Pi-hole let's you define different groups with different ad blocking policies. Then you can define which dhcp ips go in each group. Works very well. The "normies" won't even notice
Here's a wild idea: about the CEO and shareholders being properly taxed, instead? Every job being replaced by AI is with the purpose of making more money for the CEO and shareholders, right? So, tax them more. It would solve SO MANY issues
It's all coming together:
Even if an open protocol was developed and published, and everyone would just use AI to create their own app in order to be private, Google is shutting down that path by preventing "unsanctioned" apps from being installed (not to mention Apple, which already does it).
People wouldn't be arrested for writing code, but as it happened in Spain, people with Pixels and GrapheneOS are already treated as drug dealers
Consider GWB's "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." For and against are not always the only options. Sometimes there are nuances, or other concerns.
Daniel made this decision as a private individual. Some of his colleagues (including me) dislike it as private individuals.
I recognize that the amount as well as his position of power within the company (co-founder, co-owner, co-CEO) make people who disapprove more uncomfortable than if it had been a much lower amount from a regular employee.
However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?
Better to see Mullvad almost like a force of nature: Mullvad believes privacy is a universal right. You might disagree but at least it's consistent, and I'd argue that's one path to trustworthiness - you know how we're likely to treat you as a customer. (equally, regardless of your political affiliation)
Obviously everyone is free to make their own choice on whether they like this stance or not.
Thank you for taking this stance. It is the mature, intellectual, and virtuous one, and with it you are on civilization’s side.
The US is currently in a very bad place politically. It’s visible not just in politicians, but in everybody’s minds, all the time. A person who believes they’re fighting for their life obsesses over “us vs them”, and forgets their every principle and even most reasoning, until the fight is over. When we spit on your principles, please know that they are our principles, too, we just are not currently well enough to remember it.
You can say Mullvad is apolitical all you want but the problem is money paid to Mullvad is eventually ending up in the hands of Örebropartiet by way of Daniel directing his compensation into his donations.
He didn't say Mullvad is a apolitical, in fact, he said Mullvad is inherently political because they fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy.
You are saying something incongruent with what kfreds said!
"Mullvad is weighing in on politics unrelated to its privacy mission because money given to Mullvad is eventually ending up in the hands of Örebropartiet by way of Daniel directing his compensation into his donations."
There, better?
The crux of what I'm saying is that if you give money to Mullvad you are giving money to Örebropartiet, and that's unchanged by the first part of the statement.
I know what you’re saying sounds perfectly rational to you and I do applaud you for holding the moral position separating someone’s private life from their contribution to the company. But, think about the number of people who were let go for far less controversial actions. At some point an officer of the company doing things in their personal life becomes a distraction to the company’s goals. My question is, would you act differently if this person were not a co-founder?
If Mullvad fired an ordinary employee for donating to an anti-immigration party or pressured them into not donating, I would absolutely find a new VPN provider that doesn't do this over it.
For sure, and I think most people would agree with this. However, I also think most people treat it differently when it is someone so high up because they have a lot of control and, more importantly, accumulate a large part of the profit.
I don't think you should not be allowed to have strong political opinions in such a position. I just think that in this case, it is very dangerous to express so much support for them in such a public way. I say this because (from my perspective at least) a large part of Mullvad's "competitive advantage" is their brand image, and it just feels that a link to controversial politics probably does more harm than good to this brand image.
> would you act differently if this person were not a co-founder?
I have several colleagues who I'm fairly certain are anarcho-syndicalists, meaning they want to abolish the state and capitalism. I don't know about my colleagues, but in general anarcho-syndicalists seek to bring about their vision through organising trade unions, and use that to seize control of the means of production and distribution. I on the other hand am clearly a capitalist pig seeking to oppress my workforce. Why else would I invite them to join me on the barricades against mass surveillance and censorship? Shared values around privacy? :P
I have no business questioning which demonstrations my colleagues participate in, or what they write on their blog. As long as they are not actively malicious against me, our workplace, or their fellow coworkers.
