You have to opt in / give permission, for the stuff you mention. So if you have background stuff going on in 2020, you have yourself to blame.

As a dutch native, I can say that the wording was typically weasel wording. Especially the part where the minister, who only a few months ago was openly complaining about encryption, now says in the conclusion part of the official document: > Derhalve is het kabinet van mening dat het op dit moment niet wenselijk is om beperkende wettelijke maatregelen te nemen ten aanzien van de ontwikkeling, de beschikbaarheid en het gebruik van encryptie binnen Nederland. Translation: Therefore, the government believes that it is _currently_ not appropriate to take restrictive legal measures against the development, availability and use of encryption within the Netherlands. The translation was done by Google, and seems to be very adequate, please zoom in on the wording "currently". If that's the conclusion, I wouldn't call it "strong" wording at all, which Slashdot says the minister used. Building in backdoors isn't time related, or currently not a good idea -- it's inherently bad, not just today.

You do know that Arch has welcomed SystemD with open arms right? And KDE and Gnome are not linux. That said, I use Awesome window manager, but sometimes I do wonder if it's really worth the hassle reading man pages and googling for answers if I only want to change some trivial setting. I'm at a point I no longer have the feeling of accomplishment when I've spent 10 minutes what a GUI could've done in 10s. Should this GUI have a text backend? Yes please! But atm, that's the case in KDE as far as I know. Furthermore init is also always running, forever, what's the difference? Don't come up with "Yeah but Systemd has a friggin' network manager", true, but it's in its own process. The remark about the bootloader and SystemD.. I didn't get that, but sounds interesting, link?

I once contacted a teacher with the question when it was fraud because I 'poisoned' myself with a solution on the web and it's hard to not use the main idea. He basically answered "if you can use a copy paste solution from the internet for the assignment, it means I didn't do my best creating the assignment". He was right, in the end I used the ideas from the material I found, but it was impossible in my case to copy paste it.

Wait.. so you went to the websites of the software you wanted to have installed? Do you realize that most distro's have had a unified app-store way before OSX did? Talking about building.. I've had to build more software on my macbook then on my linux machines because OSX lacks a good package manager. Though macports & brew fill that gap somewhat, but the build times - the agony.