I misread the first line as "The fall of systemd is here" but alas, not today it seems...

We all have that dream.

As another commentator regarding Linux noted, it is amazing how much systemd is "hated" yet how prevalent it is in the Linux distro world.

So the hatred seems to be on the users because the devs of the distros seem to love the thing.

Therefore it is reasonable to believe that systemd solves more problems than it brings to the distro builders, but conversely if systemd is that "bad", or that hated by the user community, why don't the devs listen to the users instead?? Apparently there is a level of disconnect between user's desires on an OS that promises user choice, versus what you are actually given - and one must wonder why .

People hate changes unless they are the ones making the change.

What I dislike about systemd is that it gets it tendrils even into stuff that is separate from any "init process" stuff. It now controls everything, network, even sound (and don't get me started on pulseaudio...).

OK, and that I dislike change for the sake of it (yes, I get some of the motivation behing systemd, but seriously, telling me that simple human readable scripts are less easy to maintain and use than this - pull one of the others, this one has bells on it)

As someone once noted, systemd was never intended to be solely a replacement for init.

That was just the pretext the camel used to get its nose in the tent.

I don't think Liam's mother-tongue is American English. I wish the changed house style were changed to allow article authors to use the English they are most comfortable in, so American authors use an American idiom, Australians Australian, Indians Indian, and Irish Irish, and so on.

My first thought was questioning what ' [1]The Fall ' had to do with systemd. Their cover version of systemd would be interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(band)

Or maybe even SYSTEM of a Down

Its a good example why not to standardise on American English: "fall" confuses the rest of us while Americans would know perfectly well what is meant by "autumn".

User unambiguous words wherever possible. Avoid ambiguous ones.

There are publishers who do this. Of course, in Norway, there are even two written languages, so I am used to reading articles in both bokmaal and nynorsk (but I was more referring to Lost Art Press, who publish the books in the native idiom (American, British, ..) of the author.

"Fall" might be thought of as American English but its actually a regional word. On the west coast you're more likely to find the word "Autumn": used (its also closer to the Spanish word "Otono").

Most of the time if you use a certain amount of imagination you can figure these things out.

I misread fall as fail... which only reflects on what I think of systemd.

All of which would have been avoided if proper Englishg was used rther than Yankie slang.

How does all that cryptographic stuff relate to the ability to compile your own? Do we get to approve our personal key? Or have they [1]tivoized the whole thing?

For myself I can't be arsed with all that, but having the option is still essential.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

That's the one thing I'm certain they won't be able to fuck up.

How does this magic new lockdown deal with dual-boot systems?

How far does Poettering have to go before he starts upsetting his disciples with stuff that sticks even in their throats?

Why should dual-boot break if the keys for both kernels are enrolled in the TPM / secure boot keystore / wherever?

Why dual boot when you can use one or more VMs?

The most pressing reason to dual-boot is that the user wants to use the full bare-metal capabilities of the hardware. At a previous job, I dual-booted my work laptop because I wanted a OS running on my system which was for personal use and unconstrained by corporate IT, and said constraints were restrictive to virtual machine usage. Some people might be driver developers who need access to the hardware for testing their code. Etc. Those are just some use cases which spring immediately to mind; I'm sure other commentards can suggest others.

Finally the promise of the future is here. I'm so happy this is at long last available. Everything will be nicely locked to two or three hardware vendors, a nice OS duo- or triopoly, all the AMZN content at our fingertips, bots are going to be filtered out, no more captchas - remote attestation from a approved edge providers through approved carriers and approved last mile providers through approved and signed OS and one true good browser right to the CPU core, where the digital signature will live right next to the reliable and secure out of band management system and then back again, everything signed and secure and reliable (apart from the signed and approved backdoors for secure and relieable and accountable government agencies).

I'm sure corporate Windows users are going to love this! Wait...

It isn't the secure-boot system itself, but how it's implemented.

You can have a dystopian system like that, but you can also have a system where you trust nothing but your own personal signing key* and have *that* sign things downstream.

____

* your key, your certification authority, OpenSSL, your standard C library, the OS, the computer generating the key, the hardware manufacturer, and the country that said hardware manufacturer comes from. Also see the famous Reflections on Trusting Trust essay/talk.