It's getting late, maybe I'm missing something in my description. I guess that's a rough approximation of how I feel about tolerating differences of opinion.
> Your employees are very far from achieving such ambitious goals.
Again, I have no idea if any of my colleagues actually subscribe to such ideals. I was simply commenting on tolerating differences of opinion. There's also a difference between empathy/understanding and sympathy/agreement.
> You don't seem to realize how much power you, and your co-founder do have vs them.
Perhaps. I've thought about that many times. I'm pretty sure I understand it well intellectually, but I have little experience actually being an employee myself. What experience I have was almost two decades ago. I'd love to hear more about what you mean. What did I say that suggests I don't understand? Was it the "capitalist pig" joke? I was trying to inject some tongue-in-cheek humour, but waking up this morning I regret writing it, as it has little to do with the point I was trying to make. Unfortunately by then it was too old to edit. If it's something else, please tell me.
What I try to do is imagine how I would want to be treated by someone who has hard power over me, in the way an employer ultimately does over their employees. I read books and research on the subject, watch videos, listen to podcasts, learn from mentors, and I've refined my leadership philosophy over the course of the past 17 years.
I aspire to give all of my colleagues a maximum of autonomy. My approach is something like this:
1. The right person, in the right role, with the right manager.
2. Establish and refine a mutual understanding of goals, strategies, and expectations.
3. Delegate to the greatest possible extent.
The right person is roughly someone who has integrity, drive, competence and is easy to communicate with. By integrity I mean someone who admits when they are wrong and tells me when I'm wrong. Drive comes in many shapes (tech nerd, building a team, "just" a good work ethic, or simply wanting to put food on the table) - all of which are perfectly fine drives. Basically I want colleagues that care about something, anything. Competence means being able to perform their job role.
The more you have 1 and 2, the easier it is to build a mutually high-trust relationship, and a long-term collaboration with increasing autonomy.
Ultimately trust is about willingly being vulnerable to someone or something. I think that is why some of my colleagues are upset right now. They see Daniel's donation as a breach of that trust. I get that, and I feel for them.
As we write in the article: """We started building this organization in the summer of 2008 for idealistic reasons, and we are still idealists who think privacy is fundamental to a civilized society.
The best strategy for achieving societal impact through entrepreneurship is consistent, long-term, and value-based ownership. For us, this disqualifies taking outside investment, either through venture capital or going public. Mullvad has instead been growing organically without outside investments. It takes longer but the results are better."""
If I understand correctly, Ries is arguing that the more valuable a company is, the more tempting it becomes to extract that value. Sure, that's why it is important to have principled and long-term shareholders. An organisation's long-term strategic behavior necessarily tries to converge on its goals, set by its shareholders. I recognize that most companies are owned by shareholders who seek to eventually increase their personal wealth. I also recognize that principles almost always get to take a back seat if they cost the shareholders too much money.
Personally I reject the U.S. 1970s corporate law doctrine that the only legitimate purpose of a company is maximizing returns to its shareholders. That's ridiculous. In the case of Mullvad its mission is related to privacy, mass surveillance and censorship, in large part because we believe privacy and the absence of mass surveillance and censorship are part of the foundation of a healthy and thriving society.
As for extracting value to benefit me personally, I don't intend to accrue more than I need. I think I've reached the point where I'm satisfied with my lifestyle and the buffer I have. I've stopped playing the stock market, and instead placed my savings in long-term investments which require a minimum of attention. I'd rather do other things with my time. Obviously I'm also confident in my future earning potential should I catastrophically lose both my company and a large portion of my savings. It is very freeing and I recognize how rare and useful it is to be able to act in line with your values without concern for economic impact. I think it allows me to make better long-term strategic decisions about our companies.
Mostly I just want to maximize my contribution to society. I've toyed with the idea of placing my shares in Mullvad and my other companies in a foundation with some kind of open-source mission. I've also reached out to various non-profits and talked to tax advisors about abstaining from dividends, and have them sent directly to those non-profits. We'll see.
