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The pretense is security, PC software attestation is already in the workings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

The phones were prior with "play protect" certification. It's all being captured. Since we can't seem to have more virtuous companies, we need more regulation.

alternate libc's like musl. the eglibc controversy showed this was necessary but poettering initially refused to support a "non-useful libc". his words.

But musl exists today? And even I use it from time to time, mostly I think in Alpine Linux. How was musl hindered if we can use it?

Maybe it isn't as popular as you would have wanted, but I don't think that's the same as claiming it's been hindered by systemd.


> But musl exists today

Yes and the systemd crowd wants to embrace and extinguish it as well [1]

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/v259-rc1/NEWS


So if systemd refuses to support musl, it's "hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space", and when they change their mind and work to add support for musl, it's "to embrace and extinguish it".

Paradoxically that's how I see it.

Being an old fart and sysvinit pundit I am course wrong.


I got to line 1500 before I gave up, what from that indicates they want to "extinguish" musl?

1. Support musl 2. Become mainstream with musl distros 3. Become dependency in practical terms 4. Then even software optimized for musl-based distros has to deal and support systemd

But do you have any proof for beyond #1? Seems like a far jump here, but maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Nope. It's my view of the situation and I'm confident that will be the case. Not that it's an evil plan. Just a nature taking its course. This is how I see it.

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.


xterm is literally x terminal but it's not systemd terminal

xterm runs on Wayland and arcan; you should pick a different strawman

> 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.

Initially i hated systemd for the change it bought and lennarts behavior, but today I'm wiser.

Today i hate systemd for its bad debugability (edit unit & daemon-reload loops), the lockups that happen whenever there is a fifo in the wrong place, and the processes that systemd spawns with no apparent related unit and without means to mask them. And the difficult to disable suspends on machines that never had any business suspending.


Could you please expand bit more about those processes that systemd spawns without units?

Cgroups in Linux kernel, and systemd-cgls tool should let you trace every process to a source


ibus and goa both run under dbus.service.

I ran into this problem because ibus runs later than setxkbmap and undoes the keyboard settings.


OK so those processes are launched not by systemd, but by dbus itself.

There's probably a /usr/share/dbus-1/services/org.freedesktop.IBus.service file in your system and if dbus sees something that tries to talk to IBus, and IBus is not running yet, dbus will launch it for you as directed in that file. In it's own namespace unless directed otherwise.

There's an optional integration between dbus and systemd, look for SystemdService in man dbus-daemon. IBus does not set it. Perhaps it should. I don't know.

> I ran into this problem because ibus runs later than setxkbmap and undoes the keyboard settings.

that must've been pain to debug :). I can see on my system that there's a systemd user service that I could launch with `systemctl --user start org.freedesktop.IBus.session.generic.service`, maybe that would work better than on-demand via dbus in your case.


It's that lack of visibility that still makes me low-key hate it, though it's no longer the part of the modern Linux ecosystem that I hate most so I mostly just accept that it's part of watching a platform I used to really like enshittenate itself.

Same here.

> You're just not entitled to have third parties trust that device with their systems and money.

But its a bank, right? Its my money.


If malware on your phone steals it the bank could be on the hook. The bank can set terms on how you access their computers.

Can it sets terms on my religious and political views? I'm not speaking about race and sex, you cannot choose them (ok, sex you could in some jurisdictions, and there is difference between sex and gender, please, don't be nitpicky here), but about things I can choose same as I can choose my hardware and software to run.

If there is real effective market (which is not in any country on Earth, especially for banks), you could say: vote with you money, choose bank which suits you. But it is impossible even with bakery, less with banks on market which is strictly regulated (in part as result of lobbying by established institutions, to protect themselves!).

So, on one hand, I must use banks (I cannot pay for many things in cash, here, where I live most of bars and many shops doesn't accept cash, for example, and it is result of government politics and regulations), and on other hand banks is not seen as essential as access to air and water, they could dictate any terms they want.

I see this situation completely screwed.


You DO understand you can own more than one phone, right? Just use one that isn't rooted as a dedicated banking device and the rooted phone for whatever else you need. You are making life far too hard.

But to have two desktop computers — one attestable and other not — is much more hard than two mobile devices.

And we are discussing this movement here. You know, пive him an inch and he'll take a yard.


It is actually very easy to use VMs for the non attesting machine.

Would YOU be willing to use a bank that refused to use TLS? I didn't think so. How is you refusing to accept remote attestation and the bank refusing to connect to you any different?


Everything under the assumption that tampering is a bigger problem then abusive companies controlling your software stack.

... and it will also refuse to boot if it has been modified by the user.

Preventing this was the reason we had free software in the first place.


Increasing security for the system owner will necessarily decrease the ability of others to modify the system in ways the owner doesn't like.

With "owner" not being the legal owner, but Microsoft.

> Because I use NixOS

feels like the new "btw i use arch"


Maybe its that the social norms around sex are that women do not enjoy it and men have to force it on them.

The harm of that is that women feel shame for enjoying it and men feel shame for wanting it.

The social norms are garbage, at some point in life you figure it out by experience...


Are the stars by users or by automated agents?


Came to say this


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