What makes you thinking that you that you need less admins for virtual machines than for physical?

Through 1 server you can control various servers across the world using vm remotely. So it makes sense to hire less admins to do the job. Also, with increased automation... there will be less time spent on configuring the system... hence again less need for admins. Am I not correct? Please enlighten me again if I am not correct...

I had to laugh yesterday when I read that Microsoft had to revoke its own digital certificates because of a compromise.

This is a company we can trust to implement secure boot properly. Oh yes indeedy.

:)

There has been spread a lot of FUD about Secure Boot, I personally don't think it is a bad thing, not in its current form.
But anyways, Secure Boot is something that lies outside of Linux, you can simply avoid it by disabling it and have not to bother about it at all.
This is not true for systemd, it is a thing inside the Linux community, where one entity tries to force their standards on anyone else, regardless if that is sane and regardless the collateral damage that is done with that. If Linux has to follow the Red Hat standards in the future in opposite to being Unix like (where its roots come from and what has made it like it is), or at least let the developers/users choose their standards for themselves, it may be time to change to BSD.
I hope I don't have to, I really like Slackware, but I like it because it is like it is and a change to systemd would be pretty hard for me to accept.

Any chance Slackware might end up on a BSD kernel some time in the future? That's a question I wanted to put to Pat Volkerding for his interview.

Imagine what would happen with secure boot if they did this (which they do hint at in the article).

Microsoft is not implementing Secure Boot. The developers at Phoenix and AMI are.

Thanks for your numerous answers. According to them, I can only draw the following conclusion. In order to remain a happy Linux sysadmin, I would only have to 1) purchase a Slackware subscription and 2) throw Lennart Poettering into the nearest active volcano. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That's pretty doubtful, but the BSD userspace is looking better and better. ;)

Shame! it would take a lot of work though. Slackware and the BSDs hit a sweet spot for sure. I like the way Slackware people and NetBSD people plug away quietly improving their OSes. No big heads trying to make a name for themselves by *improving* the Unix philosophy.

Thanks very much for the answer anyway! I'll do my best to get some money to you this year. It's been a tight few years in Ireland. Can't see how we can remain at the bottom for much longer. Fingers crossed!

As far as I understand, mostly GNOME stuff is concerned by systemd. I admit I've been a GNOME user for a few years, on CentOS, RHEL and Ubuntu, but decided to abandon it after fiddling around with GNOME3 for about ten minutes (the time it took to find out that there is indeed no Power Down button). I read Patrick Volkerding's statement about GNOME exclusion, it made me laugh and I totally understand his point of view.

For the last half year or so, I've been mostly working on a heavily modified Debian stable with KDE 4.4, and everything works perfectly. Though secretly I've always been a fan of XFCE's manner of doing things, only I didn't use for day to day work because of a few - sometimes - tiny missing bits I need for work. Right now, I'm busy writing SlackBuild scripts for the latest XFCE 4.10 that looks very appealing to me, plus it seems to have all the bits (more or less) I need for productive work.

But XFCE depends increasingly on GNOME libs, and that's where I'm really concerned. It would really piss me off to migrate my machines - and eventually those of my clients - to a healthy mix of Slackware and XFCE, only to see this great alternative desktop go down the drain in a future not that far away.

Or am I simply too anxious about that?

So why not Linux Kernel + BSD Userspace?

If Debian did the opposite with BSD Kernel + GNU Linux userspace.

How many developers do Debian have? Hundreds, if not thousands?

How many Slackware?

We still have the current sources for udisks, upower, and everything else that's not in systemd and such right?

As far as going with BSD's Userspace, +1 here if it can be done.

And as far as Slackware's developers... Slackware has a few developers, some official, but there's always the thousands of unofficial developers who could be enticed from other distributions to help port BSD-Userpsace to Linux. I seriously doubt all distributions out there will side with systemd if enough resistance can be met against it.

Damn right. Personally I love bsdtar. Thanks for including it in Slackware. I know it comes with libarchive but some distros (e.g. Debian) put it in a separate package so that it isn't always installed by default.