Hello:

On 21 Jun 2026 at 10:43, Martin Steigerwald wrote:

> ... Lennart wrote Systemd would be an init system replacement ...
> ... his communication was not quite so accurate and complete.
Surprise!
But I beg to differ.

I think that systemd was written to be what it is now.
More so: to be what it *will* become further on.

Just wait for it.

---

In another life, I landed a job maintaining 60+ PCs at a ministry
within the local federal government.

Some were purchased with late edition W95 and the rest with first
edition W98 pre-installed and I dealt with both the OS and new
hardware / peripherals as replacements were purchased as well as a
file server.

The one thing that has always stayed with me (idiot users being
another subject altogether) is how the MS registry ended up being
what most issues/problems gave me, sometimes on a daily basis.

Obscure, undocumented, changing at every upgrade.
Tech suppoert from MS? Yes, I had heard of it.

> As I compared Systemd strategy with the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
> (EEE) from Microsoft he asked me to stop being a d*ck.
Did you actually expect anything different?
Maybe not at the time, but I am sure that you do *now*. 8^)

---

I had previously learnt what the MS EEE was by way of prior
experience with DOS and W3.1 / 3.11 but did not associate it with
anything but the usual corporate greed MS was/is all about.

FF to when I decided to convert my home box from XP-SP3 to Linux, at
first with a crude dual boot (separate HDDs, boot selected in BIOS)
and with time became aware of what it was all about.

More than anything, the philosophy behind it and how everything was
much clearer and simple. ie: no registry, multiple log files to see
what was actually going on with the system, the power of the
terminal, no blue screen of death (!), etc.

Not to mention the possibility of actual support from web forums.
That *alone* is absolutely priceless.

All in all, it was a whole new experience for me.

Then one day things changed and systemd showed up in the distribution

I was using at the time (Ubuntu?). I went along for a few months and
as I became aware of the changes and delved deeper into what systemd
was about and what it did, I *instantly* realised what had happened.

Someone had written a clone of the MS registry for Linux and it *was*
a thing.

EEE had reared its ugly head, now lived within the Linux ecosystem.
So I kept moving from distribution to distribution avoiding all those
that adopted systemd and finally settled on Devuan.

And with *no systemd in my box* is the hill I will die on.

TL;DR:
systemd is nothing but a tool developed by L. Poettering to slowly
but steadily infiltrate, control and eventually crush the Linux
ecosystem as we know it.

This is being achieved via one of the arguably most important
distributions (Debian) and will eventually result in its becoming a
faint memory of what it once was.
ie: just collateral damage

I strongly suspect that L. Poettering has been working for MS for
much longer than it is known.

"Conspiracy theory!" some will argue.
Maybe ...

But if one looks at what has transpired in the past decade, what the
end result has been for Linux and "follow the money", a *think again*
is mandatory or at the very least, common sense.

Because ...
How is it that *now* MS, having once labelled Linux "a cancer" (S.
Ballmer 2001), has Windows WSL to host a Linux environment in its
OSs, Azure Clouds running on Linux servers and its own Linux Azure
branded distribution?

I sincerely hope to be wrong, but I foresee (a turn of phrase if you
will) that the time will come when one will not be able to boot a PC
(or whatever replaces it) if some form of systemd is not present
somewhere in the hardware.

And whan that comes to be ...

"Who you gon' call?" *

Best,

A.

* Ray Parker Jr. et al. / Ghostbusters - 1984