I'm one of those mythical Linux users who has been using it for years but has little to no idea what's going on behind the scenes or under the hood.

In my time using it, I've sort of passively gleaned that certain things are controversial, but I don't necessarily know why. It's also hard for me to know if these are just general intra-community drama/bikeshedding, or if these are actually big, meaningful issues.

If you're someone who's in the know, here's your chance to lay out a Linux controversy in a way that's understandable by someone like me, who can't tell you why people always make "GNU/Linux" jokes for some reason whenever people mention "Linux."

Here are some things that have pinged for me as controversial in my time using Linux:

• Unity
• Canonical
• Deepin
• systemd
• Arch
• GNOME
• Manjaro
• Kali
• Rust in the kernel
• elementaryOS
• Linus Torvalds
• Snaps
• Wayland
• Something about a university being banned from contributing to Linux
• NVIDIA drivers
• Package managers vs. Snaps/Flatpaks

There are certainly more -- these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Replies don't have to be limited to the above topics. I'm interested in getting the lay of the land about any Linux controversy.

IMPORTANT

This topic is intended for learning, not bickering.

• Please try to explain a controversy as fairly as you can.
• Please try to not re-ignite a flame war about a specific controversy.

It's fine to discuss these in good faith, but I do not want this topic to become yet another Linux battleground online. There are plenty of those already!

A project I'm working on requires me to cover a bit of comedy targeting Lennart Poettering as it's tangentially related, and I'd like to have more context even though it's not strictly necessary. I'm a nontechnical Linux user who used the OS before systemd came around, but really the only impact on my life it's had is that I occasionally use systemctl to control services.

Though I wasn't paying as much attention to the community around the time major distributions switched, I've been casually exposed to criticism of it ever since I came back, and I'd like to make sense of it all and form an opinion beyond "I like Fedora and GNOME and it seems to go hand-in-hand with those". I've read The Biggest Myths, the Wikipedia article, some stuff on freedesktop.org, and of course absorbed the venom slung back and forth over systemd in every FOSS community, but it's hard to get a full picture. And a picture from 2022, for that matter, as a lot of this information comes from its early days. Help me out?