hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 15, 2025 22:31 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
In reply to: hope not tied to SystemD by atai
Parent article: Finding a successor to the FHS

Are you intentionally writing "SystemD" as a dogwhistle for the anti-systemd folks, or are you still unaware that that's it's spelled "systemd"?

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 1:02 UTC (Sat) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (18 responses)

That's quite some assumption of bad faith.

More generally, writers are moving away from using vendor capitalisation to whatever format assists the reader best, treating the word as a proper noun and capitalising to assist pronunciation. That is, authors are writing for readers, not for corporations. For example, Ikea has a corporate-preferred capitalisation of "IKEA" but is not said as "I. K. E. A.": the corporate style misinforms the reader. Some publications have a house style requiring "System-D" (ie, written as pronounced unless the product is very famous), so this author's choice is within the range of normal.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 2:38 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

The systemd project has the official spelling: "systemd". So yep, "SystemD" is a pretty useful indicator.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 7:02 UTC (Sat) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (6 responses)

> The systemd project has the official spelling: "systemd". So yep, "SystemD" is a pretty useful indicator.

Care to explain to the ignorant I am, a "useful indicator" of what ? Does the latter convey a particular meaning for some groups ? I've seen it spelled both ways and genuinely thought that the former is the process name while the latter is the project's name, and have seen the latter being used by those trying to carefully represent it. So if this form is associated by some to a certain meaning, it would be nice to know. But I doubt it would be associated with anything negative by the project maintainers themselves, considering that it appears a few times in the repo's history and even still in the code itself: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/resolve/.... So isn't this just some noise, or maybe those triggering on a particular spelling are themselves an indicator of anything like searching for trouble where there isn't ?

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 9:50 UTC (Sat) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (5 responses)

Yep it's dogwhistling, you can consistently see it from a particular crowd that is best avoided like the plague.

There's even a brand page defining it if you are in doubt: https://brand.systemd.io

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 10:45 UTC (Sat) by nadir (guest, #154506) [Link] (4 responses)

Always a chance somebody is genuinely clueless, but I agree. Its use is nearly always an indicator that the user has also anti-"woke" views, loves xlibre, hates wayland for non-technical reasons, wants his software projects free of "politics", etc. etc.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 12:00 UTC (Sat) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (3 responses)

OK, strange, never noticed this. I find it strange that people would just use capitalization of a name which could look like the expected one as a sign to manifest anything, but be it. At least I'm sure it's not the case for the ones I've seen write it like this.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 13:24 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

As the systemd people point out, it follows standard unix convention in that the first bit points out what it does (and is in lower case because all system routines are in lower case), and it has a d tacked on the end to indicate it's a daemon.

So in standard unix nomenclature, systemd is the daemon that manages the system. And like all such daemons, it's lower case.

Cheers,
Wol

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 21:10 UTC (Sat) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]

Wait. Daemons? Or their filenames? This feels like something where there is a distinction.

While calling it SystemD is obviously just clueless and wrong because that's not its name in any meaning, I don't think this fundamentally collapses the way you propose. For example, we have the thing that is named the Apache HTTP Server, often Apache in brief, which has a binary named httpd. Even if it had decided to call its binary "apached", that wouldn't mean that the software's or project's name is "apached". I think it's useful to think there's a layer of indirection between project names and filenames. Apache is not even the only httpd...

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 17, 2025 9:14 UTC (Sun) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

The recommended spelling of systemd was documented by Lennart Poettering very early on. I suspect people on average are well aware of the recommendarion, but use SystemD in spite. I have noticed a strong correlation between expressing an extreme dislike for systemd and using the form SystemD.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 16:40 UTC (Sat) by ATLief (subscriber, #166135) [Link] (2 responses)

If there was a project called "KewlFS" that insisted it be capitalized as "kEWlfS", would you capitalize it as such?

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 17:56 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I was going to respond to your obvious "gotcha" hypothetical with the snarky response it deserves but the value I want to uphold is people speaking their honest thoughts and feelings in earnest, and I was reminded of the posting guidelines "Is your comment polite, respectful, and informative? " (thanks, they worked at least once!) and deleted my original thought as being unworthy.

To answer your (presumably bad-faith) question earnestly, if there was a project that chose capitalization like 'kEWlfS' to refer to their work, rather than the more conventional 'KewlFS' that would be fine, maybe this project is a FUSE driver for Exchange Web Services (EWS) so they want to emphasize this in their branding, it would be disrespectful to insist that your personal interpretation and preferences are more correct and should override the members of the project who are doing the work, in a matter of style such as this.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 18, 2025 9:16 UTC (Mon) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

There *is* a great example: LaTeX. It's definitely styled in a "weird" way. It is, however, the styling preferred by the original author, and it's not difficult to remember, so type it in another way unless you're trying to make some sort of point?

