I mean to a certain degree, I can understand if people find a problem with Poetterings approach of doing things !CORRECTLY!. Like, systemd-resolved resolving A-records with multiple addresses ina deterministic fashion because it’s not defined not to be deterministic, and because actual load balancing would be better. It’s not wrong, but it’s breaking everything. And it got patched after some uproar. And there are a few things like that.

But at the same time - I don’t think people appreciate how hard doing process management right on linux can be, especially if the daemon to run is shitty. Like, init scripts just triggering the shutdown port on a tomcat - except the tomcat is stuck and not reacting to the normal shutdown port and now you have a zombie process and an init script in a fucked up state. Or, just killing the main process and for some reason not really removing the children, now there’s zombies all over the place. Or, not trying appropriate shutdown procedures first and just killing things, “because it’s easier” - except my day just got harder with a corrupt dataset. Or, just trying soft and “Pwease wexit Mr Pwocess” signals and then just giving up. Or having “start” just crash because there was a stale PID from an OOM killed process around. Man I’m getting anxiety just thinking about this.

And that’s just talking about ExecStart and ExecStop, pretty much, which I have done somewhat correct in a few init scripts back in the day (over months of iteration of edge cases). Now start thinking about the security features systemd-analyze can tell you about, like namespaces, unmapping syscalls, masking parts of the filesystem, … imagine doing that with the jankyness of the average init.d script. At that point I’d start thinking about rebooting systems instead of trying to restart services, honestly.

And similarly, I’m growing fond of things like systemd-networkd, systemd-timesyncd. I’ve had to try to manage NetworkManager automatically and jeez… Or just directly handling networking with network-scripts. Always a pleasure. Chucking a bunch of pretty readable ini-files into /etc/systemd/networkd is a blessing. They are even readable even to people rather faint on the networking heart.

And even password based disk encryption can be defeated with 2-3 physical accesses if an organization wants to hard enough. Keyloggers can be very, very sneaky.

At that point you’d have to roll something like Yubikey-based disk encryption to be safe, because this re-establishes control over some physical parts of the system. Until they find the backup Yubikey you had to not lose all data by losing the primary key you’re carrying around to maintain control over it.

It’s not a battle the defending side can win.

And that skeleton of a system becomes easier to test.

I don’t need to test ~80 - 100 different in-house applications on whatever many different versions of java, python, .net and so on.

I rather end up with 12 different classes of systems. My integration tests on a buildserver can check these thoroughly every night against multiple versions of the OS. And if the integration tests are green, I can be 95 - 99% sure things will work right. The dev and testing environments will figure out the rest if something wonky is going on with docker and new kernels.

IMO, this is the elephant in the room.

If you’re looking at what people used CentOS or Rocky or Alma for - dev systems, CI systems, … These aren’t lost sales. If you forced them to off of their solution, they aren’t going to pay the price tag and management/installation pain of RHEL. If they have people knowing how to run Linux, they’ll use something else. And sure, they are drawing some resources from RH (bandwidth for packages at the very least), but they are giving the RH system a larger footprint in deployed systems. And people running it had a positive opinion about the system.

But Oracle Linux is a different beast. Here a company is poaching large customers willing to pay for support by repackaging your product for less effort. It sucks, but it’s entirely consistent for Oracle to be part of ruining a good thing.