mksaunders

It's not offensive now because they've changed the text (a while ago). Originally it said that people who didn't pay for eOS were "cheating the system".

Some people could find that offensive, especially when eOS gets the vast majority of its codebase for free from Debian, Ubuntu and the rest of the FOSS world. What the eOS guys said was offensive to some people, and downright idiotic to everyone else!

He should just call it Great Giana Sisters 64 HD...

"Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work."

Even when almost every distro has switched? If the situation were 50-50, I'd agree with you. But given that Systemd has been overwhelmingly adopted by distros, I think that says alot.

"The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes"

Yes, but again, they surely haven't all made a giant mistake, right? I don't buy the "they've switched because of upcoming desktop userland" argument either. Distro devs -- like Linux users in general -- aren't ones to roll over easily.

With overwhelming support from distro developers, the people who know their stuff, Systemd must be doing something right. And if you look at the Benefits section here, you can see a lot of things that are appealing to distro devs: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

"So there was, in fact, a PR campaign."

Er, how do you think the Systemd developers convinced these technical teams to use Systemd? With bribes? Sexual favours? Or perhaps, you know, using the software itself?

It's funny. The lead developers of Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, Debian etc. etc. etc. have all chosen to use Systemd. Yet for some reason, many commentators assume these people -- distro technical leads -- simply don't have a clue, and have switched their projects to Systemd because Lennart is somehow forcing it on them.

All these distro developers, people a LOT smarter than me, and putting in more work than me, have chosen Systemd. That says a lot to me, and I'm not going to judge them. I'm still on the fence about a lot of Systemd, but to say that major distros have switched because of "PR campaigns" is ridiculous.

Interesting point. Although you'd probably get similar evasive responses, the host saying "Now answer more clearly", and a different (but equally evasive) response. They'd have time to concoct a seemingly informative but ultimately useless response.

This happens in a lot of Reddit AMAs...