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 16, 2025 16:00 UTC (Sat) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

IKEA is simply the trademark. Written that way it clearly refers to the business. You could write Ikea but that could be someone's name.

We write iPhone, not Iphone. It is written the way people recognise it, you don't need to know how to pronounce it to know what it means. Written and spoken languages are not the same (though obviously closely related).

Anyone writing System-D is basically doing the same as people writing Micro$oft. A deliberate misspelling for effect.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 17, 2025 11:39 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (5 responses)

> Anyone writing System-D is basically doing the same as people writing Micro$oft. A deliberate misspelling for effect.

Why "deliberate" ? I used to think it was spelled like this. There are commits in the systemd repo spelling it this way, and there is even still one instance of it in the code. Why always search for nastiness when it can simply be explained by ignorance ? Why would people know how developers *wanted* to spell it when the *only* contact they have with the name is oral, when spoken about by others ? How many times a day do you see "systemd" written on your screen to represent the project (not the process nor directories), or even do you write it on your keyboard ?

Systematically jumping on people when they ignore something that you happen to know is not doing any service to anyone, let alone to the project you want to defend or represent, it makes it look like being surrounded by people waiting in the corner, ready to attack you if you fail to pronounce it well. This makes no sense. It reminds me of the good old days of LaTeX, where some morons would laugh when someone pronounced "latex", with the most extremes even insisting "don't you see, it's not an X, it's a Chi, but OK you can use the X letter". Better just teach others rather than criticize.

In the case of "Micro$oft" you cited above, it's different, it's using a character that is not a letter but the symbol for a currency to infer a relation between a company name and money. You should instead compare this to spelling "MICROSOFT", or "MicroSoft" instead of "Microsoft", which is easy to be mistaken about as well, particularly since the original logo was uppercase BTW!

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 17, 2025 12:08 UTC (Sun) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

> There are commits in the systemd repo spelling it this way

2 in total, both from 2010

> and there is even still one instance of it in the code.

a mistake by a contractor in a code comment that slipped through the cracks, already fixed

> Why always search for nastiness when it can simply be explained by ignorance ?

This time it's just an honest mistake, the issue is that 99% of the times it's not, and instead it's a case of a particular venn diagram being a circle

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 17, 2025 18:15 UTC (Sun) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (3 responses)

"Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD." https://brand.systemd.io

This text has been on the systemd website since the beginning. Where else would the naysayers have learned to call it SystemD?

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 18, 2025 5:21 UTC (Mon) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (2 responses)

Sincerely, who visits "brand.$foo.$tld" to guess how a project is spelled ? Nobody cares in the first place how you spell httpd, squid, sendmail, postfix, ntpd etc (all intentionally lowercased here hoping not to offend anyone) because nobody suspects that there's a trap there.

Yesterday I made a test and told a friend about this news. He was surprised and told me "Ah? I thought it was written like SystemV". That might actually be one possible source of confusion and a more likely one than deliberately wanting to misrepresent a brand. I find it really bizarre to put criticizers and newcomers in a same box just for their accidental misuse of a name, at the pretext that some untold statistics shows that 99% of the time it's criticizers who spell it like this. Maybe instead they become criticizers after having been insulted for writing it this way. I really find this approach offensive. But anyway, let's end this topic.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 29, 2025 1:10 UTC (Fri) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (1 responses)

> He was surprised and told me "Ah? I thought it was written like SystemV"

That was my thought as well. I'm quite surprised that people are reading so much into the spelling, to the point of even inferring political opinions.

I don't see any secret cabal of systemd-haters covertly communicating with each other using misspellings to trick those who don't dislike systemd. People who dislike systemd are generally not shy about saying they dislike it. We shouldn't be looking under rocks for people who have different opinions about init systems.

hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 29, 2025 8:59 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That was my thought as well.

It's interesting that people don't seem to wonder why the number in the name should suddenly jump from 5 to 500 …

Also, the legacy init system which systemd replaced wasn't actually called “SystemV”. It didn't have a proper name to begin with (after all it was just the init system, not much to see here, move on) and, in the Linux community, people used to refer to it as “System V init” because it was patterned on what was delivered with Unix System V (in the 1980s), as opposed to, e.g., what BSD was doing. So it isn't entirely obvious why the successor to “System V init” would be called “SystemD” – if Lennart Poettering had intended to continue that pattern he would clearly have gone with “System D init” and not just “SystemD”, but then it'd still be strange to move from “V” to “D” and not “VI” or “W” (remember that the X Window System was the successor of another window system called W, hence the “X”).

Anyway, more than a decade and many blog posts, man pages, distribution releases, conference presentations, etc. later it should be common knowledge that the “d” at the end of “systemd” is, in fact, lowercase. It is reasonable to assume that people who still insist on writing “SystemD” have either been living under a rock or else have an axe to grind.