Is that what got you started on you drinking your own poo? Why didn't you just try Cuba first?

>"Maybe, but I wonder why the thing that's ostensibly there to boot my system even needs to know what users there are on it. Its job is to get you from nothing to login - what happens after that is, frankly, none of its bloody business."

I guess you haven't encountered systemd-logind.service yet
https://www.man7.org/linux/man...

Well, not just one young arrogant engineer, also most of the maintainers of the major Linux distros in the world.

If it's really a bad idea, the blame doesn't really fall on Poettering. Many young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid, and their things got ignored by the world. Some smaller number of young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid but were able to convince their PHBs that they weren't stupid and they got deployed. I don't think that's how I'd characterize the leadership at Red Hat (I never worked there, but I have good friends who did), but let's suppose that they were clueless and that's why they deployed Poettering's stupid idea.

But then how do you explain why so many others looked at it, experimented with it for a few years, and then decided to adopt it, and even extend it?

The systemd opponents are loud and forceful on social media. The people who actually build the systems, however, disagree. And It's not just one or two groups who are somehow beholden to Poettering, nor is it people who don't know anything or have no technical stake in the decision.

You might want to consider whether you're living up to your nick here.

I don't personally care that much. I find it mildly annoying that the old scripts my finger muscle memory still wants to type by default don't always work... but honestly I rarely need them any more, because my systems Just Work. And I have to consider the possibility that systemd is part of the reason Linux requires so much less maintenance than it used to. There are multiple contributors here. A lot of it is that drivers have gotten a lot better and other aspects of the system have matured (like the audio subsystem :^)).

But given its broad adoption by nearly all open source and commercial Linux distros, Occam's razor says that it's probably better than sysvinit. Or BSD init. Or Upstart. Or OpenRC, or... <insert favorite system manager here>.

>"The real issue will arise when applications start requiring that date to be verified (and the fork won't help then, either)."

Bingo.

Except it won't be FOSS applications. It will be on-line crap. Having the field or not doesn't matter at all. It will be a whole matter of "chain of trust" again, where you don't actually own or control your own system. Linux/FOSS will not meet that requirement and will be rejected. Just like it is rejected in a small amount of DRM games than want to control your system.

At least with the DRM crap, it is not government-related/mandated, so market pressure can be brought to bear on such companies trying to force it. Especially relevant as the Linux "market" keeps growing and starts carrying more clout.

>"SystemD wants to grow up into a REAL despotic gatekeeping process that locks you out of your own hardware for idiotic reasons that only its developer thinks are important, just like the big corporate offerings do!"

Even if present, there is nothing requiring the user actually use a birthdate field. Or that it even be accurate. Could it be a slippery slope? Maybe. But FOSS, like Linux, is ultimately not controlled by corporate dogma or government whims, so it is unlikely that use of the field could be mandated. As long as it is up to the system owner how it is used, that should be good enough.

>"I grew up on the simplicity of Linux's three tenets:"

Those are actually Unix tenets, that Linux just inherited.

But yeah, I generally hate the idea of systemd because it is trying to be all things and in ways that make understanding and configuring things more difficult.

>"So when the battery dies, you can throw the whole device away!"

Indeed. And then it is also extremely difficult to try and recover the battery for recycling, as well, I assume.

So these devices become toxic, non-reusable, non-fixable, highly flammable, dangerous messes.

Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.

In what way? Please correct me.

Bah. If a human driver increased their safety and reliability by avoiding certain situations, would you call them a worse driver for it?

They provide full access to the regulators, and they've allowed academic researchers full access. Putting it all online would be more transparent, but they're a business and they have up and coming competitors.

Do you honestly believe that mass debt forgiveness -- after COVID was already over! -- was a necessary emergency response to the pandemic? Suspending payments (and interest) during the pandemic made perfect sense, and that was not struck down. I don't recall that it was even challenged.

No, the debt forgiveness clearly had nothing to do with the (already-ended) emergency, it was just an attempt to skirt the law, and the courts were quite correct to strike it down as executive overreach. If Biden wanted to do that, he should have lobbied Congress to change the law. He didn't do that, of course, because he knew Congress would refuse -- even though his party held both houses.

Your comment mischaracterizes what has happened. The Supreme Court has absolutely bent over backwards to let Trump do what he wants in temporary rulings, including jumping in to to stay lower-court orders that no previous court would even have responded to. But their on-the-merits rulings, when they have to issue a full opinion, have been much less friendly to Trump. There have been some incredibly bad ones (e.g. immunity) but Trump has lost more than he has won in SCOTUS final judgements.

>"In no way is it a "first class" anything when it's only for GNOME and only in a snap. [...]There's a 0% chance I'm going to use GNOME or snap."

^^THIS

If it were a project that mapped to many/all Linux distros, using a native package (not container, especially not a SNAP container), worked on any Linux desktop environment (and yes, X11 too), then it would be far more interesting. I might even check it out and give feedback.

>"Must be incredibly relevant. You went out of you way to post how it doesn't affect you."

I am probably not the minority in the views of relevancy and I specifically wrote it could be useful for some people. But, whatever :)

I use Linux on everything. So how relevant is Canonical's announcement for me?

1) I don't use Gnome
2) I don't use Wayland
3) I don't use SNAP
4) I don't use Ubuntu
5) I have no use for desktop dictation since I can type much faster than speaking something, then reading it all again to edit and correct all the mistakes and add all the missing punctuation/etc.

At least they kept it "local" and perhaps some people might find the tool useful. So wake us up when it is a real/native package, can be used on any Linux, on any DE, on any GUI.

You're treating the current law as a standard handed down from on high, incontrovertible and guaranteed-correct, which must be applied verbatim. And, indeed, laws must be applied as written... but that doesn't mean the laws are perfect forever. Laws are written within a context, and when the context changes, the laws have to change.

In a world where all cars are driven by humans, if you want to protect highway workers one way to do it is to attach serious prison time to killing one and to publicize that fact loudly so that all of the drivers know that they should be especially cautious around highway workers, even more than they would around other sorts of pedestrians (let's put aside the moral debate about whether we actually should protect highway workers more than other pedestrians).

In a world where some cars are driven by software systems, that strategy doesn't really work -- as your question correctly points out -- but the right conclusion isn't "Therefore self-driving cars shouldn't be allowed", or "Therefore we must identify some scapegoat human at the company to put in prison". The right conclusion is "Therefore we need a different kind of regulation to keep highway workers safe from self-driving cars". What should that be? I can think of lots of possibilities, both pro-active (e.g. require self-driving vehicles to demonstrate in rigorous testing that their vehicles stay far from highway workers, with whatever minimum distance you want to specify) and reactive (severe penalties, up to heavy fines and/or immediate loss of permission to operate). The point is that the law should choose an approach that works with the new context.