There's submodules and subtrees, neither works all that well. SVN can pull down part of a repo, which is (IMO) slightly more sane behavior.

Git's subtree / subproject management is extremely painful. The information manager from hell, indeed. I dislike SVN/CVS extremely, but they make much easier to do sub-repositories. For example, Arch's ABS is entirely under SVN, which works well enough for them, but using git the same way sounds like torture.

Threatening a fork is like threatening legal action: if you think you're to that point, you need to just do it, and inform the relevant parties afterwards. Anyone can threaten to take action.

Apache is monolithic in the same way that systemd is. It does not do "one thing". Nginx exists because Apache does way too much. X.org is also absurdly complicated, but at least they stripped out the print server. Wayland is the attempt to make it more pared-down. An init system is either complicated or bad at what it does, or both. I would perhaps debate about including Postgres as a piece of monolithic software, perhaps in comparison to simple data stores, but it doesn't stray too far outside of the definition of "relational database".

Your system is not well thought out and would not handle dependencies / parallel startup very well. However, generally speaking shell scripts should definitely be the exception: executable configuration files are a bad design. If you must use arbitrary scripts, then you should abstract the common elements and reduce the part that must be expressed as executable code to the bare minimum. Have sane defaults, and an easily-reviewed common subset of functionality, make the simple things easy, and stay out of the way of anyone who really really needs a programming language and shell in order to start a program.

The important part of systemd is actually managing processes and services, startup is where most of that happens, but it's not the driving force of systemd. The reason why systemd exists, and the reason why it isn't portable, is because of cgroups, which are a feature specific to the Linux kernel allowing for real process management. In non-systemd Linux, daemons must carefully communicate through special files what they are doing, or the OS is not able to determine anything about the service. There is a complicated process which every process that wants to daemonize must follow, and the only thing that makes this remotely sane is longevity. Solaris and OSX have both separately replaced SysV init.

I have read that FreeBSD has taken the strategy of using essentially a library of common things that init scripts might want to do, but for the general case having this library be written in an interpreted language gains little.

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Found it!

A land-grab in the ocean? The Battle of Ellesmere Island?

I think there's about as much chance of having a small arms conflict in the Arctic as there is of Putin invading Greenland riding a polar bear. What exactly do you envision? Canadian troops invading Novaya Zemlya? The Arctic is unpopulated in a way that is difficult to describe. There is no one to shoot, and even getting there is a huge logistical problem. I'm pretty sure you've never been to the Arctic, but for the sake of argument, is there any basis to these ideas of yours?

I was wondering about that, but I didn't manage to find any information. Do you have a link handy? And maybe information about the differences between Google's stuff and ARChon?

When I said that it hadn't caught on, I meant that other browser vendors were not interested in implementing NaCl.

Isn't that more or less the idea behind NaCl/Native Client? It doesn't seem to have caught on. For that matter, there was also ActiveX, and the best that you could say about it is that it had a flawed implementation.

Chrome also just added a runtime for Android apps, which seems to handle at least some simple apps at native speed on my chromebook. I suppose that's a java runtime of some sort?

I know that there are many wonderful things done daily in JS, but I really would prefer another scripting language.

Have you seen the videos about why X is fundamentally broken? Did you read the fine article? There are a lot of horrible flaws in X that cannot be fixed short of a rewrite.

I get the impression that you haven't done any research into this issue, and are dismissing it based on a stereotype. Familiarity breeds contempt, and I am sure that to some degree the trend you identify exists. However, devs don't usually go that far out of their way to make work for themselves just on a whim, and I do expect them to actually be able to identify flaws in their software. Also, you should not assume that just because something is 20 or 30 years old, that it does not have major flaws. Even ignoring Shellshock, there's a lot of justification for replacing X with something else. If you believe otherwise, maybe you can pop over to the Wayland dev channel and explain why they're all wrong and that they don't need to be spending time on it.

The reason why systemd exists, and the reason why it isn't portable, are the same reason: it depends on a feature specific to the Linux kernel.

It's not up to the systemd developers to write kernel features for other OSes. If there's an "anti-standard" it's the kernel, not systemd. If the rest of the Unix world wants to implement something similar then I am sure it could be made part of a standard eventually. Until then, you've wasted space typing.

Please don't talk about runaway greenhouse effects here on Earth. It really isn't possible.

Quick summary: for a runaway greenhouse effect, you need a big surface reservoir of some greenhouse gas (on Earth, water vapor). Theoretically, you increase the temperature a little, this vaporizes more of the gas, trapping more heat, which vaporizes more gas, and so on until the planet no longer has a radiative balance. Then things get a bit warm.

On Earth, the tropopause generally keeps water vapor near the surface; if water vapor rises to that point, it usually freezes and precipitates. This prevents it from building up in the upper atmosphere. One of the effects of CO2 on Earth is to cool the stratosphere, so ironically adding more of it could be moving us further away from a runaway greenhouse effect.

There is a vague possibility that we might make some lasting change to the climate, but probably not. We're still a few orders of magnitude away from the most drastic outgassings that the Earth has experienced. We're drastically compressing the timeframe of those events, but we will exhaust all fossil fuels long before we match the CO2 emissions of the largest LIPs. We can and seemingly will fuck up the planet for a geologic age, but the planet has recovered from worse extinction events before. We'll have to be satisfied with 90% of terrestrial life, I am afraid that the Ultimate Species Fuckup is beyond us.

It's a cheap internet appliance with a keyboard as opposed to a touchscreen. Is anyone using tablets?

Or did you mean anyone using ChromeOS not on a Chromebook? Probably that animal doesn't exist, Google is trying to keep a "unified experience", i.e. Apple-like control over their platform. A large concern here is security; you can put it into "Developer Mode" and do whatever you want to the system, but otherwise it's pretty locked-down. I don't really mind this; people who want to screw with Linux can, and people who just want to browse the web and not worry about what the machine is doing can also do this. Turning on developer mode is extremely non-obvious, and that's probably good too.

As a primary machine, a Chromebook can be a little limiting, less so if you are well versed in wrangling Linux. However, I understand that it is being used in education a lot; it sounds pretty much perfect. Ultra-cheap hardware, simple software, low maintenance -- what's not to like?

Probably most of them. The drivers don't exist for Windows, and installing a Linux distro is a little more complicated than you might hope for. Plus, there are some actual benefits to ChomeOS, mostly that it will back up your files for you, and that it boots in seconds (maybe a total of ten seconds from clicking reboot to having all the browser windows open again), but it's also more secure than Linux. Security is achieved at the cost of making it hard to change the system.

Also keep in mind, these things ship with a 16GB SSD. You can install a couple Linux distributions in that space, but it's pretty cramped for any sort of content: you're not going to be gaming or torrenting very much. Increasing the storage is possible, but if you're going to buy a $200 laptop and a $100 SSD, you may as well buy a real laptop.

Generally speaking, it's a nice, cheap, internet appliance, for those who want a keyboard instead of a touchscreen. It's really not that bad of a user experience. I have been leaving mine around the house for the roommates; they browse the web, listen to music, watch movies, and type their resumes. I don't know what other features you think it needs.

You spent a non-trivial amount of time and effort fighting with trolls. Unless you're Thor Odinson and these are literal trolls, you lost just by engaging.