I don't do this for the money anymore. I do it because it is important to me. I wonder if a lot of people commenting or trying to apply social pressure assume that we're worried about the company losing value. Of course I would be sad if colleagues or a lot of customers left us, as I care immensely about both. That doesn't mean I'm willing to betray my principles, or in this case betray Mullvad's mission.
I hope I've managed to answer most of your questions. Please tell me more about what I should do to better understand the power I have over my colleagues, as their employer. What am I missing? Thank you.
I don't mind some jokes, though, it made me think of Animal Farm, which does not fit here.
You seem to be doing a great job as an employer, already caring is better than most, which is a low bar.
I meant your political power, more than power in the employer - employee relationship. You have more political power than your employees, by a lot. You may not use it, much, until today. But the imbalance is big, as proven by recent events.
Do you have plans for what will happen with the company when you two are no longer around? The book is more about such things, rather than what you might be able to with any profit. What happens to the organisation when you personally is not around to steer it?
> You have more political power than your employees, by a lot.
For sure.
> Do you have plans for what will happen with the company when you two are no longer around? The book is more about such things, rather than what you might be able to with any profit.
Loss is a natural part of life. Nothing exists or remains relevant forever. Market needs, people, and the world at large change. Hopefully for the better. The best we can do is act based on how we understand the world, which is why empathy and curiosity are so immensely valuable. They nudge us to understand the world and other people better, which facilitates more collaboration. I believe the vast majority of people have good intentions, but we often don't understand their behavior because we are blinded by our biases. When someone you respect does something you don't understand, or disapprove of, the rational reaction is curiosity. The alternative is to live an intellectually poorer life, which in turn impedes your ability to practice strategy, which in turn makes you less able to make progress on your goals.
We've considered so called "limited company with special restriction on profit distribution" [1]. It is a one-way "poison pill" for Swedish corporations that wish to permanently limit their ability to pay dividends to shareholders. Ultimately we found it too restrictive. It would risk impeding our ability to fund various open-source software and hardware efforts, among other things. I don't think we would have done it anyway. The risk is too high that you misjudge some aspect of it.
We've also talked about the option of creating foundations and donating our shares to them. Both of us see major risks with that too. In any case I hope it won't be relevant for a long time.
> What happens to the organisation when you personally is not around to steer it?
Daniel is a bit older than me, but unfortunately I have a progressive illness for which I take low-grade chemo and biologics. Modern medicine is amazing, especially the newer biopharmaceuticals that have come out in recent years. I will likely have to scale down my involvement first though.
Daniel would lead our companies to the best of his ability, together with our amazing management teams. I trust him more or less completely with the corporation. I know he will represent my values where it matters the most. He's very good at that. Last time we talked about this the feeling was mutual.
You don’t consider supporting “remigration”, aka forced expulsion of non-white-skinned people, to be actively malicious? What if he was physically going door to door and assaulting immigrants? Would that also be out of scope for you?
Of course the distinction itself is important in its own way, but I think/hope everyone here fully realizes and accepts that he technically donated as a private individual. You can clearly see it from the headline - it does not say "Mullvad VPN AB is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party", after all. For those who have an issue supporting Mullvad after this, that is unlikely to be the point of contention. The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with, profits from (and then funnels those profits into said actions), etc. Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.
> I think/hope everyone here fully realizes and accepts that he technically donated as a private individual
In this forum, yes. Unfortunately there are lots of people who don't care to inform themselves in the least. During the weekend my impression was that most people assumed Mullvad only had one founder, owner and CEO. Some people were implying that Mullvad's workforce supported this, which of course is ridiculous. I don't want to be associated with this donation. Then there are the people who think he donated 5 million USD or EUR. Sigh.
It would be nice if people didn't resort to make things up, and instead expressed their disapprovement based on fact. That's what I'm doing. As are several of my colleagues.
