Systemd Decided, Schaller's Fedora Feedback, Mint 17.2 in June

In a potpourri of stories today, Red Hat's Lennart Poettering spoke to an audience at CoreOS Fest on how systemd can help with containers. Bruce Byfield is "learning to live with systemd." Fedora developer Christian Schaller shared some of the response he's received to "What are we still missing for you to switch to Fedora Workstation?" Also, Linux Mint 17.2 "Rafaela" is "planned for the end of June."

Lennart Poettering, systemd creator, recently spoke to attendees of CoreOS Fest in San Francisco this week about his baby, systemd, and how it can help them with their container management. InformationWeek's Charles Babcock said that Poettering was in "programmer mode" as he spoke to audiences on its merits. Babcock concluded that Poettering has been vindicated by systemd adoption across Linux lines, thus "finding his place in the community." He said, "Poettering and Sievers have had the smarts to step outside the box and assemble a set of code modules that in all likelihood will last long into the future."

Speaking of systemd, Bruce Byfield today posted that "much of the discussion of [systemd] during the last year was out of proportion to reality, and shows free software at its worst." He began by saying his first impressions of systemd "could not have been worse. My monitor could not display at its highest resolution. Booting displayed errors because I was not using GNOME. Even worse, I had to search for how to turn off my computer, and even then could only do so from the root account." But since having learned how to use it, he decided that "most of the objections to systemd were premature and that, although perhaps unnecessary, it is surprisingly well-structured and easy to learn."

While we're on Fedora, sort of, Christian Schaller shared his email summarizing some of the community reasons for not switching to Fedora on the desktop. The release schedule was discussed in the context of whether a rolling release might be preferable as was the request for a graphical upgrading tool, improved multi-monitor support, SELinux difficulties, and an integrated backup/restore solution. Schaller said that the most responses where in reference to "the pain of getting 3rd party software on Fedora" to which he said to fellow developers, "If anyone is in any doubt that our current policy here is costing us users I think these comments clearly demonstrates otherwise." Schaller said these and other topics would be continued at Flock in August and is currently being discussed at length on the desktop developer mailing list.

Fedora's infrastructure suffered wide-spread network trouble in the wee hours yesterday morning lasting at least five minutes. Most online services were down until 3:58 AM when all systems were reported as a "go." Elsewhere, in our final Fedora note tonight, Máirín Duffy showed off some more Fedora website redesigns, this time for Fedora Labs.

In other news, Clement Lefebvre reported in the latest Linux Mint Monthly News that Mint 17.2 would be released in late June with a RC coming around mid-month. Lucian Constantin today wrote of a new proof-of-concept Linux rootkit that uses the video card instead of the main processor called Jellyfish. And finally, HACKADAY.com was just one of many reporting on a new $9 mini PC board dubbed C.H.I.P. but their headline pulled me in: C.H.I.P. is a Linux Trojan Horse for Nine Bucks.