I completely agree – but critical thinking involves something along the lines of "here are the things that I think are wrong, this is why I think they're wrong, this is how I think they could be solved."

The answer "let's throw everything out" isn't that useful; likewise, dismissing the considered opinion of lots of people who have been doing this sort of thing for a while needs to be done with some rationality. An empty, bandwagon-jumping appeal like this adds little value and just helps spread more misinformation.

Actually the answer is to be slightly more conservative with the approach. No one has to pick up systemd now for example. Leave it a year and see where it is. The technical merits will be obvious and the technical problems will also be.

Moving all the chess pieces at once, which is what is happening is not productive, professional or a sign of experience.

That's not the case though – systemd has been enabled by default by Fedora for three and a half years or so, and has been steadily adopted since then by most other major distros. Not everybody is moving at once, so why would waiting a year make any difference?

This bugzilla query against RHEL 7.0 systemd says otherwise:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_s...

A lot of the bug descriptions are quite scarily bad when you consider them in context such as "various loginctl commands not working" etc.

So what you mean is "Systemd still has serious bugs," which is nothing to do with whether or not everybody is moving at once.

That's the point – if systemd has important bugs they should be fixed. Clearly, the groups responsible for the decision have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it, and have accepted that a large, fundamental change will have issues. That's fine – there are a bunch of other distress you can use that have not adopted systemd, which you can use in the meantime if you disagree.

The two are related.

People are shipping production operating systems with systemd that is chock full of bugs.

An all consuming tentacle monster like systemd is fine if you want to dogfood it but to throw at paying customers and/or supporters of your distribution is a little off key.

Linux developers are generally very smart people in my experience. It's consensus of many experienced and smart people that makes it significant.

They are individually I agree, but as a group of people it's not such a good story. It's quite dysfunctional from what I've seen.

I can;t comment specifically on the Linux group, but in general you are absolutely correct. As a consultant, I see it daily in my practice. When I talk to people individually, they seem smart/knowledgeable, but as a group, they often make not-so-smart decisions.

That's exactly my point. It's not limited to the Linux core team. We divide into working groups of 2-3 people max to avoid this. Works quite well.

What does this comment even mean? What's wrong with them as a group?

To borrow a quote from a popular movie:

    A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.

I think this is trying to say you are as strong as the weakest link? Maybe it's trying to say something about group think.

I mean all these movie quotes are all cool sounding but are quite shallow.

Answer: Yes.

Just because some thought has to go into the interpretation does't make it shallow.

A large group is often dumber than its weakest link.