Avicenna

honestly speaking did not put much effort into this research. I was intrigued and checked a couple of websites which all seemed to claim they are long dead and gone and posted one of them here.

This is singularly the worst time such a change could be implemented, so much so that I am almost looking for malintent.

It is a psychological reaction. The amount of digital surveillance has massively increased in the last couple years. US has just started, as you probably know too, discussing the possibility of adding mandatory age checks to any device connecting to the internet (that might fail due to its infeasibility, but that is another issue). So is this reaction really that surprising? People are afraid that this might be the first of a series of changes that make it more surveillance friendly, such as actual age verification. Indeed that would probably be the only feasible way one can turn something like systemd surveillance friendly. Even leaving everything aside, this is singularly the worst poasible time to suggest such a change to the level that I would almost look for malintent.

I suppose people are afraid that this is just the step one of a series of incremental changes that will make systemd more surveillance friendly. Regarding changing distros, starting a fork and doing couple fixes is not the same thing as maintaining it and being vetted by the community. So I would too change distro to a non systemd one, although options might be quite limited.

The only institution that has been improving in terms of leadership in the last decade seems to be the Church. Welp time to move to vatican and apply for a job in the inquisition I guess.

The main difference is they (Apple) have been clear with their design choice since the beginning and they had their own market. Google is imposing this change on many users who did not want such an ecosystem to start with. But I suppose the market share of people who won't care about this will be large enough that they will survive, because they are a tech monopoly.

do they still really exist?

If some company did this with computers 20 years ago they would probably go bankrupt the next year. This is what happens when tech oligarchies are allowed.

hah, I too was initially confused why Linus hasn't given the middle finger to google, turns out this is the video where he does give a middle finger but to Nvidia

It is not like google is now devoid of labelled crap data. After you tick couple boxes correctly to make google rewards trust you, you can basically upload a receipt that is from another continent from a totally unrelated shop and google still accepts it without even doing the most basic checks like address and date verification.

"I messed this place up, hey you clean it up", classic college bully mentality

lol got me there for a second