It seems Devuan, the systemd-free Debian fork, has a Nazi problem.

Spurred by popular discussion of systemd’s odd decision to immediately integrate a framework for OS-level age-verification law compliancy, Devuan was mentioned and I began looking into it, as it seemed a fun idea to return my systems to a traditional init system.

Here are my observations, though. I noticed that on Youtube, someone named Brian Lunduke has made many videos on Devuan as well as Debian and other projects, bizzarely calling it the “anti-woke” distro. Disturbed, I wanted to know if this view was endorsed by the project.

I found the Devuan forum and someone who wanted to know the same. “Does anyone watch Bryan Lunduke?” https://web.archive.org/web/20260322044859/https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6818

In that thread, one user called Bryan fascist while another sung his praises before the thread got locked.

This is the one that really gives me pause: “Idle chatter nonsense” https://web.archive.org/web/20260322045120/https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=5530

It’s just some user ranting about socialism and trans people working at Disneyland, ah as it turns out not just any user according to two admins who defend their presence on the forum and eventually lock the thread:

“MiyoLinux is responsible for one of Devuan’s most popular derivatives. If you knew anything at all about Devuan you would know that…https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=9 https://sourceforge.net/projects/miyolinux/ IOW MiyoLinux might be going through something so acting out but on his worst day he has more value to Devuan than the paltry commentaries made by an occasional visitor. So yeah…I cut him some slack . . .”

My cursory judgement is that the project is at best tolerant of the presence of, as one so well put it, “right wing nutters” and at worst the project belongs to them.

I’ve seen enough that I cannot consider putting this software on my system, open source or no. Some snakes need trodding on first.