• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Thinking about it from your point of view, maybe MS was right and Linux is a cancer too. Technically it behaves similarly to systemd, since most Unixes are actually Linuxes nowadays (excluding BSD ofc, but they are still in the minority, similarly to alternatives to systemd). It even is a binary blob as well!

    Should every distro use/develop a different kernel? Should we focus our resources on providing alternatives and again have a multitude of different Unix versions, every incompatible with each other? Isn’t it better that we have this solid foundation and make it as good as it can be?

    Overall I think standardization of init is not so bad, just like adopting the Linux kernel was. It is actually quite nice that you can hop from distro to distro and know what to expect from such a basic thing as init process.

    Anyways, in Linux land you actually have a possibility to replace it. Granted, it is not as easy, however there are plenty of distros that allow you to ditch systemd in favor of something else.



  • Agreed. I’d say with open source it is harder to ‘get away’ with malicious features, since the code is out in the open. I guess if authors were to put those features, open nature of their code also serves as a bit of a deterrent sice there is a much bigger possibility of people finding out compared to closed source. However as you said it is not impossible, especially since not many people look through the code of everything they run. And even then it is not impossible to obfuscate it well enough for it not to be spotted on casual read-through.