the project as a soapbox for political or SJW type messaging that I have seen. Who knows how long that can last.

Anyways, now I’m dabbling with OM to see what it’s all about. Technically it’s just Linux with a different DE and package manager than I’m used to but philosophically, I think, the people who surround OM are of a similar mindset to myself which makes it unique. Who knew a non-partisan, merit based environment could appeal to so many folks?

Cheers

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OM tl;dr:

- Focus on OpenMandriva distribution and on code. Keep your personal beliefs, political convictions and all the likes for you: we don’t care who or what you are.
- Treat everyone with respect, just like you want the others to treat you.
- Have fun!

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Welcome to OpenMandriva.

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Welcome! We are glad to see you here. We hope you will come to call this place home. I know I did. Speaking of Mastodon, I hang out over at Lunduke’s place and we have yet to find a hornet’s nest that he won’t kick. :rofl:

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Welcome to OM!

I am sure you will appreciate your stay.

Leftism sucks. Let’s do good code and be based instead.

Cheers!

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Thank you!

I stuck with Linux because I could do what I want and it left me alone. It seems like most projects can’t do that anymore. It’s the principle that I care about, not left or right, that’s why I’m here.

What I would hate to see is OM become known as the “right wing” distro but somehow trying to be non-political is now seen as a political alignment.

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That’s a good nerd. A very good nerd!

Welcome to OpenMandriva! Your story is similar to mine and I think you’ll fit in just fine around here. I was an openSUSE user since version 11.0 and I was forced out by their crazed wokeness a couple of years ago. Sad. But, if not for that, I would not have discovered OMLx.

OMLx is definitely not a right-wing distro. It’s simply a distro that focuses on good software, good support and a friendly community. And I suspect no one here would like OMLx to be categorized as right-wing. When you really get down to it, how can software be political anyway? Either it works or it doesn’t.

See you around!

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I’ll be honest with you. The teachings of the left sicken me, so basing on that, I would not mind if OM was known for being “right wing”. However, I would mind it because I don’t think a distro needs to be political. It is just a OS, however it happens because there are humans behind it, so that is why it appears.

At the end, the truth is what matters. In order to use OMA, I was never asked whether I affiliate with a specific party, ideology, political candidate, or anything. I don’t have to agree to anything right wing to use it either, and the distro doesn’t actively promote it. So, Open Mandriva Lx is not a right wing distro, and that is what matters.

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Labels entail a variety of assumptions, and often times I do not agree with all of them. I would not like if the distro became associated with right wing for that reason, but as the person above your post mentioned, being non-leftist those days is automatically being “right wing”. It is a sucky reality we live in.

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I don’t think there is any valid reason for a distro to declare being that way or another, I don’t care if the worst woke of all want to use OM or participate into it, if his code is good I’ll take it, even though I hate what they are doing at the highest point.

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That’s so true. Anyone a half-step to the right of Stalin and Mao is a radical, dangerous right-winger. Geez…it’s so bad.

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I think it’s pretty much the same everywhere, here in France, if you are at the immediate right of the major extreme left parti, which is called LFI, they consider you as a fascist, literraly, they word it that way, there is no debate, just antagonism.

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I did not know that about France. I am sorry to hear it. That is not good for any society or country.

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Of course it isn’t right wing but those labels don’t come from within they come from without. There’s an influx of users here who were tired of being screeched at, by projects and distros, for asking to tone down the political rhetoric. Just asking for this gets you labelled with a political position. You are given political labels just for thinking that certain social justice issues have become political.

So when a project like OM says they won’t do that who is going to show up? It’s the people who are sick and tired of being verbally beaten on, who have already been labelled a certain way, that show up to get some peace. So those other projects can look over here and say all those horrible people they kicked out went over there to OM, therefore OM is just like them.

It’s not even about being right of Stalin or Mao. You could agree ideologically 100% but asking not to subject others to the politics you even agree with will get you labelled “dangerous right-winger”. Non-partisan is a partisan idea according to those people.

Look at this statement from Codeberg about some recent “far-right” attacks. We stay strong against hate and hatred — Codeberg News

Notice they say “far-right” at the beginning but by the end they just say “right-wing”. They talk about their “fight against the far-right” that morphs into the “fight against right-wing forces”. There’s a reason why they opt for those terms instead of “extremism”. The latter applies to both ends of the political spectrum.

Anyways, I hope OM doesn’t get this label but I can’t help but assume it will. The fact that Lunduke is allowed to be spoken about here is enough. The fact that OM reached out to him at all is enough. People with some decent sized blogs like Gaming On Linux call Lunduke an alt-right, far-right, Trump loving deranged weirdo all the time. It’s guilt by association.

The GoL blog has introduced me to a lot of cool Linux games but man the politics is annoying. I’ve seen him rage at people in the comments when they mention it, it’s frustrating.

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It would seem that in an effort to flee the over-politicisation of every other place we have actually increased the politics here by an order of magnitude. I suspect we are all just venting after having to keep our frustration bottled up and I hope it cools down after a while. I do feel bad for @rugyada and other long term members for the sudden barrage of politics in their, normally quiet, place on the internet.

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I agree, there seems to be a lot of, “If you aren’t on our extreme you are an evil insert commie or fascist here.” They can only see red or blue. I believe the politicians and media are driving this race toward the extremes with their rhetoric. Extremists are quietly infiltrating neutral projects, and once enough of them are in positions of power they take over and turn them into activist organizations. There are projects were the founders were thrown out for opposing their extremist views.

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Welcome to OM, there is a lot of us that came from Lunduke, but I would have to say that I love the OM approach to the Community which I call “90s approach” and as @rugyada mentioned:

  • Focus on OpenMandriva distribution and on code. Keep your personal beliefs, political convictions and all the likes for you: we don’t care who or what you are.

So mainly shared info, help, learn, make new online friends and have fun.

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It is in light of this and other posts above that I end up thinking: what can we do to remedy this?

Yes, we have freedom of speech in here, such as you won’t be censored for being of any political side at all. But even then, the charged political climate and lunacy from the extremists make you want to be apolitical in order to avoid the tensions, despite the fact that several people here (myself included) came here because of Lunduke’s videos.

Should we tone it down? Of course politics will likely be still cited for a while as the reason people may have decided to come to here, but those of us who have been here for a while could perhaps just avoid talking too much about it.

Looking at it this way, I start to feel a little disappointed too. I don’t want to feel like I am spoiling someone’s party, even if I consider myself to be right, or tired and frustrated with the evil I had been dealing with before arriving here. It’s understandable that it sucks, but keeping it out of the forums, for this reason and others, I’m sure wouldn’t be disliked.

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Welcome @Ethanol6

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I just want to welcome the OP and add my .02.

I am in the USA and get very frustrated that when anyone questions a political position of any side, that person is called names and accused of vile things just for politely asking a question.

I am somewhat comforted by the fact that it is not only my country that is politically crazy but I am genuinely very sad that the world is in such a vicious mood.

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