Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

For what it's worth, 4 years on I still struggle daily with audio and only audio on Linux. I'm not in a position to tell if it's ALSA or PulseAudio that makes nothing come out unless I plug/unplug, mute/unmute in the correct order everytime I come back from suspend/open a different app/want to use headphones. But I didn't have these problems before Fedora 8 when I was using ESD ;)

And just recently I've resorted to manually starting couchdb in a console instead of using the init scripts on fedora because after upgrading to 15 they do some bad things to file permissions. Is it the distributors fault or is it systemd? Correlation does not imply causation?

I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the tedious and boring maintenance, bugfixing, and polishing.

The quality of Linux as a desktop operating system is in stark contrast with Linux as a server operating system. Thanks to the enormous amount of money invested in server-related components, Linux as a server is generally very polished and reliable.

On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

If you ask for possible reasons to attack Lennart in the first place: He was the main force behind Pulseaudio (which, for various technical and political reasons was reviled for a long time) and now systemd (a C replacement for the sys-v scripts, think smf/launchd).