Yes, breaking the dependency on cloud providers is already extremely hard. But breaking the dependency on mobile OSes is going to be dramatically harder. What good is digital sovereignty if all users are still tied to American products to access those systems?

The user is able to install new certificates.

That’s true today, but there’s no guarantee it will be true in the future. Google is already pushing for all software running on Android to be cryptographically verified and they (Google) are the only ones that control the signing keys. This means that they intend to kill off F-droid and all other software delivered outside the Google store.

If Google is able to pull it off on Android, everyone else will try to do it on desktop OSes too - Linux included.

I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.

I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.

Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.

I’ve made other comments before about how we used to cheer for Google back in the 00’s because they were the upstart that took on the entrenched competitors (Microsoft primarily). Look what Google has become today - the very thing we hoped they would destroy, and they are so much worse about it.

Red Hat/IBM ultimately owned by the same people as Google: shareholders. Nothing will ever stand in the way of their greed. If this technology is allowed to exist, there’s no reason to think that it too will be used against our interests.

He was there for a brief period. According to Wikipedia he was there from 2022-2026 and seems to have left to create his new company in early 2026.

Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?

Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we’re experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.

I’m so tired of reading this stupid argument. “People only dislike systemd because they’re afraid of change.” No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here’s the real issue:

Do you really think it’s a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?

Let’s consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users’ default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn’t conform to its “standards” in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome’s engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.

That’s exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.

Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do…

But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering’s new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

It’s mostly Gnome 2 frozen in time - there have been small improvements here and there, particularly in Caja (the file manager). I think that’s great though personally, and use it on most of my machines.

Wayland adoption has been slow, but it is getting there.

I don’t think you understand the implications of what you’re suggesting.

Forking a project as large as Gnome is a massive undertaking. Not only is it a lot of up-front work to implement the functionality, but you also have to stay up-to-date with all upstream changes, and there’s likely at least a few Gnome developers that are paid to work on it full-time, so that is a lot to maintain. And not only do you have to build it for your own distro, but you also have to convince maintainers of other distros to adopt it as well and put it in their repositories, otherwise you have no community of users, which means no community of developers either.

Forking Gnome is wildly impractical. It’s not a feasible suggestion to make at all.