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As long time SoylentNews community member Marand observed during some recent discussion of severe systemd boot problems, it turns out that systemd disables the magic SysRq key.
The magic SysReq key is described at Wikipedia as:
[...] a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low-level commands regardless of the system's state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.
A Fedora user who logged a bug report for this issue back in 2013 described the problem with systemd's unexpected and harmful default setting:
As systemd depends on many files on a rootfs, in case of any problems with rootfs, it is not able to do its basic function - control processes and (cleanly) shutdown/reboot when crtl-alt-del is pressed on local keyboard. As this is a feature, I'd like to ask to enable the sysrq by default on Fedora, otherwise it is not possible to reboot system even locally in case of emergency situation.
While that Fedora bug report is set to CLOSED NOTABUG, other Linux distros, like Mageia and Debian GNU/Linux, have restored the proper behavior.
Now that this problem has come to light, all Fedora users should evaluate whether or not they need to fix their systems to work around systemd's incorrect default setting. Users of other Linux distributions using systemd should also evaluate their systems, too, in case their distro has not yet fixed this unexpected bug.
(Score: 1) by schad on Monday December 22 2014, @03:29PM
For better or for worse, that's likely to be the case from now on. If you want to use Linux as a desktop machine, your best bet is to go for completely different paradigms. Stuff like the *boxes (fluxbox, openbox), Enlightenment, and so on. Those will probably always be systemd-free. I don't see much desire on either side to start sharing functionality with GNOME or any other "mainstream" DE.
I do recommend trying alternative DEs like LXDE or E. The key to success is to use them the way they're supposed to be used. Don't try to take your existing workflow and make it work in them. For LXDE, I was happiest when I stopped trying to avoid the CLI. I had this idea in my head that if I was using a DE I shouldn't ever have to use the command line. Well, that's the way Windows users think. In Windows, the CLI is awful, so of course you never want to use it. In Linux, though, the CLI is amazingly powerful and has an incredibly rich suite of tools that's been developed (and polished) for nearly 30 years. Don't run away from the CLI, embrace it! Use it for all the things it's good at, and use the GUI for the things it's good at. That's when you really see the power of Linux (or, really, Unix generally). Everything you do in Windows must fit into the GUI paradigm, because it's the only one Windows does even remotely well. In Linux you have no such limitation.