Lennart Poettering - systemd + PulseAudio Creator - Departed Red Hat

[phoronix]

Phoronix: PulseAudio & Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

To much surprise, the lead developer of systemd Lennart Poettering who also led the creation of PulseAudio, Avahi, and has been a prolific free software contributor has reportedly left Red Hat...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lennart-Poettering-Out-Red-Hat

[Alexmitter]

I would wonder what he will do next if he really leaves redhat, no matter what it will likely be outstandingly great and as revolutionary like his other works.

A absolutely outstanding developer, one of the few best we have.

[Hibiki Kanzaki]

He should be able to make good money as a consultant getting systemd and pulse working well on non-trivial atypical configurations.

[microcode]

I would wonder what he will do next if he really leaves redhat, no matter what it will likely be outstandingly great and as revolutionary like his other works.

A absolutely outstanding developer, one of the few best we have.

People love to hate on PulseAudio and systemd, but both completely changed the standard for desktop Linux. Ordinary, everyday audio on the Linux desktop used to SUCK, and people forget that easily; Pulse made audio on Linux work just right for 90+% of users. Service management, socket activation, sessions, etc. were a total mess, and differed wildly by distribution, none getting most things right; I remember building systemd from source on Debian stable and everything Just Worked™, and when Arch switched to systemd that's why I made the jump on my workstations, since then it's given me back months worth of productive time I might otherwise have spent head-in-hands, or just waiting for init.

Huge thanks to Lennart Poettering, and to RH for employing him for these years.

[treba]

I'm really looking forward for one of his younger projects, systemd-homed, to mature enough to be offered by distribution installers. Having my data encrypted while only having to insert one password has been a feature I've been missing on Linux for a long time. Especially removing that password from memory on suspend so I don't need to turn off the device for it to be save.

[microcode]

He should be able to make good money as a consultant getting systemd and pulse working well on non-trivial atypical configurations.

I think Pulse is on the way out at this point, with PipeWire eating its lunch, even in the "PulseAudio compatible sound system" duopoly market; but certainly there will be work for Lennart.

[andyprough]

He was planning to remain an IBMer for another ten years, but like with so many processes these days, systemd-oomd terminated his employment process suddenly and without prior warning.

[mikewhy]

I _still_ have to use pulse in virtual machines, as pipewire uses the wrong sample rate and none of the suggestions online seem to work.

[RejectModernity]

systemd is great and all, but its binary logs is something else...

[birdie]

I would wonder what he will do next if he really leaves redhat, no matter what it will likely be outstandingly great and as revolutionary like his other works.

A absolutely outstanding developer, one of the few best we have.

As a developer for himself or RedHat he's truly great. However I've dealt with him in terms of bug reporting - oh, boy, this is a very difficult person:

• "This is not a bug"
• "This works as intended/this is by design"
• "No, I personally do not like your feature request"

Then you pour a ton more data and prove and then he might reluctantly reopen the bug report (not always).

E.g. I'm absolutely appalled by the mess systemd creates in /tmp: multiple directories named systemd-private-MACHINE_ID-SERVICE_NAME.service-RANDOM_STRING - I've asked to move all of them to e.g. /tmp/sustemd-private/ - "nope, will not fix".