Best i recall was someone claimed their BIOS had been infected with something that would use speakers and mic to get around being airgapped from any net connection.

Not sure if it was ever verified by any security experts or not.

Yeah, Consolekit was dead. This in large part to the same people that are so heavily pushing systemd...

To me at least keeping things distributed separately makes it harder for a developer to accidentally cross the internal/external divide.

Well that explains quite a bit...

Btw. While Gnome exist as a "independent" foundation, quite a number of the core devs seems to work for Red Hat. This to the point that some of them use Gnome blogs to talk about Red Hat news from the insider perspective.

Supposedly they tried to create such a independent tracker in the form of Consolekit.

You will find a fork of it at https://github.com/ConsoleKit2....

It got forked because the project was shut down and left to rot by no other than Poettering, who was co-maintainer at the time.

If systemd was just a init replacement, i would agree.

But at this point in time the one systemd tarball holds a init replacement, cron replacement, udev, firewall manager (firewalld), logger (journald), networkmanager (networkd), dhcp client, dns client, session/seat tracker (logind) that was also recently put in charge of handling power button and laptop lid events (replacing/merging shutdownd).

And i swear they were planning to put in a userspace TTY manager as well in the near future.

In essence it has pretty much become a second kernel in userspace.

Agile is old school. Its all devops now, gramps.

Or know it but accept it either because of some star eyed idealism (we can make the desktop so much better!!!) or simple greed (many of them work directly for RH after all).

Poettering's standard reaction to something breaking because of changes introduced by systemd seem to be akin to Jobs and antennagate, "you are doing/holding it wrong".

Ran into a email a few days ago in relation to systemd trampling libvirt cgroup configs. It could basically summarized to "libvirt needs to supplicant itself before systemd".

It is the same kind of ivory tower attitude as we could see back when systemd would DOS the kernel if the kernel command line contained the debug flag.

In Poettering's world you don't diagnose, you just restart and keep on trucking. It is uptime by machinegun devops.

The main devs on systemd seems to be coming out of a combo of devops/cloud and desktop, with little to no regard for keeping serious servers up for years on end.

In essence their idea of uptime is more akin to machinegun fire. Dump everything into containers/VMs, and just fire up a new one when the old one goes belly up. Don't care about bugs etc, just restart restart restart.

Not just feature requests. They are bluntly stated that any patches for functionality they have no interested in will be rejected.

Damn it, they even yanked HDD readahead support recently because everyone on the dev team was using SSDs.

It's like Torvalds yanking everything out of the kernel that didn't support x86 because thats all he is running on his desk.

Why oh why is it that the naysayers are the ones that has to move on and start over?!

Why could not Poettering and CO create their own distro and prove it functional from the ground up first?!

Damn it, look at how it is done at the kernel. New subsystems are maintained outside of the main tree for years while the bugs etc are hammered out.

Poettering and crew is not just replacing init with systemd, they are replacing everything between the kernel and the web browser with something new. This should really require that it is developed in isolation until the feature creep has come to a halt, and the bugs can be found and hammered out.

The latest changes include stuff like ADSL controls in networkd and folding power management into logind.

It barely makes sense that this has found its way into virtual noname distros and such. But that RH and Canonical is putting them into releases is whacko.

So in essence the "wise" men of Gnome took the already questionable gconf, that used XML files, and turned it into the binary files based dconf...

Fuck it, i'm going back to XFWM...

How long before they have to replace anything beyond the GNU stuff with something out of the 90s to avoid dragging in the systemd shoggoth via some dependency or other?