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Phoronix has an article up about some interesting ideas of Lennart Poettering about what could be a possible future for Linux:
Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame has published a lengthy blog post that shares his vision for how he wishes to change how Linux software systems are put together to address a wide variety of issues. The Btrfs file-system and systemd play big roles with his new vision. Long story short, Lennart is trying to tackle how Linux distributions and software systems themselves are assembled to improve security, deal with the challenges of upstream software vendors integrating into many different distributions, and "the classic Linux distribution scheme is frequently not what end users want."
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New Linux Vision That Involves btrfs
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(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:24AM
Been a Debian user since 2000 and been happy with it, but they're still committed to moving to systemd as the Linux default for jessie's release as stable. Currently, in testing, systemd is required for all desktop environments because of how its tentacles are reaching into every part of the stack. The only thing that hasn't pushed me to jump to a different distro is you can still use other init systems, at least for now, via installation of systemd-shim package.
That lets the other parts of systemd that the desktop bits want live without needing to give in and run the init replacement. I'm fine with that for now, and hopefully sanity is restored before they obsolete the shim package and require systemd as init. Gentoo has that udev fork with the intent of removing the systemd dependency, so maybe that sort of thing will spread the same way Gentoo's gcc fork did back in the day.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:11PM
"systemd is required for all desktop environments"
Only the shitty ones that most people don't like but the corporates are pushing really hard. No need to accidentally tar and feather something like xmonad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:44PM
What's wrong with tar [wikipedia.org] and feather? [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:47PM
I was specifically referring to desktop environments (KDE, Xfce, etc.), rather than window managers like xmonad, because there's a fundamental difference in the two. DEs and WMs have different scopes and different use-cases, and while the big DEs usually contain WMs, they don't have to because it's not their primary purpose. Sometimes a WM is all you want, but other times you want things a DE provides, and it's not fair to either category to lump them together. Apples and oranges.
Actually, I wasn't blaming the DEs for the current situation, either, because it's not really their fault, either. They, with the exception of GNOME, aren't even necessarily trying to become dependent on systemd; it's a side-effect of the Poettering/Sievers relationship to systemd. If a DE tries to provide user-friendly access to USB devices (which it should), it ends up requiring something like udisks. That, in turn, requires udev. Sievers, being the udev creator, decided that udev needs to be tied to systemd. Now every DE that handles USB is dependant on systemd through no fault of that DE's devs.
This is deliberate, insidious, and like you said above, reeks of embrace-extend-extinguish. In Debian, the udev/systemd dependency isn't even obvious at a glance. udev doesn't say it's dependent on systemd when you check, but there's this underhanded situation going on where if you update udev, one of the libs it uses forces the install of systemd on you. On top of that, if you don't know about the systemd-shim package, that will obliterate the sysv init you had without warning.
It's not just the DEs, either; USB support in general is a minefield for apps with regard to systemd right now. The way I found out about the systemd/udev dependency was updating a webcam app, because it wanted me to update or install udisks, which in turn wanted a newer udev, which demanded systemd. It's rather . . . surprising . . . to update a single, simple user-space application and see the proposed changes list trying to obliterate sysv-init and update half the underlying OS. That's putting it mildly, because what I actually said when I saw it was much less polite.
What happens if (when?) systemd gets its tentacles into Xorg or Wayland? Not even the WMs will be safe.