> The issue seems to be simply in this case, some people clearly find the private individual's actions objectionable enough to not want to support a product that individual is deeply associated with
Yes, that is clear.
> Fixating on this being done as a private individual just comes off like a bit of a deflection attempt from a pretty straightforward case of individual actions having consequences.
Ah, thanks. That was not my intent. For sure an individual's actions has consequences, especially when you're in a position of power. In this case people are holding Daniel accountable by switching providers. They are acting according to their beliefs. That's fine.
Meanwhile I am also trying to clarify Mullvad's position on the matter. Many people understand it and still disagree. That's also fine.
And if the Örebro party decides it wants chat control or similar things? Will Daniels privacy principles stand or will it bend to suit his likely stronger beliefs in anti immigration? Has he made similar contributions to parties against chat control?
> And if the Örebro party decides it wants chat control or similar things?
Then Mullvad would oppose it. I mean, the party is insignificant compared to the other parties in Sweden, so I wouldn't want to call them out specifically. It would be weird to give such a small party attention on our blog. If a journalist were to email us and ask about it explicitly that's another question. Of course Mullvad would oppose it.
> Will Daniels privacy principles stand
I would be very surprised if they didn't.
> or will it bend to suit his likely stronger beliefs in anti immigration?
What makes you say that? He's worked 17 years on building Mullvad, which is worth far more than 5 million SEK.
> Has he made similar contributions to parties against chat control?
Örebropartiet is not Al Qaeda nor a terrorist organisation. They can have a controversial position, but I'm not sure it is worse than the position of the republican party in the US which has many supporters amongst CEO of big tech companies.
> However, as others have argued, what would happen if Mullvad started weighing in on politics unrelated to its mission?
A bit too late for that now, isn't it? Extreme anti-immigration stances have always been associated with anti-privacy because eventually those stances evolve into state apparatuses designed to identify dissidents and targets for deportation. What will you do when the party your co-founder supports eventually demands stripping away privacy for the sake of finding 'terrorists'? Trying to hold this thin veneer of apoliticalism outside of your privacy stance is a remarkably foolish one and one that most people can identify. Especially those who saw that progression occur in real time.
> Maybe there's a case to distance Mullvad from him, then. Not taking a stand is also a political choice.
They are making a stand. This stance that they've taken has made me decide that I'm switching from another VPN provider TO Mullvad. Not many people have the backbone to actually stand behind freedom of speech when it may cost them something. It's very admirable.
No, this is unrelated from privacy. The issue is that the EU won’t allow the new Siri because Apple isn’t willing to open up the system enough for 3rd party AI agents to get the same functionality.
Because Siri is the brand and other competitors will dilute the brand with their inferior products, is the line of reasoning, I'm sure. I'm unclear on why apple is branding the AI launcher or whatever if it's just going to be a wrapper for a third party product, however.
> It could instead require third parties to improve theirs.
Apple made it sound like their proposal for that was rejected by the EU. And it would be consistent with previous regulatory decisions by the EU for them to not want Apple to be setting the rules for how third-party interoperability partners/competitors ensure privacy.
It seems to me that the EU has a preference for protecting privacy with legal mechanisms, and generally doesn't approve of Apple's attempts to protect privacy with technical mechanisms because that inevitably limits interoperability with systems that aren't designed around the same restrictions and assumptions.
I’m sure they love it when Apple says, “Well… they COULD give us their models to put in private compute, but we’re not paying them for that and they’re not getting any more data than we get, ourselves. Which is exactly none.”
Apple is building a system that is more private than EU law requires. If they tell say Facebook that Facebook can integrate in but first must meet the same more than is legally required standard Apple is aiming for wouldn't that be anti-competitive?
For example, with Copilot, you get a contractual pinky promise that they cannot access your data.
Can engineers really not access ? Can the police really not access ?
It's like AirTag for example. Apple cannot access it because it's scientifically "impossible" by design, but if they sign-in to your account, well it's over.
Once Apple fills the right audit / certification / paperwork they will be able to enable that feature. It could also be a negotiation lever.
