• Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.

    The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.

    Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.

    • I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.

      I’ll stop now. So /rant

    • Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.

      As far as I know, systemd is only the default.

      At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.

      I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.

      What exactly does “LGLP” mean?

      The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.

      Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.

      Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.

    • Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.

      Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.

      Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.

      Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.

      • Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.

        Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.

        I suffer with systemd

        What’s the problem?

      • IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.

        My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.

        I don’t know much about KDE at all.