Mastodawn

[object Object]Mar 22

the thing you must understand now is that regardless of their stated views, liars like Bryan Lunduke, Lennart Poettering, and Dylan M Taylor have demonstrated by their actions that they all have the same goal: a fascist software ecosystem that operates against our interests and exploits but does not empower our labor. it is the destruction of FOSS as we know it.

1/

[object Object]Mar 22

Bryan Lunduke has always treated FOSS like a right-wing political project. he has also always misrepresented his goals as technical ones. the current moment is very convenient for him: he is using the valid need for an alternative to systemd to funnel people into fascist-controlled software ecosystems like Devuan and Artix. under no circumstances will Lunduke ever acknowledge the many init alternatives and distributions run by marginalized leftists. this is the game he has played for years.

2/

Mike Sperber Mar 22

[object Object]

systemd has always been a lever of power; there’s no other reason to create an ecosystem of its shape. the person who grasps that lever is Lennart Poettering, and it always has been. I don’t need to write much on this; I watched the “oh shit” moment last week when systemd started accepting slop code, and again when an age verification mechanism was imposed on every systemd user and distro on Poettering’s final word. this was always the social structure on offer, enforced by a rigid ecosystem.
3/

[object Object]Mar 22

when Dylan M Taylor (the author of the age verification code in systemd, Ubuntu, and Arch, and a defender of Google’s dreadful new restrictions for Android apps) and others in his wake compare his age verification implementation with an age gate on an adult site, they know full well that adult content online is a gray area rapidly verging towards illegal as US states and other repressive regimes implement age verification laws.

4/ (Taylor cont.)

[object Object]Mar 22

they are fully aware that said laws disproportionately punish individual online creators. they must be aware of these things, as they are presenting themselves as experts on the downstream effects of age verification when they state that it’s just like an age gate that can easily be bypassed.

you must understand that the unfairness is the point. you must understand that you are the individual, marginalized online creator who will be punished. that is the point of all this.

5/

[object Object]Mar 22

at this point I have no remaining patience for the “if you don’t like it just fork it” crowd. patches don’t fix any of this. the only thing that does is to refuse; to get angry and organize. none of these people deserve your advocacy or your loyalty. they do not give a shit about technical merit, the FOSS ecosystem, your contributions, or you. there is only one goal, and it’s very clear what it is.

end

@zzt I hate this so much, thank you for writing such a clear analysis of the situation.

I had a feeling things were going wrong with slop being accepted into systemd, and worse when "left" media personalities started citing the fascist Lunduke as a source.

@taylorlorenz this is why you shouldn't platform that piece of shit.

staringatclouds Mar 22

@zzt So how do we remove Bryan Lunduke, Lennart Poettering, and Dylan M Taylor from the "I can push through any changes to the Linux core I like" chain ?

Krzysztof Sakrejda 3d ago

@staringatclouds @zzt actually replace systemd? It's very modular so it's not too hard...

Stephen Foskett Mar 22

@zzt I hear ya pal. Having a similar discussion on systemd this morning right here.

Jules 🍺Mar 22

@sfoskett @zzt yes, me to, along the lines of small groups of three make changes to Foss projects all the time like its fixing a bug, also if we had to have a committee for all minor changes nothing would get done.
Its so devisive and misleading, suggest we drop d.conf, I've never liked it, to much like the MS registery
#dropDconf

Dualtronic Mar 22

@zzt When we used to shout this off the rooftops, people were all, "no no, see, it's *progress*! there are Good Reasons(tm)!"

Steven Reed Mar 22

@felix @zzt I was one of those, I'm afraid to say. Now rapidly reconsidering my positions and wondering if I'm too old to learn a BSD :(

Steven Reed Mar 22

@felix @zzt (actually, mostly, it's reinforcing my desire to set all the tech in my life on fire and run away to farm goats)

@srtcd424
If you're not too old to learn about farming and goats, you're not too old to learn a different OS ;)
@felix @zzt

Chuckles Mar 22

@viq @srtcd424 @felix @zzt technology is so much easier than goats, or more specifically a goat.

fan boy 🪭6d ago

@viq @srtcd424 @felix @zzt
I was never young enough to learn about farming and goats

Dualtronic Mar 22

@srtcd424 I've been considering a switch to BSD for years, but it's hard after a quarter century on Linux. Thankfully there are still a few distros that managed to keep the systemd alien parasite at bay.

