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A number of users have reported that running "rm --no-preserve-root -rf /" not only deletes all their files (as expected), but also permanently bricks their computers (which is not). Tracing the issue revealed that the ultimate cause was that SystemD mounted the EFI pseudo-fs as read-write even when this FS was not listed in fstab, and deleting certain files in this pseudo-fs causes certain buggy, but very common, firmware not to POST anymore. A user reported this bug on SystemD's GitHub issue tracker, asking that the FS be mounted read-only instead of read-write, and said bug was immediately closed as invalid. The comment thread for the bug was locked shortly after. Discuss.
Links:
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/02/01/running-a-single-delete-command-can-permanently-brick-laptops-from-inside-linux/
(Score: 4, Informative) by hash14 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:47AM
Agreed. You're talking about a project that's a censorious dictatorship, and one with no respect at that. Nobody I've seen talking about systemd has a single nice thing to say about Lennart. The only thing that keeps him in his position is that he works for Red Hat and whoever gives him a paycheck seems to like what he's doing... so at least there's one group who has respect for what he's doing, albeit one that we should feel very edgy about.
But because he refuses to ever admit that he's wrong or that he can ever take the advice of another individual*, he just stamps his feet like a petulant child and then wonders why nobody likes him or his software. Everyone's just a hater right? But it's not without reason....
* I can't actually back this up concretely, but I'm just making judgements on some of his more high-profile temper tantrums
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 09 2016, @03:52AM
His number 2, Kay Sievers, has been about as bad [freedesktop.org], to the point where Linus banned any further kernel changes from Kay.
For what it's worth, I'm solidly anti-systemd, even if that means I'm building my entire system from source code.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hash14 on Tuesday February 09 2016, @04:04AM
Yeah, we've all been forced off our "comfort platforms". I used to be a Debian stalwart and miss it dearly. I'd love to jump to Devuan, but it looks like even they are having some issues keeping the repository systemd free. So it's Gentoo for me now, and while it's a magnificent project, I'd far prefer going back to a package-based distro. The problem is just that none are reliable (at keeping out systemd) or seem viable in the long-term (Gentoo is doing the most to preserve independence from systemd). And I'll give BSD a try at some point, I just worry that the performance/hardware support won't be quite up to that of Linux.
In any case, I don't even think it's Lennart or Kay who's the biggest danger. It's Greg Kroah-Hartman who's the #2 Linux developer. He's a big fanboy of systemd, has taken to trolling Gentoo developers for forking udev (because *shock* some people don't like systemd), and was pushing hard for the monstrosity that is kdbus to be mainlined in 4.1 - thankfully that didn't happen. But with him at the helm (or #2 at least), I'm seriously concerned about the lines being blurred between Linux and systemd, and how much Linux development in the future will be specifically to cater to systemd. That, in my opinion, is the greatest threat to Linux right now.
(Score: 1) by UncleSlacky on Tuesday February 09 2016, @10:29AM
Just FYI, both antiX and MX-15 are systemd-free (it can be added if desired) and based on Debian Jessie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:45PM
There is also Calculate Linux, a binary distro with a Gentoo base.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Tuesday February 09 2016, @08:25PM
Ditto Manjaro-OpenRC [sourceforge.net], an Arch-derived distro (well, Manjaro-OpenRC is derived from Manjaro is derived from Arch!). I use this on a little Celeron NUC with a cheap SSD and it's pretty good. Being largely Arch, you have access to all the same stuff (e.g. -ck or -pf kernels, etc).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09 2016, @05:50PM
On the topic of GregKH, one reason he is so defensive about udev is that he wrote it back in the day.
Yes, Sievers currently had maintainership when it was folded into systemd. But i suspect it had the tacit approval of GregKH.
Rob Landley has an interesting story about an exchange between him, Sievers and GregKH about documenting the /sys interface udev depends on.
http://www.landley.net/notes-2015.html#05-07-2015 [landley.net]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @02:50AM
Because I don't use the full Gnome or KDE suites, I've found it possible to have a Debian 8 desktop with most of my favourite software, without using systemd as the init. Because systemd caused one crash for me, I decided I didn't want it.
In /etc/apt/preferences I put
Package: systemd
Pin-Priority: -1
I installed the sysvinit package to replace systemd, and allowed the installation of the libsystemd0 package.