Atemu

Not invented here syndrome.

systemd has become like the JavaScript of init systems

Likening systemd to JavaScript is incredibly inappropriate.

systemd now handles DNS, cron, bootloader, and is a suite of tools tightly coupled with the init system)

No. Except for the cron replacement, all of those are stand-alone tools that can be run with systemd, without systemd or replaced with any alternative.

They just happen to be developed under the systemd project umbrella and are obviously tested to work well with another.

This argument is especially weird for systemd-boot; it's not even a Linux program ffs.

There are some components that are harder to replace with alternatives but mostly because no good alternatives exist. Systemd might be partially to blame here in how easy it is those parts can be ran independently and replaced with equals and you could certainly criticize it for that but you didn't even mention one of them.

Truth be told, the birth of systemd really heralded in the death of the UNIX philosophy

There is no truth in this sentence.

Doing one thing only, and doing it well, while looking good on paper, and oftentimes is a good general rule of thumb, doesn't apply to modern application development, for better and worse.

What? Please google "Microservices".

Your whole wall of text hinges on the assumption that systemd is a simple "init system"; a root process spawning a set of other processes. This is false.

systemd (as in: PID1) does service management, not init. It happens to also fit into the "job description" of init because starting and cleaning up dead services also fall under the responsibility of a service manager but reducing it to just an init system is just plain wrong. All the other things are handled by separate components/processes.

Thus, it still follows the "unix philosophy". The "one thing" it does simply isn't what you think it does.

It's like saying cp doesn't follow the UNIX philosophy because you could copy files with cat. cat is soo much simpler to understand, why would anyone ever use the bloated cp? Must be the pesky commercial influence of Bell labs!

Truth be told, the birth of cp really heralded in the death of the UNIX philosophy.

It actually is. The file gets opened by bash and bash passes the file descriptor to cat but cat is the program which instructs the kernel to write to the device.

Modern cat even does reflink copies on supported filesystems.

Homomorphic encryption enables votes to be both public and obfuscated at the same time.

That's nice but has nothing to do with voter fraud prevention.

I will not reply to the stupid ad hominem. You have made it exceptionally clear that you have no idea what my political views are.

Things like a house fire would presumably destroy a series of optical disks which would make most any in house option non-functional.

Well, it makes any option that only uses a single location non-functional. Having two copies at home and one at a distant location (as recommended by the 3-2-1 backup rule of thumb) mitigates this issue.

Network based backups could also fail to transmit data securely and accurately as well

Absolutely. Though the network is usually assumed to be unreliable from the get-go, so mitigations usually already exist here (E2EE, checksums, ECC).

really any sort of replication solution needs validation of the data is of significant value

Absolutely correct. An untested backup is probably better than nothing but most definitely worse than a tested backup.

and have a way to recover if someone does a ‘sudo rm -rf /’ accidentally.

Certainly something that must be mitigated but this is getting out of "hardware failure" territory now ;)

So PM claims it has on the order of 10^8 users. Let's assume each user has one email address with one public ed25519 key, both of which are likely false.

Each key is 32Byte; 32B * 10^8 = 3.2GB.

Could someone do the math how much fiat it'd take to store such an enormous amount of data on the Ethereum or monero blockchains?

This is false. Protonmail has supported Web Key Discovery for external domains since 2019: https://proton.me/blog/security-updates-2019

nobody’s made a solution that is simple and effective

This one isn't that either by the looks of it but it's certainly a problem where something like blockchain could provide a solution.

Voting is another concept that would become unhackable overnight

No. Voting on the blockchain is an even worse idea than money on the blockchain.

In many cases, there are good reasons why these things are done they way they are. I have yet to see a software system that is better at preventing voter fraud than humans looking at your government-issued ID at a poll site and humans overseeing other humans manually counting votes.

A single actor might be able to commit voter fraud in the order of dozes or hundreds of votes perhaps but with a digital voting system based on blockchain, they could do so on the order of thousands or even millions by compromising end-user devices used for voting or buy enough work/stake/whatever to perform a 51% attack.

Same goes for money btw. Our current system is by far not a perfect one but removing the ability for governments to i.e. freeze accounts of bad actors is not a boon.

I don't know about timeshift but it appears to have a configuration tab for snapper.

There are much worse ways for a RAID controller to fail than suddenly not doing anything. What if it doesn't notice it has failed and continues to write to a subset of devices only? Great recipe for data corruption right there.

Bad RAID controller/HBA, CPU, RAM, Motherboard, PSU are all hardware failures that RAID does very little (if anything) to mitigate. One localised incident in any of them out could make all of your drives turn into magic smoke or bits go bad.

You cannot rely on that sort of setup for data security. It only really mitigates one relatively common hardware to push storage system uptime above 99.9%. That has a place in some scenarios where storage "only" being 99.9% available has a significant impact on total availability but you'd first have to demonstrate that that is the case.

Tapes only make financial sense if you're in the hundreds of TB.