Of course, I can even get the whole world under lock and key, by putting myself in the cage.

What I was pointing at is the Wintel creep and where it's headed with systemd.

My personal belief is there will always be token plurality available, just like with Firefox, which reportedly lives mostly off Google's money. It appears to be cheaper than monopoly lawsuits of the Microsoft Internet Explorer fashion.

What I was pointing at is the Wintel creep

Well, that's one name for Lennart Poettering.

to read the essay:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

I spend my days, when not coding, having to administer a fleet of Windows laptops.

There are a number of Dell laptops that tend to suffer TPM failures, rendering the OS useless. Especially as we march towards Windows 11 where it requires at least TPM v1.2.

If the TPM fails, it's fucked. The laptop is scrap essentially if you need to run Bitlocker or any sort of encryption on the disk.

Now we're trundling in to a Poettering world where we're having this shit enforced on us? Only those who have not had to deal with the delight of a dead TPM on a laptop would ever think this implementation is a good idea.

-> Now we're trundling in to a Poettering world where we're having this shit enforced on us?

You can always fork it. Nobody is forcing you to use a vendor-supplied kernel.

As I have mentioned several times previously, the top contributors to the Linux kernel are corporations. They pay people and those people put in what they want to put in or what they are told to put in.

Linux today is not the Linux of 20 years ago. Sure, anyone can make a new distro with this feature and that feature. They generally don't last long.

Sure, anyone can make a new distro with this feature and that feature. They generally don't last long.

EL Reg normally gives us two or three starry-eyed reviews of Ubuntu remixes each week. It would be interesting to know how many of them ever make it to a second version. It might happen sometimes, I suppose.

Mint still doing well, thank you!

Personal preference remains with Manjaro; though I await the project's reception of these systemd growths. (I'm not going to call them changes, because that is disingenuous).

So, you can fork it, but it's pointless and naive...?

That is the Linux way. We are told time and time again that if we don't like something we can take the source code, fork it, and build our own version. Extending that for a moment to distros, that is why there are so many distros. Some distros last far longer than others, others are built to specifically not have a particular subsystem (eg Devuan).

What we seem to have, what I see a lot of, is quite a few Linux people thinking they can influence the way Linux should be - it should not have systemd or it should not have a secure boot feature, for example. All they have to do is pick a distro which meets their criteria and use it, or if it does not exist they can build it. Open source does not mean you have control over what somebody else does, yet that seems to be how some people think it is.

So, you wrote that forking is "pointless and naive". In some cases, with the plethora of distros adding one more Ubuntu remix with marginally different bells and whistles, I think it is pointless. But in general? You seem to be turning the open source world on its head.

Edit: For the record I have expressed several times my dislike for systemd in general and its tentacles. This is just another tentacle.

"If the TPM fails, it's fucked. The laptop is scrap essentially if you need to run Bitlocker or any sort of encryption on the disk."

Aren't there ways to backup the bitlocker encryption key to an external location?

There are. You have the option to print them off and keep them in a secure safe somewhere, or you can use a 3rd party application such as Sophos.

Except, in my experience, there have been times the latter doesn't work. I've had 3 laptops require access to the bitlocker key and in those 3 instances the key Sophos listed didn't unlock the laptop.

Experience of the former is that, while it's more rudimentary, the key can sometimes not work either.

for either

Devuan (see https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=devuan )

or

MX linux (see https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mx )

Been on Ubuntu since Warty, I feel I've been ejected/rejected...

Don't forget PCLinuxOS or Slackware.

Texstar and Patrick Volkerding know what they are doing and will have nothing to do with systemd.

Also Void, Gobo, Guix, Alipne, Gentoo, Artix and others:

BSDs are another option.

https://nosystemd.org/ has a partial list

I somehow lost a tiny bit of trust in Debian for not being on this list.

+1 (Devuan here - although used Slackware exclusively until had to switch to RHEL6 for work...)

It doesn't really matter... seriously...

Life is too short.......

That's nice. But why does it have to be lumped into the same package with the init subsystem, networking, audio, kernel logging, user home directory mounting and the kitchen sink?

Have I forgotten anything.