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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: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday September 02 2015, @04:04AM
Actually Lindows was a full OS, whether you cared for its design or not.
Lindows was actually the first Linux distribution I installed (Knoppix was the first I tried). In retrospect I suppose, in a way, it was ahead of its time, it had an app store long before anyone else, but after a couple days I decided to try something different and ended up with Mandrake.
...this is why I've argued "free as in beer" is a bad idea, the power of voting with your wallet is the way end users can force change and without it? Well as we have seen any corp willing to throw around enough $$$ can pretty much just take over the whole show,...
The problem with not having "free as in beer" is that the alternative is a Microsoft or an Apple, or something tending towards them, which is what most users switching to Linux were fleeing in the first place. If systemd becomes too onerous I'll keep trying other distributions, if Linux becomes nothing but a systemd O/S I'll try one of the BSD's. Thankfully, with "free as in beer", I'll still have choices, at least for a while.