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LFS drops support for System V, citing workload problems and upstream dependencies on systemd
(lists.linuxfromscratch.org)
this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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The distro whose goal is education and customization drops support for the easier to understand and lighter init system out of lack of maintainability in service of accommodating the new stuff big desktop environments are doing.
Welcome to the Year of the Linux Desktop. See you all on FreeBSD in 2027.
you can always go ahead and maintain sysv and it's support throughout linux software.
Surely you’re not serious.
My tiny pebble of help won’t hold back the tides of the desktop environments carving the myriad packages that make up linux into what they need at the behest of whoever keeps their maintainers in new shoes.
Even if it could, choosing the de over the init system in lfs shows where the priorities lie. To quote the linked mailing list message, the decision has to be made. Individual people who see that as a worse path can’t change a thing.
i'm not actually serious. you'd have to organize with the people who also want it done, like the systemd people do.
Organizing with people who also want it done, like the systemd people did at the behest of their employer to solve one of its many problems selling linux as a centrally manageable replacement for their competitors’ products.
At some point we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room using an elephant sized lathe and an army of paid workers to shape linux. The days when people could band together and make decisions about the future of this operating system have been over for over fifteen years now.
and you address that by finding the people who also want it done and deciding how you are gonna find the solution to your problem. there is definetly not a shortage of groups forking of old DEs and maintaining them for years.
the people behind systemd found someone to pay them for it, and seem to attract most of the people and companies interested in working on it.
my suspicion is that there just ain't enough people interested in other systems.
Poettering famously began work on systemd while at red hat in order to solve red hats problems.
The people behind systemd didn’t find someone to pay them for their work, they were already employed working for a company in the enterprise linux market and created a software package explicitly aimed at solving enterprise linuxs’ problems because linux was looking bad in comparison to the very mature windows server administration environment.
It’s why systemd has insane feature creep and why back when it was announced literally everyone not on the payroll said “what, why the fuck would I want that? RH BTFO”
Systemd attracts the most people willing to work on init because those people are being paid to do so by companies that sell linux. The companies that sell linux want systemd because its the enterprise solution and if their software or hardware integrates well into the systemd process then they can make money by making lots of sales to people who either work out of or run gigantic datacenters.
This isn’t a case of the best solution with the most democratic support being funded by benevolent community focused businesses (who yes, do make a tidy sum but that’s how the cookie crumbles!), it’s a case of a system exactly like windows getting built by the employees of a company who wants it so it can advertise feature parity with windows in its products!
I feel insane having to type all this out.
what's the problem with wanting feature parity with windows? linux does lack some management features and standardization that could help it quite a lot.
i'm ok with them selling linux support for corporations, as long as they contribute their additions back to us because this is what made linux as good as it is in the first place.
At no point have I leveled a critique of feature parity or the idea of selling support.
I am explaining in exhaustive (to me) detail how the phenomenal commercial backing that systemd had and still has makes it a ridiculous suggestion that someone could simply maintain sysv the same as people have maintained and developed systemd.
If I love sysv so much I can’t maintain it the same as systemd because I’m not a team of experts being paid to work on it full time!
The contribution of systemd back into the open source community can’t even be without ill outcome because it has replaced simple and easy to understand sysv in the very distribution whose goal is teaching!
As someone whose comprehension of how a computer goes from a complex collection of inert electronic components to a running, functional system comes from building lfs back in the day: that’s bad! No longer can we simply look at the tiny set of programs and simple scripts that take our computer online and gain understanding from that investigation, now we must trust the documentation and operation of an incredibly far reaching and powerful black box called systemd!
We were allowed to freely live within the castle walls and are anbout to lose the understanding of how to build thatched roof huts and split rail fences because of it.
If you want to see this process play out again, leaving you in the unenviable position of old man trying desperately to explain history to people who just charitably accept the present as a given, take note of wayland development, gnome decisions like tilting at middle click and see who is spearheading those changes and whomst they are paid by.
In ten years you’ll be using windows without a functional micro kernel wondering what happened.