...Monit? runit? Two completely different approaches to service monitoring, one not even in an init system. And there are more (s6, daemontools, etc.).

...What the heck are you running that puts thousands of daemons on a single server? If you're doing something this large, you might want to consider virtualization. Thousands of daemons is a gigantic attack surface to have on a single system, and a mess if something were to go wrong with one of them that takes down everything.

Wayland is actually one of the "new Linux" things that I'm interested in. I'm not getting rid of X anytime soon, but when Wayland has the tools, hardware support, etc. I need, I'll likely switch to it without any fuss. (For the curious, I use i3 as a window manager, and there's just no equivalent compositor for Wayland yet. None of my applications are GTK+3 or QT5, either, so I'd be using the X compatibility layer for essentially everything too.)

But systemd I really am not fond of. It's not an issue of being different (though that is some part of it), so much as the way it dictates so much of how you use things. It seems to touch every single part of your system on an ongoing basis, rather than just booting the system and staying out of the way. I sincerely doubt there would be as much distaste for it if it was just the init system part, rather than stuffing everything else in too.

Too beta in Debian. It's been used for years in Gentoo, but was only added to Debian's package archives a couple months ago.

The biggest thing that pushed adoption was when it absorbed udev. You can still run udev without it, but it's plastered with systemd branding and building udev without also building systemd (and then having to manually strip udev out, if you want to run it standalone) is difficult. Beyond that, Gnome 3.8 made it (almost) a hard requirement. Strictly speaking you can run Gnome without, but, as I understand, it loses almost all of the power/disk/device management.

People like it because it's obsessed with boot times (which is apparently a really important thing to people who don't actually run a real-world system, where boot times of 10 seconds vs. 5 seconds are meaningless), has a few useful features (often, subjectively, questionably implemented), and has really good PR. The problems with it include an obsession with APIs (Unix, everything is a file -> systemd, everything is an API), an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach (NIH: write their own binary-formatted logging daemon, their own cron daemon, their own implementation of dbus, ...), and a horrid misunderstanding of what an initsystem really needs to do for servers (LP: "Control groups of course are at the center of what a modern server needs to do." -- which, really, what it needs to do is serve things, not shuffle processes around various metaphorical boxes). The project is, as a result of including the kitchen sink, also extremely monolithic -- everything is stuffed in a single git repo, a single tarball, and is heavily interconnected.

Two of the primary developers (Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers) are also notoriously hard to deal with if you ever suggest they've done something incorrectly. You can find a lot of examples of this, largely to do with LP's attitude towards anything that isn't systemd, and Sievers' regular breaking of udev over the past few years.

While in rare cases job security is a problematic issue due to incompetence (or worse, in extreme cases), stripping away job security typically creates even more, worse problems in the long term with an even faster race-to-the-bottom. If this succeeds, they could find themselves, instead, fighting against the school board hiring cheap, less-competent or less-experienced teachers because they can get rid of the expensive, experienced ones quickly and easily.

Also, teachers are, in most places, unionized (the article doesn't seem to mention if California teachers are or not). Go against the union in such a drastic manner and you may find yourself with a widespread strike on your hands.

I encourage people to think about this word choice. At least to me, it's a little disturbing that we are trained to think of ourselves and everyone else as consumers in every context.

To vastly simplify it... BSD emphasizes freedom for developers. GPL emphasizes freedom for end-users. Different goals, and impossible to ever say which is "more free", since it depends heavily on the context.

You can just as easily point to instances where companies have taken BSD sources, closed them off, and sold them, saying that now the end-users have less freedom than they would with GPL sources.

They also then proceeded to define pretty well everything involving any part of the government anywhere in the world as dealing with national security...

Also important is: which version are you looking at? The 1.4 series (still updated) is intended for smaller/embedded installs, while the 2.x series is intended for mainstream (especially desktop) usage

It's a wordplay on "Mao", the guy famous for kickstarting communism in China.

Because there's no way that's going to be a government sting operation. No way at all.

He said "Creationist" not "Christian". There's not a complete overlap between "Creationists" and "believers in social Darwinism", but the general impression one gets of the attitudes towards the poor and attitudes towards religion in the right wing of (especially American) politics is that it's a large set (partly by virtue of "believers in social Darwinism" being a terrifyingly large set in general).

It's not the science education where you need to fix people who believe crazy things like literal $HOLY_BOOK interpretations, it's the language skills. Teach these people what similes, metaphors, and allegory are.

They should just ditch the browser plugin by default. Support it as 'legacy' for a version or two, but don't ship or install by default (hell, they could even only offer it to corporate customers for all I care). It's the biggest problem with Java -- otherwise you pretty well get what you expect if you download and run unknown code, no worse than any other language. It's not like C's ability to completely tear your operating system apart if you run code you don't know is a bug, after all.

Pretty sure that only applies in cases where the accusers are the ones pressing charges. Considering this is the exact reverse...