Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.

This is fantastic news! As I've argued here on HN many times over the years, proper permission management is probably the single most important piece that's been keeping us from sandboxing everything by default, like on Android and iOS.

> It’s important to note that everything discussed during the talk is planning, and not a single line of code has been written yet

It's may get harder in the future to have a Linux desktop that keeps up with the times and also does not include third-party cruft or spyware in the future.

I love using Alpine, and for the few packages that don't have a musl version available (e.g. Steam), flatpak has been a great way to run them.

Hopefully someone will maintain a fork.

Nit: on "decades-old", Flatpack is from ~2016 only.

The article contains only a vague half paragraph of architecture:

  > they want to move the permission management from Flatpak into the service layer, through a new service called systemd-appd. Systemd-appd gives applications an identifier and stores their permissions, and then this data can be queried by the rest of the system. In turn, this enables a slew of other features, not least of which is subsandboxing. 

And what other speculated Flatpak features introduce other dependencies from systemd? Discussing whether unwanted dependencies can be made optional or eliminated requires technical details.

Now the direction changed with the new team/leadership towards integration, security and control instead of "it works everywhere".

Hopefully basic features will still work without systemd-appd, otherwise we would be back to "Linux desktop has no universal packaging format" considering that:

* Most appimages often rely on specific libc of the base system;

* Snap does not fully work outside of Ubuntu ecosystem.

systemd-appd sounds like it could make some inroads in the threat model that Windows and Linux still have in 2026 (and macOS is still reeling from): anything that runs as my user, can access anything running as _my_ user. I don't think this threat model was tenable in 2016, much less in 2026. But moving away from that also breaks with the Unix tradition.

Systemd as the system management layer is becoming a centerpoint for moving Linux forward, on servers but especially so on the desktop, and it does so at the cost of breaking with traditional views. It's kind of hard to watch: I want Linux to move forward, and there's just a lot of good ideas there. But it will be painful for a large Linux community to break with traditions.

Systemd is a great example of embrace and extend that was actually succesful.

Microsoft should have just hired Poettering.

Just kidding!

And just in the end, we will finish with the same kind of monolith that we can experience with Windows.

Soon systemd will sniff more data - such as the age:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954#issuecomment-4...

And the usual copium aka this is very harmless, nothing evil is done, nothing bad can happen. That'll cover the age.

In the future systemd will sniff for more private data. For those who think this is a conspiracy theory, well - look at the last some decade or so, and query which claims made early on, about systemd, suddenly become true at a later point in time.

The systemd folks are kind of smart, though, because they provide "merely an init system" (right? Or was the comparison always unfair, because e. g. sysinit never was about adding layer of layer on top of layers) and they build on top of it, for other applications to tap into systemd - at the cost of adding a dependency.

Even LFS/BLFS succumbed recently and now only offers systemd-builds. Personally I think this is kind of betrayal to the spirit of LFS, but Bruce gave an objective argument, which is the time investment for maintaining non-systemd and systemd, and on this particular point he is quite correct. Time is a finite ressource.

What we kind of see here is that systemd keeps on growing and growing. It is the ultimate virus. You can't get rid of it. Now flatpak fell for it too, though objectively speaking I fail to see why flatpaks should have a dependency on systemd to begin with. Thankfully I use versioned AppDirs (similar to GoboLinux) so I could not care any less about flatpaks (don't need them, I already use any version of a program I want to), but flatpak also betrayed its original vision. For some reason those grand visions always become worse over time.

But no worries folks - we know one thing is true, and that is that systemd will grow even bigger. It will not stop until it has swallowed EVERYTHING.