EU privacy laws are not there to protect your privacy, its there because the law makers don't know how modern privacy works and wants their name on the law so it seems they did something.
Uhm no, EU privacy laws are actually pretty simple: do not collect data you don't need without asking consent from a user first.
Which should IMO be the basic principle worldwide. But unfortunately in many countries, companies are more powerful than governments/regulators, so they get to grab everything they can get their hands on.
When the justice system gets fixed in Spain maybe I'll pay the taxes there again. It shouldn't take more than a year to get an okupa out. It's too slow.
I milked that cow already. But thank you Spain for the free education and the scholarships!
Isn't that a selfish view, though? "Works for me,so I don't care that systemd is creating dependencies everywhere for everyone else".
I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives.
Isn't linux about choice? It feels we're going on a downwards spiral where choice is being taken away from us in every domain
> I appreciate that it simplifies some things, but I can't understand that you can't choose which parts of it to install, or even replace parts of it with alternatives.
You can? The system where I'm writing this uses systemd, yet networking is handled by NetworkManager and not systemd-networkd. Time keeping is handled by chrony and not systemd-timesyncd (or whatever the systemd NTP client was called). Etc. Systemd in fact has many components that are optional. Of course, there are also parts of it that are non-optional, just like many other collections of related software.
> Isn't linux about choice?
Linux is "about choice" to the extent that the source code is freely available, and if you don't like what upstream is doing, you have the choice to fork it and do whatever you want. "Linux is about choice" does not extend to upstream maintainers being obligated to cater to every whim of every end user.
Case in point, Devuan: Not being satisfied with the path Debian was taking, they exercised their choice and are now doing their own thing. Good for them! And to the extent this has reduced the frequency of systemd haters starting yet another anti-systemd flame war on the Debian mailing lists, it seems to me Debian has won too. Hooray!
How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd?
If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox?
I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn't modular enough? Use something else then that is modular.
OK you're missing the historical context here. To make this story extremely short, the author of Systemd was already known for another project that was causing problems to Linux users but was shipped early. And when Systemd was released, it has several issues, too, so some distros like Debian withheld the switch. But at some point the folks at Red Hat decided to tie Systemd to the login mechanism for Gnome. I don't believe there was any hidden agenda here, it was just more logical for them. However, this caused huge headache for package maintainers of non-Systemd distros. There was the whole drama with voting, Debian project leader leaving, Devuan appearing and so on.
I believe most people moved on, but the way it was all done somehow didn't feel right.
Ok, yes, I wasn't aware of the history, I use whatever my distribution uses as default, and been doing that for decades now, as that tends to be less hassle, so been using systemd for a while because of that.
With this new knowledge about the history, I still feel the same as the original question. AFAIK, no one is forcing people/distributions to adopt systemd. It might be easier, and most takes the easiest route, but that's OK, right? That doesn't mean that you cannot make another choice, maybe involving more work, but you can still make that choice, unless again I miss something obvious here.
The problem is mostly that programs started depending on aspects of systemd that are both very complex, and difficult/impossible to implement without ending up with systemd. Systemd's components don't play well with established standards (sometimes not running standalone at all), which contributes to the feeling of having to buy into the whole ecosystem just to use a small part of it, just for that one bit of a certain program that now depends on it.
This has happened with gnome's display manager, and now gnome-shell is threatening to cease functioning without systemd, as well as on systems that systemd doesn't run on such as the BSDs. KDE's new login manager is now doing the same, so in many respects, people's fears have been validated.
Is that "logout" referring to a user explicitly logging out from a desktop environment? I can't imagine it would apply to a closed SSH session, or at least it wouldn't make sense if it did.
> It is now indeed the case that any background processes that were still running are killed automatically when the user logs out of a session, whether it was a desktop session, a VT session, or when you SSHed into a machine.
And the reddit comments include a link to a tmux issue where the suggested solution is for tmux to add systemd as a dependency (https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428). Includes some back-and-forth about how all sorts of software would have to change in similar ways to accommodate systemd, instead of systemd just playing nicely with decades of established practice.
