The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement

Almost everyone dislikes user-visible change, unless there's a very slow migration path one step at a time (see KDE4, Vista, Gnome 3, etc.). Yes, this community has a larger proportion of heatseekers than the world at large, but even the FOSS world tends not to like huge revolutionary changes in one go.

More transparent changes - by which I mean things that don't change the way the user interacts with the machine on a daily basis - tend to be more welcome as there's less of a downside, so if it improves some functionality in some obvious way then it's an easier sell. For example, systemd has been far more positively received than PulseAudio since it solves real known problems without much of an effect on the end user.

Unfortunately, Lennart has a fairly bad track record. His projects tend to involve a grandiose scheme to replace some way of doing things entirely, which he then gets bored of once they reach the 90% stage.

Presumably some up-and-coming new star will come along again in a few years and decide to rewrite sound systems or init systems or syslog (or display servers, or desktop environments, or...), get them 90% done, and then get bored of them, and the cycle will begin anew.

Unfortunately, the options are either to stick with systems that are permanently 90% done, or be dismissed as a greybearded old has-been who 'hates change'.