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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:16AM
Devuan
If you were happy with Debian before Lennart, try antiX (pronounced "Antiques").
It's based on Debian Testing but has avoided Lennart's junk.
They recently had a new release. [freeforums.org]
They have several spins and as long as you have 64MB of RAM and a blank 700MB CD-R (or a thumbdrive), you should be golden.
If your box has some modern oomph, this will make it like a 427 AC Cobra.
-- gewg_