Ulu-Mulu-no-die

LFS is not a distro, it’s a book that teaches you how to build a Linux system from the ground up. By all means do it at least once because you can learn a lot from it, but it’s not meant to be used as a daily driver, unless you have nothing else to do in your life than keeping it maintained.

The layoffs are directly tied to Oracle’s aggressive and debt-heavy expansion into artificial intelligence infrastructure
money the company urgently needs to fund a massive buildout of AI data centers

The bubble can’t burst soon enough.

Linux runs the entire internet, a good part of corporate-level servers and it dominates the supercomputing space, you can't get more mainstream than that. As for desktop use, most people around the world don't know what an operating system is, some even believe the browser IS the internet. With such tech-illiteracy there's no way Linux can be widely adopted, because no opensource project can beat Microsoft commercial power in "convincing" PC vendors to offer it preinstalled, yes a few do, but they're very scarce compared to those offering Windows, some even claim you will break the warranty if you install something different than what comes preinstalled (Windows), such a claim is illegal in many countries but some people don't know any better. If you don't know what an OS is, you have no reason to change, unless you're lucky and have a friend or family member doing the work for you, but you can't rely on that for the entire world.

What systemd does here is offer a solution to secure it centrally It doesn’t as long as other init systems exist and people can luckily choose, hopefully that will always be that case. Here’s to hoping this entire discussion becomes just as pointless as you expect the PR to become Agree on that, I think that’s the hope for everyone here.

Doesn’t change the fact that it needs to be stored somewhere, if the maintainers end up facing legal pressure to implement it Sure, but trying to apply it to the entire world when only a few countries are currently impacted is fishy at best. And no, we don’t know yet what the entire world will do about it, even if Meta is trying to lobby everyone, there’s also a push for making opensource exempt from it, in that case those applying the PR have worked for nothing. Are you going to oppose every other system that allows storing data too, because it might be used to store data for age verification? It depends, if the purpose is age verification then yes I will oppose it. There are legitimate, reasonable complaints to have with systemd. I didn’t have any so far, for the very simple reason that I don’t have the technical knowledge to judge by myself. This PR tho doesn’t require any tech knowledge to understand what’s going on. “We added a data field, which we’re trying to make sure doesn’t end up in the wrong hands” The road to hell is paved with good intentions, even tho by reading the PR thread I’m not sure the intentions behind the push are actually good as you seem to believe.

It does provide a standard and (somewhat) central place That would be the case if everyone used systemd, but it’s not, sysvinit distros still exist and they’re not going away in the foreseeable future. I don’t think this is the hill that battle should be fought on. I could agree with this if the reason for this PR wasn’t age verification, that’s indeed a battle that needs to be fought, on every piece of the puzzle.

Luckily for me, that’s not the only option, especially since I’m not US.

There is indeed a philosophical part to it around the “do one thing and do it well”, but what you call “fear” is not an totally unfounded concern, in that it’s true that the more complex a piece of software is, the more complex maintenance also is. But you need serious technical knowledge to fully understand everything that systemd does compared to sysvinit, what are the advantages of this new system and how much its complexity can actually affect maintenance (or not). I don’t have that kind of knowledge, you could explain to me all the technical advantages systemd has but I wouldn’t be able to understand them, so I just trust distro maintainers in doing what they believe it’s best for their distro and I never considered the init system as a parameter to choose what distro I want to use, I just use what’s in the distro. Now it’s different, because adding a field to comply with a moronic law pushed by Meta to avoid fines has nothing to do with technical reasoning, you don’t need any tech knowledge to understand that, anyone can.