Ah well ... perhaps we'll soon have "the year of the GNU/Hurd desktop" ;-)
I do think you're overestimating the impact of systemd, not all distros (that use systemd) enable the same parts/targets/whatever either.
It's actually rather flexible from a distro's point of view.

It doesn't matter; the distros themselves do not matter, and I am not overestimating anything; Lennart has written about all of this. It's all there.

Once you have a kernel + systemd userspace, with applications and libs in btrfs snapshots, what your old distro did or didn't do is irrelevant. You set your general purpose OS up how you want it.

I am not saying this is achievable (Torvalds does not think it will be easy) but that is the goal.

Yeah, it looks like the very concept of "distribution" is soon to be dead.

Those are about extra (not replacing anything) runtimes for specific environments (like gnome), offering the same abi, allowing 3th party packagers (often proprietary) to build their binaries without any hassle. They don't replace your trusted sources from your distribution (think chroot on steroids).

Description Results of topical steroid damage on skin of a 47 year old female.
Date Picture taken May 2011
Source Myself. It is a picture of my lower right arm.
Author sansea2

Edit: Wikimedia link deleted (the anchor text said "do not click", but, frankly, linking it wasn't my best idea today)

Why would you post that here?

They'd get the OS they deserve. Most releases of most software are buggy and/or mutually incompatible, and most users lack the discipline and technical expertise to regress to more-stable releases the way Patrick does.

Even if Lennart's vision comes to pass, I would still want to use the specific versions of packages Patrick prescribes, because he's damn good at it, and gets bug reports (and occasional fixes) funneled to him by Slackware's large, healthy user community.

@szboardstretcher: To make the point that "something on steroids" is a completely empty argument. Null, void, meaningless cliché. If you followed the link, you have seen the reality of "on steroids", so maybe that also is the reality of "Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems". I'm willing to discuss the actual detail of that proposal. Otherwise, empty clichés teach us nothing.

It's rare that one of my Linux PCs runs btrfs. That might become an issue. It stinks that btrfs is being dragged in like this because it looks rather nice; the developers bust their tails to improve it as well. Y'know, modern Windows seems to have some kind of WinSxS folder where just any old crap is dropped in there just in case it's needed. While the Linux-desktop goal seems to be to become a lousy imitation of Windows, might as well throw the Linux equivalent of it in there, regardless of the filesystem that the user chooses. Call the folder LennSxS so we know what it's all about and where it comes from.

The "Year of the Linux Desktop" is nothing but wishing in one hand and taking a shit in the other, and seeing which one fills up fast. At the rate Red Hat wants it's CoreOS, maybe them going up against Apple, Microsoft, and Google will put them in their place finally when they crash and burn. Maybe if that happens enough disgust will trigger a ripple effect in the GNU/Linux world that enough sanity will come back to GNU/Linux.

At the rate this crap is rolling, we'd have "The year of the BSD desktop" with probably better results.

I don't think any sane person/company cares for Linux desktop at this point in time.

I think one of the fundamental errors RHEL is making is the belief that Linux can be tamed for the desktop. Even Valve aren't that crazy, hence the fact they built Steam on Linux to be highly portable if not particularly efficient (it basically ships its own dependencies).

A far greater candidate for that would be one of the BSD's, they're already standardised enough. But note that nobody does this, because why bring a knife to a gunfight.

Linux is fine just where it is, it is coming along nicely, and I'm not sure where this crazy trip is going to end, but I'm pretty pissed off everybody is trawled up in the same net.

A short interview with the man himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdRmnSHHVw4

Note the idea of feature creep and complexity as a virtue, and parting shot at Slackware.

"And Slackware people of course prefer their 1990's stuff." (Lennart Poettering)

And now he's wondering why folks want to use him as a punching bag. What a douchebag.

Oh come on, now you are just being... kind...