Perhaps instead of trying to be all things^W^WChrome to all people, they would do better to go back to their roots as the simple, expandable browser the AC mentioned, and perhaps focus on the robustness issues with plug-ins and cross-tab contamination that have plagued them for so long.

Unfortunately these two things are somewhat conflicting. They are working on a process-per-tab/plugin implementation ("Electrolysis") but it will require changes to many add-ons.

Even if (in theory) they aren't downloading my browsing history and it is my browser making the requests they can deduce what sites I must be browsing to request such "suggestions."

According to the bug report for this feature, the intent is that any suggestion would be triggered by multiple visited sites, so this wouldn't reveal exactly which sites you had visited. Still, it obviously does leak some information.

• I'm supposed to download binaries that don't have Authenticode signatures, from a web server that doesn't support TLS.
• And then I have to download (and somehow verify) a copy of PGP or GnuPG, in order to verify the signatures they do provide. (I also have to know and remember the fingerprint of the genuine PGP signing key.)
• Finally, I have to trust that no-one has cracked a 1024-bit PGP key.

I can only assume that almost all downloads from the official site are vulnerable to MITM'ing. And, as PuTTY is such a popular tool, it is surely a prime target for that.

highly protected corporate network

Do those really exist?

A win for rude, pushy and obnoxious people who shouted loudest and longest and ignored everyone else...

Well that's what I see from the systemd detractors, not its proponents. They're still shouting loudly, in the comments on every article even tangentially related to it. Of course they are being ignored by systemd proponents and most neutral parties because they mostly repeat the same myths and slurs.

A true free and open process would be to include a choice at installation/upgrade time between the choices. If I do have a choice on the web server, on the DNS server, on the mail server, even on the kernel, on the shell that I deliver for my users [...]

You can't choose any of those through the installation GUI. All of them require a custom pre-seeded install or post-install action.

If you upgrade an x86 system, both systemd and sysvinit will be installed and you can select sysvinit from the GRUB menu.