> the great de-Poettering
A rube-goldberg version of SSH that somehow depends on many things that should be totally unrelated to SSH. Because ofc Poettering needing to mess with everything does need to have systemd notifications available from SSH.
This excuse allows to link many libs and pretend the backdoor attempts are unrelated to systemd, like the liblzma one.
Not of course it's an excuse that doesn't run very far seen the following undisputable fact: the XZ backdoor only affect systemd-enabled SSH. Ouch. Facts do hurt.
I cannot wait for the day a good hypervisor comes out for Linux that runs perfectly on a systemd-less Linux distro, like Devuan (I already used Devuan, but not as an hypervisor).
Basically "Proxmox but systemd-free". I know I've got the FreeBSD+bhyve option too. And at long last I'll be systemd-free again.
After a while, I just lost track. Happily, I don't have to deal with any of that stuff these days.
I'd expect devuan to be a decent hypervisor host, but haven't tried. There's also SmartOS (a few forks away from being Solaris), which looks like it had a release this year. It includes native ZFS.
Honestly, at this point, I'm looking at devuan as the last stop before I jump on the FreeBSD train. It looks like they let you choose between X11 or Wayland, at least for now. I got Steam to work in a FreeBSD VM, but it face-planted because the VM host didn't support any sort of 3d acceleration.
Hopefully enough users will revolt to keep X11, systemd-free Linux viable, but I wonder if that particular niche (which still works great out of the box) is going to end up less popular than the BSDs.
Devuan uses elogind, which is a fork of logind that doesn't require systemd. I haven't noticed any problems with it.
My machine has elogind and slim running (devuan default behavior), and from what I can tell this gives you the same functionality as xdm used to, but worse.
I'm not sure why things got split into two subsystems, but I guess logind is essentially required in systemd systems. I remember there were a bunch of bugs where systemd would do stuff like unexpectedly force-kill background processes, and rm -rf home directories, etc, etc.
I think those bugs had something to do with logind, but I'm not sure.
Again, I just see weird vestigial stubs on my machine, not the underlying multi-decade train wreck.