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Comment by traverseda | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what makes the "antiX" linux distro they're using "proudly antifascist".

Google search results show their repeated response to questions like that on their forums is anyone who disagrees with them in any way or criticizes anything they've done is literally Hitler. They're apparently very hard to get along with.

Its a rather interesting and extreme solution to endless bike shedding arguments. Should "our" editor be vim or emacs? Well anyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler so we're going to use XYZ and you'll like it or go away. That's an interesting strategy to save time on eternal discussions.

It goes back a long ways and it stems from very minimalist only free software linux communities. Many of these communities I've been privy to for 15+ years take pride in running in the smallest memory footprint, are anti-Java, anti-javascript, anti-Poettering (systemd as a backdoor), etc. and this is the premise of it. This community will get very mad at you for suggesting to add in those things that they deeply hate, i.e., javascript or non-free software blobs.

They write it on their web page. This makes people who are “not fascist, just anti-anti-fascist” out themselves.

I did poke around a bit to try and see if there was an explanation, or any explicitly anti-fascist features. I guess it is just intended as some kind of in-group identifying thing? I had thought maybe they were implying systemd was facist, as they stress that the distro doesn't use systemd.

I guess I assumed it would be a stronger connection, given that the distro is called "anti"-X and it's "anti"-facist, that it would have some explicit tor integration or something.

I think the subtext is some people associated systemd opposition to right wing politics (not fully unfounded if I understand) so the maintainers wanted to get out ahead of it when releasing another distro without systemd

I hesitate to ask, but can you provide some context for linking anti-systemd sentiment with fascism?

I checked out antixlinux.com to see and they don't explain it on the front page, About page, or on their FAQ

I searched for antix antifascist and came across this post: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/anti-fascist-antix/#...

>>antiX is not anti politics, it is anti fascist politics. Politics is everywhere whether you like it or not. Put simply, we do not tolerate politics or people spreading hate/prejudice/violence against people because of their skin colour, race, religion (or none), gender, sexuality.

The only other time I've heard of "IT-fascism" is when this 'abebeos' character threatened someone's job for not taking seriously a 50% claim on a $7k bounty for 'documentation, testing, and integration work'.

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=92729#c56 (relevant discussion is collapsed)

threat: comment 56; "IT-fascism": 58,60,61

The idea behind it is using only free software, and nothing non-free. The guy who runs AntiX goes by the username Anticapitalista and the theme is not supporting corporate computer systems and consumerist cruft.

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