Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

Probably obvious from the surnames but this is the first time I've seen a EU company pop up on Hacker News that could be mistaken for a Californian company. Nice to see that ambition.

I understand systemd is controversial, that can be debated endlessly but the executive team and engineering team look very competitive. Will be interesting to see where this goes.

So we try to make every new feature that might be disruptive optional in systemd and opt-in. Of course we don't always succeed and there will always be differences in opinion.

Also, we're a team of people that started in open source and have done open source for most of our careers. We definitely don't intend to change that at all. Keeping systemd a healthy project will certainly always stay important for me.

this basically will remove or significantly encumber user control over their system, such that any modification will make you loose your "signed" status and ... boom! goodbye accessing the internet without an id

pottering recently works for Microsoft, they want to turn linux into an appliance just like windows, no longer a general purpose os. the transition is still far from over on windows, but look at android and how the google play services dependency/choke-hold is

im sure ill get many down votes, but despite some hyperbole this is the trajectory

Thanks for the answer. Let me ask you something close with a more blunt angle:

Considering most of the tech is already present and shipping in the current systemd, what prevents our systems to become a immutable monolith like macOS or current Android with the flick of a switch?

Or a more grave scenario: What prevents Microsoft from mandating removal of enrollment permissions for user keychains and Secure Boot toggle, hence every Linux distribution has to go through Microsoft's blessing to be bootable?

About ten years ago I took a three day cross-country Amtrak trip where I wanted to work on some data analysis that used mysql for its backend. It was a great venue for that sort of work because the lack of train-internet was wonderful to keep me focused. The data I was working with was about 20GB of parking ticket data. The data took a while to process over SQL which gave me the chance to check out the world unfolding outside of the train.

At some point, mysql (well, mariadb) got into a weird state after an unclean shutdown that put itself into recovery mode where upon startup it had to do some disk-intensive cleanup. Thing is -- systemd has a default setting (that's not readily documented, nor sufficiently described in its logs when the behavior happens) that halts the service startup after 30 seconds to try again. On loop.

My troubleshooting attempts were unsuccessful. And since I deleted the original csv files to save disk space, I wasn't able to even poke at the CSV files through python or whatnot.

So instead of doing the analysis I wanted to do on the train, I had to wait until I got to the end of the line to fix it. Sure enough, it was some default 30s timeout that's not explicitly mentioned nor commented out like many services do.

So, saying that things are "much better in every way" really falls on deaf ears and is reminiscent of the systemd devs' dismissive/arrogant behavior that many folk are frustrated about.