To anyone thinking not possibile, we already switched inits to systemd. And being persnickety saw mariadb replace mysql everywhere, libreoffice replace open office, and so on.
All the recent pushiness by a certain zealotish Italian debian maintainer, only helps this case. Trying to degrade Debian into a clone of Redhat is uncooth.
This misunderstands why systemd succeeded. It included several design decisions aimed at easing distribution maintainers' burdens, thus making adoption attractive to the same people that would approve this adoption.
If a systemd fork differentiates on not having attestation and getting rid of an unspecified set of "all the silly parts", how would they entice distro maintainers to adopt it? Elaborating what is meant by "silly parts" would be needed to answer that question.
It's definitely pretty opinionated, and I frequently have to explain to people why "After=" doesn't mean "Wants=", but the result is way more robust than any alternative I'm familiar with.
If you're on a system so constrained that running systemd is a burden, you are probably already using something like buildroot/yocto and have a high degree of control about what init system you use.
Look at all the kernel patch submissions. 90% are not users but big tech drones. Look at the Linux foundation board. It's the who's who of big tech.
This is why I moved to the BSDs. Linux started as a grassroots project but turned commercial, the BSDs started commercial but are hardly still used as such and are mostly user driven now (yes there's a few exceptions like netflix, netgate, ix etc but nothing on the scale of huawei, Amazon etc)
Thanks, this may be the key takeaway from this discussion for me
A lot more programs are available for linux, drivers and subsystems have gotten better, more features that benefit everyone (such as eBPF) and more
Open source operating systems are not a zero sum game. Yes there is a certain gravitational pull from all the work contributed by the big companies. If you aren't contributing "for-hire", then you choose what you want to work on, and what you want to use.
This «Linux have a finger in every pie» attitude is very harmful for industry, IMHO.
You say: reinvent the wheel.
I say: use pickup truck for every task, from farming to racing to commuting moving goods across continent. Is it possible? Of course. Is it good idea? I don't think so.
All cars are the same if you squint enough, wheels, engine, some frame, some controls, which are not very different between even F1 car and 18-wheel truck.
Better, this OS must be verified (as seL4). But I understand, that it is pipe dream. Heck, even RTOS is pipe dream.
About IoT: this word means nothing. Is connected TV IoT? I have no problems with Linux inside it. My lightbulb which can be turned on and off via ZigBee? Why do I need Linux here? My battery-powered weather station (because I cannot put 220v wiring in backyard)? Better no, I need as-low-power-as-possible solution.
To be honest, O think even using one kernel for different servers is technically wrong, because RDBMS, file server and computational node needs very different priories in kernel tuning too. I prefer network stack of FreeBSD, file server capabilities (native ZFS & Ko) of Solaris, transaction processing of Tandem/HPE NonStop OS and Wayland/GPU/Desktop support of Linux. But everything bar Linux is effectively dead. And Linux is only «good enough» in everything, mediocre.
I understand value of unification, but as engineer I'm sad.
Like John Deere. Read about how they use that sort of thing
You already trust third parties, but there is no reason why that third party can't be the very same entity publishing the distribution. The role corporations play in attestation for the devices you speak of can be displaced by an open source developer, it doesn't need to require a paid certificate, just a trusted one. Furthermore, attestation should be optional at the hardware level, allowing you to build distros that don't use it, however distros by default should use it, as they see fit of course.
I think what people are frustrated with is the heavy-handedness of the approach, the lack of opt-out and the corporate-centric feel of it all. My suggestion would be not to take the systemd approach. There is no reason why attestation related features can't be turned on or off at install time, much like disk encryption. I find it unfortunate that even something like secureboot isn't configurable at install time, with custom certs,distro certs, or certs generated at install time.
Being against a feature that benefits regular users is not good, it is more constructive to talk about what the FOSS way of implementing a feature might be. Just because Google and Apple did it a certain way, it doesn't mean that's the only way of doing it.
Centralized trust Hardware attestation run by third parties creates a single point of trust (and failure). If one vendor controls what’s “trusted,” Linux loses one of its core properties: decentralization. This is a fundamental shift in the threat model.
Misaligned incentives These companies don’t just care about security. They have financial, legal, and political incentives. Over time, that usually means monetization, compliance pressure, and policy enforcement creeping into what started as a “security feature.”
Black boxes Most attestation systems are opaque. Users can’t easily audit what’s being measured, what data is emitted, or how decisions are made. This runs counter to the open, inspectable nature of Linux security today.
Expanded attack surface Adding external hardware, firmware, and vendor services increases complexity and creates new supply-chain and implementation risks. If the attestation authority is compromised, the blast radius is massive.
Loss of user control Once attestation becomes required (or “strongly encouraged”), users lose the ability to fully control their own systems. Custom kernels, experimental builds, or unconventional setups risk being treated as “untrusted” by default.
Vendor lock-in Proprietary attestation stacks make switching vendors difficult. If a company disappears, changes terms, or decides your setup is unsupported, you’re stuck. Fragmentation across vendors also becomes likely.
Privacy and tracking Remote attestation often involves sending unique or semi-unique device signals to external services. Even if not intended for tracking, the capability is there—and history shows it eventually gets used.
Potential for abuse Attestation enables blacklisting. Whether for business, legal, or political reasons, third parties gain the power to decide what software or hardware is acceptable. That’s a dangerous lever to hand over.
Harder incident response If something goes wrong inside a proprietary attestation system, users and distro maintainers may have little visibility or ability to respond independently.
Then the user can put their own key there (if say corporate policies demand it), but there is no 3rd party that can decide what the device can do.
But having 3rd party (and US one too!) that is root of all trust is a massive problem.
The giveaway is that LLMs love bulleted lists with a bolded attention-grabbing phrase to start each line. Copy-pasting directly to HN has stripped the bold formatting and bullets from the list, so the attention-grabbing phrase is fused into the next sentence, e.g. “Potential for abuse Attestation enables blacklisting”
I would love to use that technology to do reverse attestation, and require the server that handles my personal data to behave a certain way, like obeying the privacy policy terms of the EULA and not using my data to train LLMs if I so opted out. Something tells me that's not going to happen...
It's also because content companies and banks want other people in suits to trust.