I think Poettering deserved his fair share of the blame for the problems in Pulse Audio. However, a guy writes an over ambitious project, has a lot of problems, has problems with interfacing with users, etc, etc, etc. This is the internet! Pick a random project an Github and you'll probably find similar issues. The real problem here was Red Hat -- and it was literally the same problem with systemd. They tied it so closely with the rest Gnome that you couldn't reasonably use Gnome without it. And since all of the distros were essentially riding on Red Hat's tail, everybody got strong armed into using this stuff before it was ready (to be fair, it was years and years and years before Pulse was stable at all).

I am not a fan of Poettering's code or his attitude, but people have treated him exceptionally badly. He's just doing his job. If these projects were allowed to compete for mind share fairly there would be no problem. If Red Hat had made sure that Gnome could work with alternatives then there would be no problem. Pulse audio would have died a rightful death. Systemd? I suspect that it would still have succeeded.

> The real problem here was Red Hat...

Agreed. This is Red Hat's mentality with a lot of it's product base. Poettering and Dan Walsh come to mind with regard to the elitist attitude in their respective corners. But just wait, this is going to get worse. Now that IBM owns them they will push this agenda even harder. The new game is controlling a majority of devs in well-known or strategic projects so the overarching enterprise can push an agenda. I don't think we're seeing the teeth quite yet, but give IBM a few years and my guess is it becomes very obvious.

> Poettering and Dan Walsh come to mind with regard to the elitist attitude in their respective corners

Don't forget Drapper

Finally moving to an OS with systemd as the init system cost my team two months of platform stability. Every time we thought we had fiund the magic order or operations incantation and fire things up, we'd find a new poorly documented config item that had to be mucked with. Nothing so fundamental as starting a set of services should be that hard. SystemD has a few nice features but none of them are worth the headache. I applaud Knoppix for this move. I'm personally headed back to slackware, now that everything I work on is containerized anyway. SytemD won the war by persistence alone, not quality of work.

I hope that some of the other distros follow this move of Knoppix. I have had exactly the same experience with SystemD like you. The good parts of systems: standard simple format for describing unix services instead of shell scripts. Everything else they do is just crazy. The amount of CPU it uses also crazy.

> The amount of features and stuff they add to systemd is seriously impressive

That's exactly the problem, though. You don't want all that stuff in your privileged PID 1 process. Nor blowing up your prod servers and getting in your way to even examine log files afterwards.

> And Pulse Audio was started by Pottering but he quickly moved on

Which is pretty much what I blame him for.

He has a history of starting ambitious (maybe overly so) projects, doing all the fun stuff until it kinda sorta works, and then riding off into the sunset.