I opened Elfeed (the best RSS reader) to see this post
https://itsfoss.com/news/systemd-age-verification/
I was struck by many thoughts and emotions, mainly those of “What the hell?” and a general feeling of frustration. Amongst all of this, I also felt something that has become all to familiar to me in this era in which we live: mental exhaustion.
These days, it seems like we live in a never-ending nightmare for privacy and our basic rights to live our lives in peace. This age verification garbage is just the next step in the march towards complete monitoring (think 1984, but with a nice coat of “Think of the children!”).
All these developers who bend the knee to this new wave make me sick. Linux is supposed to be a private, user-defined, and independent platform to build upon, and initiatives like systemd trample on that.
The issue is, systemd has so engrained itself into the Linux ecosystem, with it being an init system, bootloader, and a dependency for some popular desktop environments.
So what can we do?
Well, there are many, many, alternatative Linux and BSD distros that are free from systemd, and there are resources like https://nosystemd.org/ that are helping others get away from this bloated nightmare of what was once simply an init system.
Until next time stay safe, and God bless,
Matthew