Steven Reed Mar 22

@felix for me, going back to something non-declarative after nixos though would feel like a huge step backwards. I don't want to get sucked into ansible or anything equally icky in order to make my stuff reproducible :(

@srtcd424 @felix haha, lately I've been wondering if I could run liminix (uses s6-rc) on my laptop. But right now I can barely run it on my router so I guess I should fix that first.

(As you probably already knew, a lot of nixpkgs works just fine without nixos, it's the modules/services that are coupled to the init system/service manager)

@srtcd424 You could try Guix. It's similar in principle to NixOS (but with Guile scheme instead of the Nix language) and it doesn't use systemd, instead it uses shepherd which is itself written in Guile. Package availability is pretty good, although the default package repo excludes non-free packages. Service availability is more limited I'd say, but on the upside, a home-manager equivalent and a deployment tool are included by default.

@felix @srtcd424 give Chimera Linux a try: built on musl libc, with BSD-based userland tools, and with Dinit as init system

Dualtronic Mar 22

@jmc @srtcd424 I just might, thanks! Been looking at Chimera twice or thrice lately, and their recent statements regarding current developments are very encouraging.

Gregório Mar 22

@srtcd424 @felix @zzt same, but going to Gentoo, despite the learning courve that I know awaits me.

Ps.: what’s the issue with Artix and fascism? I considered them, but dismissed the idea after not finding an explicit anti-AI policy from them.

@srtcd424 @felix @zzt never too old to learn a BSD!
Arguably easier to understand than Linux to be honest

Bill Ricker 5d ago

@paul @srtcd424 @felix @zzt
BSD and Gnu/Linux are both re-implementations of the Unix later POSIX interfaces, and BSD and GNU have cross-fertilized over the decades, so there's less re-learning than one might expect.
Seriously considering going home to *BSD ...

Dualtronic 5d ago

@BRicker Sure, using them is pretty much the same, barring available command flags and stuff like that. Sysadmin work, not so much. Okay, it can be learned. The BSDs are famous for their documentation. I played with them. Saw what it involves. Definitely doable in a pinch. Still not a switch to make casually.

Bill Ricker 5d ago

@felix
right.
OTOH if one is picking next one's next distro for avoiding the SystemD universal attack-surface, one is opting into sysadmin differences from mainstream already.

(Having started on PWB before BSD 3&4, and suffering thru multiple Gnu version churns, I alas expect flags to vary unexpectedly.)

(We had a client last decade that used *BSD for prod nodes (security out of the box) and CENTOS for internal dev nodes & desktops. Their problems weren't sysadmin.)

Dualtronic 5d ago

@BRicker I started using Linux a quarter century ago. SysVInit was *the* init system. It's systemd I could never get used to.

Can you please accept that I do in fact have a clue about all this stuff?

Bill Ricker 5d ago

@felix so you weren't there when Sys V & SysVinit were new?
You have longish history with Linux but not Bell Unix, Sys iii, old BSD, modern *bsd, commercial Unix?
I'll acknowledge you've got a clue, but just the one. Some of us remember how BSD variants were incorporated back into SVR2, and the chaos that reined before that.

I think we're in agreement about (un)desirability of the SystemD Universal Attack Surface, so I'm not sure why you feel the need to argue with me.

Dualtronic 4d ago

@BRicker Perhaps because you jumped into my replies unprompted.

@srtcd424 So far, Alpine has been the easiest install I've ever done, and I started in the '90s. Just FYI :)
@felix @zzt

Dualtronic Mar 22

@KatS I've played with Alpine, thanks. It's another potential option.

anniethebruce Mar 22

@zzt I've never hated it like some, but the number of things it seems to want to control always bothered me.

Never thought of it as a tool to corrupt things, more a technical concern. Which I think is still more or less valid, but this... If systemd integrates the age verification too deeply, it's going to be a problem for distros that don't want this. Yes, open source allows that to be ripped out, but being able to do it doesn't always mean it's actually feasible to do so.

Morten Linderud 3d ago

@zzt
Everything written in this is either extremely misleading or just factually wrong.

[object Object]3d ago

@Foxboron k bro

like, what is anyone supposed to do with this? “oh some FOSS asshole said it was misleading and wrong and didn’t give any other details, never seen that one before” come the fuck off it. I gave enough of a shit to write my points in full and you think this hacker news false authority crap is gonna fly with anybody?

Doofus Canadensis 3d ago

@zzt I saw that reaction about systemd configuring AGENTS.md for use in the project.

A bit of digging turned up that it wasn't just the other week, though. They added copilot configurations last October and only converted it to Claude the other week.