Video: Linux sucks 2024 (Bryan Lunduke) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Video: Linux sucks 2024 (Bryan Lunduke) [video]

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31 pointsfkarg28 comments

Bryan Lunduke is really interesting. A Microsoft alumni from the 90’s and early 2000’s moving on to become a champion for open source and Linux. He had a decent following with interesting insights and then just blew that all away.

It’s not often someone can stick to their “convictions” but he has the wealth he never needed to build a following to have a career. He could have retired young, tinkered with computers and raised his family.

His “heel turn” as is was was shocking at first but to double down on being anti-vax, sympathetic to January 6th protesters, and complaining about the existence of LGBT people (who have been around in Computer Science from the beginning) is just disappointing.

I loved his take on how GNU/Hurd should work. The idea of releasing a piece of software and only doing security updates after getting it to boot on common hardware is an interesting idea. Nothing he’s had to say in the past 4 years has been insightful or interesting. There are more than enough voices in the Linux community that can champion the cause these days without supporting the kind of tired, identity politics and culture war driven nonsense that he focuses on now.

> sympathetic to January 6th protesters

Ooof, this is a really bad look. I had no idea he sympathized with a group of unarmed boomer LARPers. His technical positions should be immediately disregarded because he has the wrong opinions about due process applying to people who put their feet on someone's desk. What a Nazi.

I'm not sure why I'm replying to this, it'll just fall of deaf ears... But Someone on the Internet is wrong[1]!

It took my literally two seconds to Google up some photos[2], they don't look very "unarmed"[3] to me.

[1] https://xkcd.com/386/

[2] https://apnews.com/article/photos-election-jan6-trump-washin...

[3] https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/05/gettyimages-1230...

Again, I'm agreeing with you. One can of pepper spray would have rendered the entire armory of the Capitol Police ineffective, and Democracy would have been stolen from us.

One thing these Trumptards with their gun fetishism have over us is their extensive firearms knowledge, and they know that only one molecule of capsaicin entering the firing chamber of a .40 S&W pistol or .223 rifle completely disables it, so this Terrorist would have laid waste to the entirety of the defensive apparatus of DC. We really got lucky, here.

Every time I think about this Attack On Our Solemn Democracy I tear up. It could have gone the wrong way, very very fast. This incredibly well-organized, armed-to-the-teeth Boomerwaffen SS would have been no match for the Capitol Police, the DC Police, the DC National Guard, or the entirety of the Department of Defense under Posse Comitatus. The mechanized divisions of mobility scooters armed with Big Gulps alone would have overwhelmed this nation's defenses, and we would be living under a Dictatorship, forced to watch Fox News and re-runs of Murder She Wrote.

> Nothing he’s had to say in the past 4 years has been insightful or interesting.

I personally found 3/4 of that video to be extremely insightful.

> There are more than enough voices in the Linux community that can champion the cause these days without supporting the kind of tired, identity politics and culture war driven nonsense that he focuses on now.

You need to see that between this statement of yours and what Lunduke said in his video, you are promoting identity politics and culture war, and he is actually trying to fight against it.

When I say he isn’t insightful I mean that his opinions aren’t unique. I can hear almost identical opinions from half a dozen other linux content creators who do not run a side blog promoting their far right identity politics. Maybe that isn’t giving him enough credit but Linux Sucks doesn’t seem to have changed much in content or structure from 2019, the last one I listened to.

If being tired about hearing from conservatives who freak out about the existence of trans people is promoting a culture war, I don’t know how to respond to that. I just want people to be able to live their lives and be left alone, especially if they aren’t hurting anyone. For some conservatives, this is somehow an attack against them because I don’t care to listen to their opinions on why trans people shouldn’t be left alone to live their lives in peace.

Why don't you post these other creators then instead of attacking a video based on the political views of the author? I have no idea where you got transphobia from him, but there appears to be none in the video.

I love that "let's keep things apolitical" then just talk about politics that he might disagree with.

There is not such a thing as apolitical. If you say something of sort you are just in agreement with the current political status quo you are inserted on. Just by his definition of "I only talk when things really get political" is statement to that.

