Is it the end for linux distros without systemd? Is doomsday near?

Mozilla in recent releases is making it really hard for non-systemd distros to comply.  Fake non-systemd distros using udev and elogind out of the latest systemd don’t seem to have a problem.  On their legality concept simply replacing pid1 with a different named process makes them “non-systemd”, void and artix included, and worst of all Gentoo of all fake linux-without-systemd.

Why is this happening?  Basically a paradigm shift, millennials (this is a term in the common English dictionary now), are cheap (you know what but I will refrain from using sexist work terminology) like convenience and comfort, luxury and “don’t care, don’t give a …” attitudes.  They are willing to try non-systemd distros, but want their flashy desktops, their carchy graphic DMs, they want ALL INSTALLED “apps” to start from cloudy pop-up-menus as users, hw plugged in and functional as soon as pushing the usb plug, they want their browser to display “all webpages” despite of what they ask in return (full access to your /home at least) or want a mail program like thunderbird to chat, use calendar luxuries for their appointment, … and Mozilla is handing them all to IBM for lunch.

Librewolf of all projects was perceived as a healthy secure and private fork of the mozilla firefox “trap”.  It is “community maintained”.  This close knit community though is made up exclusively of level 1 devs of major distros that ALL use systemd.  So what can you expect from them, healthy choices?  Suddenly librewolf 105.0.1 following the latest firefox will not display the prime top menu, consolekit, dbus, seatd running, no it wants its own “systemd/elogind” to run properly, to be setting up sockets and communications with other systemd users and programs.  You dare use it anyway and then decide to revert back to 104, here comes Mozilla evil, where all your bookmarks, history, tab collection, possibly user/pw db too, have been converted to the new version, add-ons/plugins etc. have all been “upgraded” and nothing reverts back.  Your option is to start from 0, reconfigure librewolf/ff settings, import all you can from an old profile, just to get to the previous working edition of librewolf.

Same goes for thunderbird 115, dare you roll back and you start from scratch.  Arch has also made a mistake here, TB needs this library called libotr not listed as a dependency but throws out non-fatal errors and warnings.  Take a deeper look in libotr and try to build it, it can’t be configured to build without systemd but has plenty of functions that come directly from it, send/recv/socket related that prevent a build from happening.  What is libotr?  It is a library that allows “off the record messaging” which is now default on TB and who knows if it can be turned off.

Using non-mozilla alternatives, based on Chrome-engine, which is a violent security violator bootstrapping itself deep into the base system, underneath X or other graphic environment, and generally using Google antyhing is beyond consideration.  Palemoon, simply doesn’t work any better than a 5yr old firefox-esr (and this is questionable).   Remember it was Google some years ago that convinced Linus to include Speck, and NSA algorithm, right into the kernel. It took 2 years of measures to assure systems were working without it.

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So what is a distro to do?  Choose no-systemd, eudev, consolekit, seatd, libudev-zero, mdevd, no modern graphic browser that allows access to common webpages, console mail systems (mutt and forks), maybe a console browser to read text only and plain html (links elinks lynx)?    If a distro chooses this route they will end up with a community of users in single/double digits at the most.  Few devs will be convinced to join such a project to help out with packaging, and we end up with something that tends to stagnate due to lack of interest and stimulation from interest.  It is always a reward for a dev to have many users, reporting bugs, fixing them and making them happier.  The rest, selling out to popular demands and millennials’ feel good is alright … no problem man … legalize it…. will join the bandwagon of IBM’s universal linux dummy terminal to state agency systems.

Is this something happening to computer/information industry alone or is it a more general pattern of deterioration of a struggling base willing to sacrifice some luxury for the “common benefit”?

Say what has the “environmental movement” turned into?  Feel good pseudo ideology, green energy, electric everything, believe in myths of alternative sustainable sources providing electricity for everything you do or see, and failing memory that the problem of the environment is not the choice of fuel or the lack of electric appliances.  A growing hostility against trees (fire hazzard, cut them all down), insects (they “may” carry a virus we don’t know of yet), microorganisms, spray entire urban and suburban areas with insecticides, rinse the soil with chemicals that kill all life-forms that are not useful to humans (or not known to be useful), use air/land/water by handing it over to mega-corps to produce more and more electricity because we just don’t have enough for our electric cars and air-conditioners.  And those are the conscious environmentalists today, riding their e-bikes 40kph or their scooters down the paths of normal bicycles and pedestrian areas.  The non-environmentalist is trully a believer in his V8 2.5ton vehicle with climate control set at 23.5 in summer 29.5’C in winter.  It doesn’t matter where and how all this electricity will come from once everyone converts to 100% electric, as long as it doesn’t pollute the “urban” skies while it is being made, and it is branded green.  Whether it takes the largest yet tropical forest uprooting to provide biofuel seeds, or nuclear, or natural gas, or biomass from deforestation.  It is green and … it is alright…!!!

A feel good disaster chasing another disaster, that of capitalism, state enforced (brutally) inequality of all sorts and forms.  Economic, social, political, …. eternal divisions among people who no longer have any common interest in deviating from the interests of mega-corporations, expressed by their federations of multi-national banking, holding governments by titanium straps (national debt) to brutally suppress any movement against them, or alter the path of the industrial development path.  A planet borrowing to create development (handovers from gov to corporations) from a future that can no longer exist.  A planet converted into a toxic desert, no form of life (except fungi spores ofcourse 😉 left and in that year government bonds will still be outstanding for a development that ended it all back when there still was a small chance of sustainability of life on the planet.

Doomsday?  You can smell it in the air, you can see it in the soil, you can taste it in the sea, river, lake, it is everywhere.  Death to those that alert you for otherwise.  The faster the development the quicker we will get there.

So using systemd, latest mozilla products, is not that bad, in a planet dying from people who just don’t care, it is not their business, they have luxuries (in their android) now, so who cares about tomorrow, … you get my drift.

The pandemic is here, it is called late (last?) stage neo-liberal capitalism, one click before ultimate fascism, is here.  The political system of proxy-representation powerless to modify economy, the economic system itself (buy your own oxygen and if you don’t have enough die miserably), the social system (the more I hurt and put down the better I am off), are the pandemic.  No cure, no vaccine, no remedy.

Is this the age of Aquarius?

It might be too late for a revolution to start even if it was possible and successful.  Reform as it appears now is an accelerant to disaster, not even slowing it down.

Green energy idiots may you rot in compost!  Your electric scooter is wired up to 200-300miles of toxic copper lines back to a toxic powerplant that sends you juice to recharge it.  You dare call this stupidity Green?  It is as green as redioactive waste.

Happy blackout you idiots!