I had no idea about that. Does seem a bizarre choice for systemd to do that.
I admin a whole bunch of headless servers and so am often SSHing to them and running long running jobs. Some of them run VNC sessions, and I certainly wouldn't want a VNC session to kill of other SSH sessions by the same user. At least with VNC, I almost never "logout" - they're often autostarted (by systemd) and just get killed when the machine gets rebooted.
To be clear: systemd works fine to start/stop services. Usually. If you have a working system with systemd, it's rarely worth ripping out and replacing. That's just more risk than reward.
Citing PulseAudio adds nothing here. Distros decided to ship it early, just like systemd later ... that choice wasn’t pushed by Poettering. Dragging in an earlier project without making an actual technical or governance argument is just character framing. It’s not evidence, it’s a smear.
No, I decided to include it to explain the emotional response to Systemd. I didn't mean to offend anyone. That stuff didn't work and broken things were pushed on people again, that's why some revolted.
At the time desktop Linux projects like consolekit were an unmaintained mess, it needed replacements. Systemd also supported cgroups V2 and people really wanted to use that. No conspiracy or underhandedness required.
I don't think anyone would ever object against systemd as a project, it would make as much sense as objecting against, say, GNU Chess. All software has bugs, and they're gradually worked out. But the way it was introduced that made many people upset.
The way it was introduced was that many people could see the value in cgroups V2 and being able to drop unmaintained projects. Maintainers of distros and projects sometimes did this against some users wants, but in my opinion there was just lots of baseless complaining without creating an alternative.
I don't get it. If you install openbsd, you get dependencies that openbsd developers has chosen. You can try to remove every aspect of those choices but at some point it won't be openbsd anymore.
Is the claim here that Red Hat is unnecessary coupling their critical parts of the distribution in ways that other distributions would not do? A few examples here would be nice.
EEE is about taking existing standards/software and making it eventually incompatible with FOSS. That's very different from creating a new thing, and asking people to use that. AFAIK, they're not replacing anything (but maybe I missed something), so I don't see it as the same as what Microsoft did back in the day.
I think it's similar. We have a big powerful company pushing their solution, pushing more and more software to depend on that solution, so people who want to exercise their choice not to have an increasingly uphill battle to do so.
That doesn't seem so different from what Microsoft used to do, as even back then there was always choice if people decided to get together and exercise it, but practically in both cases it's an uphill battle.
Gnome, for example. GDM now needs systemd's userdb.
It is indeed becoming harder and harder to avoid and I understand that this isn't great, but systemd tackles some genuinely hard problems that others don't. Which is to say I don't begrudge Gnome devs for this and personally prefer systemd over current alternatives.
I've looked at OpenRC, RUnit and S6. I haven't recently run any of them "in production", however.
Personally, I am a strong believer that declaring the desired state is a lot easier to get right than actually writing the code to get there. Beyond that, I'm not saying any of these are bad at being what they are, systemd just has more features, some of which I really like. Two examples I'm actively using currently are automount units and socket activation (S6 also has socket activation). I have some remote folders mounted via SSHFS automatically when I access them and this is incredibly useful for my workflow.
Could I find tools to slot into other init systems that do this for me? Probably. But systemd has this neatly packaged up, easy to configure and easy to introspect state.
It uses a folder with a subfolder for every service. Each subfolder contains a script called run. The system runs the run script. If it exits, it waits two seconds and runs it again. Repeatedly. It's very worse–is–better.
There are commands to control the services and check their status. For example, if a file called down exists next to the run script, it won't run it. This is how you disable a service.
It checks for service folders being created and deleted. New folders are started, and deleted ones are stopped cleanly. They can also be symlinks, so you don't need to worry about deleting a running service folder and you can remove a service from init without erasing the scripts you wrote.
The whole system is useful in many situations and not only as pid 1.
Maybe one day I'll invent a runit–based distribution.