Open source software is political statement, and imho it benefits from being more political (or open about it) not "less".

Also this whole videos plays like a series of click baity phrases, I couldn't watch through.

Mods, why was this removed? Was this user-voted flagged or mod flagged?

I'm out of the loop on Lunduke but all the haters here have me intrigued.

One thing to look out for is that he maintains different outlets for "political" and "non-political" content, and he and his fans have a history of pointing to the latter to suggest that he's just a regular opinionated/straight-talkin' tech guru who's being slandered by unhinged haters. The reason that he does this is that his politics are trash (see his political blog, https://conservativenerds.substack.com, about half of which appears to be collections of low-effort memes revolving around transphobia and COVID conspiracy nonsense). He used to mix tech and politics freely on his Twitter account until he apparently realized that was damaging his brand and made it private.

I knew it. He's conservative and we can't handle mild political disagreement like grown-ups.

He's a lefty-turned-righty after the Portland riots broke his brain. An alternative interpretation is that he's a lefty with a brain. ;D I don't know why the other person automatically banned that as "trash politics". To me, "trash politics" are the self-destructive DEI puritanism that he rants about which is presently destroying Red Hat.

Of all the right-wing grifter types, he seems like a unicorn of sincerity and niceness. He's not transphobic; he just hates pronoun drama ruining good things. In other words, the correct and based take which should prevail. Either way, he's also virtually the only person reporting on lefty insanity in tech.

Re: handling mild political disagreements https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P6IW6bJX0j0

> we can't handle mild political disagreement

Do you take transphobia and covid denial as "mild political disagreement"?

That, for me, is not mild, and anyone that repeats this kinda garbage should put into the trashcan of history.

I don't know this person, but from the title and length I was expecting something interesting.

There was nothing of interest here. I should have abandoned the video right away when he said he doesn't get political and then jumped into crap about "anti-white oaths".

So basically he says that once Linus Torvalds dies, Linux Foundation controls everything because they control the kernel updates? I don't think this is how Linux works

If Ubuntu is going full Snap, can they start maintaining the snap package for Solvespace instead of leaving it to upstream?

This isn't actually a technical video, it's just some dude's identity politics masquerading as tech insights.

Hard pass.

Do we really need to still be pushing people like Bryan Lunduke?

Knowing when to quit seems to be a lost art.

Everyone can find their niche audience on Patreon and whatnot now, which means there's fewer incentives to guide people if they go off the rails. On the other hand, it also empowers people operating in smaller niches that have difficulty surviving otherwise, which is kind of neat.

Absolutely not. It's a shame, because Lunduke has been a voice of reason in the Linux community for some time, but those days are well over.

You don't just walk away from Qanon with your reputation intact. Bryan's slipping into conspiracy theories, grifting, and even tacit support for fascism is enough for me to stop caring about what he says.

These "Linux Sucks" videos do tend to be pretty good and he's rarely off-the-rails on the subject of technology, so I'm sure he makes some good points in this one, but I just can't look at his face or listen to him for 74 minutes.

Once you realize that someone is rooting for the downfall of democracy and the oppression of marginalized people, you tend to want to make sure that as few people as possible listen to anything that person has to say.

> "tacit support for fascism"

Can you give an example that he's expressed?

Me working with windows apis, particularily WinSock

Yeah, it could be worse. Wish MS did not drop ball on IORing why can it only do disk I/O?

An hour and 14 minutes??? Please, for the love of God, get to the point, man.

Yeah, I gave up after a few minutes. If you insist on wasting my time by packing almost each sentence in bombastic sounding oratory (and failing!), give me a transcript to read instead, or I'm out of here.

I had completely missed what Bryan had been up to in the last 5-6 years. All I remembered was that he did a bunch of these "Why Linux Sucks" videos back in the middle of the 2010s that I always thought were humorous, so I clicked through to watch this.

Holy crap, what happened? This video is all about complaining about DEI and then throwing shade at the Linux Foundation for "vaccine passports"

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