Five 2025 Linux Distros to Watch

I was going to ask you "Who is Lennart Pottering?" AND I decided that rather than lean on you, I should look him up first..... that way, usually you find out a LOT more than from anothers usually short one or two line answers..... "Ohhhhhhhh THAT Lennart Pottering - HIM Oh I remember Pulse Audio when it first came out.... It was REALLY fucking bad... and it stayed bad for a REALLY long time, until everyone else fixed it up.... " THAT Lennart Pottering. https://linuxreviews.org/Lennart_Poettering ------- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering ------------

Lennart Poettering is not only one of the most influential Linux developers, he is also one of the most controversial. Much of the hate against Poettering is simply based on differing opinions. There are, however, a some valid criticism based on very valid technical arguments. Poettering is openly against the Unix philosophy of making small programs that do one thing well. He as also openly argued against POSIX. Further, he's claimed that BSD, which arguably has much better security than any of his software will ever have, "is not relevant anymore"[1]. In the above 2018 NULUG video he explains how the vast majority of machines run Linux whereas BSD, Solaris, UNIX and such have only a tiny installed base. This was different in 1975 but this is the 21st century. systemd is one huge monolithic program which goes against the Unix philosophy. However, it must be noted that while systemd is huge it is actually many small separate programs developed under the same umbrella. systemd-timesyncd and systemd-homed are developed as a part of systemd but they are in no way mandatory parts of systemd. Most systemd utilities are optional. ------ PulseAudio controversies ------------ Poettering got a lot of hate for creating and pushing PulseAudio the first half-dozen years of it's existence. Some of it was unfounded but a lot of it was totally justified. PulseAudio was very CPU demanding, relative to the hardware which was common at the time, when it was released in 2004. It would use a large amount of CPU power just to play audio. Using ALSA directly did not. Further, PulseAudio had a bad tendency to go into a spin and use 100% CPU when no audio was playing for years after its release. PulseAudio didn't actually work right with SPDIF, specially when trying use pass-through, until SPDIF was obsolete and replaced by HDMI. PulseAudio was released in 2004 and it wasn't really usable until 2012-2014. It has since become a standard part of the Linux audio stack and the modern version is fine. The benefits of using PulseAudio over plain ALSA on modern computers are huge. Per application volume control, the ability to easily move audio streams between devices and computers and other features PusleAudio brings to the table make it an essential part of any modern Linux distribution. The historic reasons people have, validly, criticized PulseAudio for are no longer relevant. The CCC incident Lennart Poettering did in fact walk up on stage with a beer in hand while someone was doing a presentation which criticized some of the software written by Poettering at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in 2010. While there is no defense for this behavior it is something that happened long ago when Poettering was young. He has probably (hopefully) grown up since then.