SystemD and Debian Trixie questions
Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2025 12:32 pm
MX 23.5 XFCE
After reading a little about some of the changes MX has to make due to upcoming Debian Trixie release, some questions have come up.
These questions are a little dangerous because they are about trust and security.
I do not think that anyone can really know the answer without working for / being associated with the development of these applications.
So please just bare with me because I kind of know that there might not be an answer, but just some mentioning some hear say / observations.
I say this because for example SystemD is known to be a controversial topic so please try not to say anything that will cause this post to be locked.
First off, thank you to all the MX developers for your efforts in providing both a non-SystemD and a SystemD based distro.
I have not been using Linux as long as many users, but to me it does seem quite strange that one company, that has been bought out by another company, is slowly taking over piece by piece.
Nice that work has been done which benefits the community, but just wonder what happens once every piece has been taken over.
SYSTEMD
(Keep in mind that most of this is just hear say and vague, but just curious if any of it can be considered to be still be a concern)
Obviously SystemD has for the most part taken over most distros so this will not be a conversation like it was years ago, but something that always stood out was hearing people mention in the past that it could be more of a "backdoor".
Now that SystemD has been around for a while, is there anything actually within SystemD that could still be viewed like this? or was this just tension years ago about something taking over?
I once heard someone mention something about it producing "binaries" as opposed to text files which was a concern.
It was also said that because there are so many applications in the suite that it would not be as easy to review?
Again I do not think this really could be answered, I know that nothing is necessarily "safe" but just was wondering if there were still mentionings this, I have heard more about the issue of eliminating choice, then this.
DEBIAN 13 TRIXIE (XFCE)
Not good because while I already had the above on my mind, knowing that MX would be using Debian Trixie at some point, I decided to just quickly try actual Debian Trixie live just to see if any issues occurred on my machine. Worked fine but I noticed something that made me start to question some things.
In the past I had mentioned an application called "Redshift" which ended up being a topic of concern because everyone discovered that it uses something called "GeoClue" and were not happy with this.
When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?
To me this is really strange, guess it could be because of maybe the installer would try to setup timezone? but still does not seem like this should be.
Not that this is necessarily malicious, but I never really ever questioned Debian itself and it being "trustworthy"/"safe", most would hope that it is not because obviously it is connected to many distros.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew why "GeoClue" is running by default?
Is it because of what I mentioned about the installer?
Do all installers use something like this?
To me this should not even be installed at all, but if so then it seems like it should be more of a choice rather then a default.
If anyone has any information to share about this please do so.
Again all of these topics just so happened to all come up at the same time so figured I would mention these questions.
Thank you to anyone who reads this
After reading a little about some of the changes MX has to make due to upcoming Debian Trixie release, some questions have come up.
These questions are a little dangerous because they are about trust and security.
I do not think that anyone can really know the answer without working for / being associated with the development of these applications.
So please just bare with me because I kind of know that there might not be an answer, but just some mentioning some hear say / observations.
I say this because for example SystemD is known to be a controversial topic so please try not to say anything that will cause this post to be locked.
First off, thank you to all the MX developers for your efforts in providing both a non-SystemD and a SystemD based distro.
I have not been using Linux as long as many users, but to me it does seem quite strange that one company, that has been bought out by another company, is slowly taking over piece by piece.
Nice that work has been done which benefits the community, but just wonder what happens once every piece has been taken over.
SYSTEMD
(Keep in mind that most of this is just hear say and vague, but just curious if any of it can be considered to be still be a concern)
Obviously SystemD has for the most part taken over most distros so this will not be a conversation like it was years ago, but something that always stood out was hearing people mention in the past that it could be more of a "backdoor".
Now that SystemD has been around for a while, is there anything actually within SystemD that could still be viewed like this? or was this just tension years ago about something taking over?
I once heard someone mention something about it producing "binaries" as opposed to text files which was a concern.
It was also said that because there are so many applications in the suite that it would not be as easy to review?
Again I do not think this really could be answered, I know that nothing is necessarily "safe" but just was wondering if there were still mentionings this, I have heard more about the issue of eliminating choice, then this.
DEBIAN 13 TRIXIE (XFCE)
Not good because while I already had the above on my mind, knowing that MX would be using Debian Trixie at some point, I decided to just quickly try actual Debian Trixie live just to see if any issues occurred on my machine. Worked fine but I noticed something that made me start to question some things.
In the past I had mentioned an application called "Redshift" which ended up being a topic of concern because everyone discovered that it uses something called "GeoClue" and were not happy with this.
When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?
To me this is really strange, guess it could be because of maybe the installer would try to setup timezone? but still does not seem like this should be.
Not that this is necessarily malicious, but I never really ever questioned Debian itself and it being "trustworthy"/"safe", most would hope that it is not because obviously it is connected to many distros.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew why "GeoClue" is running by default?
Is it because of what I mentioned about the installer?
Do all installers use something like this?
To me this should not even be installed at all, but if so then it seems like it should be more of a choice rather then a default.
If anyone has any information to share about this please do so.
Again all of these topics just so happened to all come up at the same time so figured I would mention these questions.
Thank you to anyone who reads this
