hope not tied to SystemD

Posted Aug 17, 2025 11:39 UTC (Sun) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
In reply to: hope not tied to SystemD by kleptog
Parent article: Finding a successor to the FHS

> 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.