The Linux Homefront Project reports on Lennart Poettering looking to do away with the good old "su" command. From the article, "With this pull request systemd now support a su command functional and can create privileged sessions, that are fully isolated from the original session. Su is a classic UNIX command and used more than 30 years. Why su is bad? Lennart Poettering says:"
Well, there have been long discussions about this, but the problem is that what su is supposed to do is very unclear. On one hand it’s supposed to open a new session and change a number of execution context parameters (uid, gid, env, …), and on the other it’s supposed to inherit a lot concepts from the originating session (tty, cgroup, audit, …). Since this is so weakly defined it’s a really weird mix&match of old and new paramters. To keep this somewhat managable we decided to only switch the absolute minimum over, and that excludes XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, specifically because XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is actually bound to the session/audit runtime and those we do not transition. Instead we simply unset it.
Long story short: su is really a broken concept. It will given you kind of a shell, and it’s fine to use it for that, but it’s not a full login, and shouldn’t be mistaken for one.
I'm guessing that Devuan won't be getting rid of "su."
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Tuesday September 01 2015, @06:38AM
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Free.2FOpen_Source_Operating_systems_without_systemd_in_the_default_installation [without-systemd.org] ... I've never even heard of any of the other ones on that list. Anybody have recommendations?
PCLinuxOS [pclinuxos.com] is worth a look. And the Slackware derivative Salix [salixos.org]*, a (somewhat) simplified Slack with an easy to use package manager that looks after dependancies.
*Warning: I went to Salix when I dropped OpenSuse and stayed with it for a couple of weeks before moving on to Slackware; the same could happen to you.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.