Oh, but don't you know? You shouldn't need more than one partition; they're getting rid of separate /var (I only half joke; after they broke separate /usr by linking boot/system things to it, they declared separate /usr to be "deprecated").

If you support more than one operating system,

Another one of Poettering's favorite ideas is that nothing besides Linux matters. I may agree with him for my own personal computing setup, I think it's flat out unprofessional to eschew portability and cross-platform standards. Even ignoring the obvious benefits, making things portable can reveal bugs and unstated assumptions in your design which will trip you up later.

It doesn't seem like there is any need to remove syslog. The guy just wants it to disappear.

If there's one thing that strikes me about Lennart (and others, such as those working on Wayland), it's what appears to be a severe case of myopia, or just flat out willful ignorance, of systems that have come before. The egotism is astounding.

Granted, sound under Linux was far from perfect (so I've heard; it has always just worked for me), and PulseAudio eventually got stable and efficient enough to be be acceptable. That being said, it does feel a whole lot like "here's how we're going to do it, shut up and take it." It would be more palatable if they identified problems, proposed solutions, and then canvassed the community. Hell, even just proposing solutions as patches or wholly separate projects and letting the community vote with their feet would be preferable to this dictatorship mentality.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I distrust Lennart (and Sievers') approach to system software because they don't seem to think of the bigger picture or be aware of the past. Do you know why so many people are attached to the "legacy" "deprecated" ways of doing things? Because they work, across multiple platforms, multiple OSes and multiple paradigms (embedded, server, desktop, cluster, mobile, and future ones we can't even imagine). Because other ways have been tried (eg, binary logging on Windows) and failed. Yes, some things could be improved (dependency based boot is a good idea). But other things, such as the core modularity principle in UNIX, are there for a reason, and should not be lightly tossed aside.