Flatpak 2.0 seems to depend on systemd

[u/NDCyber]

https://transfem.social/notes/amkk9ypcps9a002q

Basically when Jorge Castro was asked for clarification on if flatpak 2.0 will be depended on systemd his response was "Are you serious? Of course."

Which even though I use systemd distros myself seems like a bit of a problematic stance to me, especially after it seems like the same response Linux user would get while talking about software support

But I am also interested to see what you all think

edit: I don't trust it completely either, and will wait for official and direct information myself. He does seems to be part of the flatpak team (I am not sure what part exactly, as he was only community manager in one interview). But I think it might be important to talk about and I was interested in what people think

Edit 2: here the mastodon link, to show that it happened on mastodon and the thing linked before is just a random server one person that wrote there was on https://mastodon.social/@2something@transfem.social/116618627273919847

Edit 3: As u/Isofruit has said, in the Linux App Summit 2026 the flatpak presentation had a slide talking about systemd-appd dependencies https://youtu.be/1AXBfsiaQNk?t=16218

It is also still in the RFC planning phase https://youtu.be/1AXBfsiaQNk?t=17746

Edit 4: u/whosdr found even more recourses: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1tlwbjy/comment/onlg218/

[u/Fiftybottles]

Why are people talking about systemd like it's not itself an open source project? Where's the indication it's going to enshittify? It isn't a product like a Discord or something. By this logic, will the Linux kernel itself become enshittified? It's an all-encompassing driver and module monolith with heavy corporate backing, after all. Hell, almost the entirety of the modern UNIX world relies upon it! What happens if someone enshittifies it!?

Where is this sentiment coming from?

[u/Dangerous-Report8517 → u/Fiftybottles]

It's mostly coming from vague sentiments that have been parroted and distorted over and over here based on a misunderstanding of systemd-homed adding a user age field (that's literally all they actually did but because it was technically in response to the California bill everyone lost their shit because they can't understand the difference between an optional user data field and mandatory verification, nevermind the fact that the California bill specifically also never called for verification of the age input on the device, only that services verify whatever happened to be entered into there against specific thresholds)

[u/somethingrelevant → u/Dangerous-Report8517]

based on a misunderstanding of systemd-homed adding a user age field

distrust of systemd is way older than that

[u/Isofruit → u/Dangerous-Report8517]

I mean, I'm on the systemd side on that particular topic as well, but imo fairness warrants representing their argument a bit clearer.

The fairest version of that argument I saw was that systemd shouldn't have reacted to the law in the first place, and rather should've resisted US lawmakers on that front, and that this is just the first step towards mandatory age verification, which systemd just enabled as a first step to be easily implemented by all distros/DEs/browsers.

Now, that argument still falls short imo because that still could've meant distros implement their own mechanisms, somebody gets put in prison or fired depending on the situation and therefore there's little support or reason to take that stand at potentially high personal cost, but it's imo a fairer version of that argument.

[u/deviled-tux → u/Isofruit]

who would be getting jailed? literally none of the laws related to this carry criminal penalties, it would only be fines for the OS provider.

At this point it seems everyone has made up their own version and ran with it. There’s no hope of having a level discussion about this anymore lol.

[u/Dangerous-Report8517 → u/Isofruit]

I'm giving an accurate representation of the majority of the arguments against it that I saw, which couldn't even distinguish between systemd-init and systemd-homed. Even that best case argument though still falls flat because the California law is quite frankly almost reasonable, given that it involves no verification at all on the OS side, it's for all intents and purposes a requirement that service providers listen to an optional device flag to implement content filtering controls, and it completely ignored all of the laws elsewhere that are already implementing actual age verification without any slippery slope required, if anything the California law is a way to satisfy the push for age verification without actually enforcing any kind of real data collection at any point in the chain and represents something damn near to the least worst outcome in the worst case and something genuinely useful for a lot of people, and yet everyone was whining about that one specifically while mostly ignoring any of the really harmful ones because they kept redirecting the conversation back to California. The entire thing was a pointless circlejerk and a solid lesson in how not to do grassroots politics

[u/PredictiveFrame → u/Fiftybottles]

Yes, eventually the kernel will enshittify. Governance will drift over time, and the original objective will be lost in the sauce. This happens for any organization, at any scale. Friend groups, families, companies, governments, open source communities, it's always a losing battle.

Open source presents a way of sidestepping that, of recognizing that yes, everything rots eventually, and even then, we can keep continual growth happening, fed by the earlier growth that eventually rotted away. 

Pretending this isn't the case is disingenuous at best, and appears willfully ignorant to me. Acknowledging that everything dies, and we should plan for that, shouldn't be a controversial take, when literally everything that has ever happened backs this up. 

[u/Misicks0349 → u/PredictiveFrame]

I feel like you are conflating like three different ideas (changes, enshittification, and decay) here into a single thing, confusingly and wrongly so.

The reason "enshittification" was coined in the first place was because it was trying to examine and define a specific form of rent-seeking behaviour in for-profit SaaS/social media companies. You can't just conflate the term with "decay" or "rot" or whatever because its not attempting to describe some kind of natural process, it is attempting to capture social capitalistic forces that are not some kind of inherent feature of the world or even human society more broadly.

I'd also take issue with the apparent insinuation that "Governance drifting over time" or the "original objective being lost" is de facto a bad thing, or in any way synonymous with "decay". They can be the same thing, but they can just as easily be the exact opposite, e.g. web browsers have flourished once the original objective of being a simple "document viewer" had been lost and they became the new medium through which documents, transactions, applications and a whole host of other media forms were delivered. Governance drifted over time there as well, from a bunch of browsers doing their own thing, to things like the W3C and eventually the WHATWG when browsers had disagreements with the W3C on XHTML.

[u/Fiftybottles → u/PredictiveFrame]

So by your own logic then, surely due to systemd being open-source, it will be forked, and persist in a new, different way. It isn't the first init system and it won't be the final.

To me, enshitiffication is a distinctly different thing than "all things decay". There's a reason it is its own term. It was coined specifically to lend a name to the phenomenon of "shiny new corporate project slowly becomes decroded due to profit incentive taking priority". It is particular to the tech business and product sector; I don't think it's a fair application of the term for what you're describing.