Dependencies may be becoming less properties of software, and more so properties of the distro's systemd wiring.
More and more software will assimilate systemd features. Free distros will patch, shim, emulate, flounder. Or in GPT parlance "Dependencies are no longer intrinsic properties of software; they are emergent properties of a distribution's systemd orchestration layer"
Meanwhile, gripes, fears etc,
'Linux' becomes interpreted vs inspectable.
Requires superfluous new literacy
Convolutes logs, tools
Obscures causality
Centralized control above Unix process model
Fair well ps aux, hello systemctl, cgtop, gls
KILL (less lethalized) superceded, replaced by service stop and mask
Surrender chains for events, ie buggy debugging or complexity accretion
General obfuscation beneath the hood
Centralized ... indexed, logs vs text streams
And....
Upstream assumes systemd
Some resist
Costs rise
Optional becomes expected
Accidental incompatibility
And... systemd ingurgitates one by one, policy, supervision, logging, identity, dependency management and the rest of the world... digests it, and from the aether emerges a sweet smiley face, disgorging forth a monolithic mutant avatar, with Linux features.
I'll be quiet happy to be wrong about everything. Feel free to slaughter everything I've written. I don't even oppose systemd - I simply perceive it as a singularity that's drawing everything around me towards it. Wrong would definitely be good, so please don't hold back. I won't seek pardon for the rant though, because true or false, it's honest.
Edit: I was reading through my threads and thought the parent was asking me, though wasn't. I've unintentionally barged in here, but I'll leave the comment anyway, as it references a very big concern of mine.
With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd.
Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg. rootless Xorg requires udev, udev turned into a systemd component. want to run xterm without systemd? good luck, you are now the maintainer of your own LFS.
The udev developers decided that it made sense to move udev into systemd. If you disagree and want choice, you can fork udev. Actually some people did that, so you can run xterm with eudev instead of udev and thus avoid systemd (though eudev seems hardly maintained now, with the latest release in 2023).
I think it's true that it's an exhausting battle to keep all those parts independent when 95% of the devs/money agree it's better to integrate them. But it wouldn't be fair either for the 5% to put on the others the burden of keeping things independent because of their own preferences...
eudev was just a copy of the udev part of systemd, with some patches to build on musl, and work without systemd.
All of that has been upstreamed now, LFS has instructions on how to build udev from the latest systemd release, without building systemd itself.
Yeah, it’s miserable; xterm shouldn’t require Xorg. It should be agnostic to display system and not force the X monoculture on everyone. Classic Microsoft gestapo tactics: shoehorn Xorg dependencies into tons of unrelated apps and thus curtail user freedom to run xterm with a WinForms or Wayland display system. It’s appalling.
From the project documentation: "The xterm program is a terminal emulator for the X Window System."
The application does not require xorg it requires an x11 server.
It just so happens that until recently xorg was the only game in town as far as Linux x11 servers are concerned.
> With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd.
Yes, but this is hardly a unique systemd/Linux problem. I despise TypeScript for various reasons, always preferred vanilla JavaScript over TypeScript. So if I'm met with "Huh, this library is using TypeScript, am I ready to deal with that", I make the choice to not depend on that, even though half of the ecosystem uses TypeScript.
Going against the grain comes with more work probably, but this is also a choice we make, because we have strong feelings and opinions about something.
Languages are confined. I don't speak Rust — yet — so when I want to modify some software that is written in Rust that is a disappointment. However, the effect of software being written in Rust is limited to that software and its libraries. It doesn't infect your system the way systemd does.
You can turn most parts off. Maybe don't talk about stuff you have not much idea about ?
There is point to complain about distros turning it on by default but you could have systemd where systemd just does unit management and not much more.
The hardest part to get rid of would probably be journald as this parasite's log format is just... not good in any metric but it isn't easy to replace either if you want to keep systemd functionality
Google being the cesspool it is, can serve whichever (ad laden) domain that fits their own interests the best.
This is yet another move to remove power from the users.
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