Textbook of Linux

b. 1980, Guatemala City — Software engineer; lead of systemd project

Also known as: Poettering

Lennart Poettering is one of the most consequential — and most polarising — Linux engineers of the past two decades. He created PulseAudio (2004), Avahi (2004), and, in 2010 with Kay Sievers at Red Hat, systemd — the init-and-service-manager that has replaced SysV init on nearly every major Linux distribution.

systemd's scope — covering boot, services, logging, networking, DNS resolution, device management, user sessions, containers, and more — is either pragmatic consolidation or overreach, depending on whom you ask. Poettering's blog posts and conference talks lay out the case for his design clearly; the same posts generated a torrent of hostile email and personal abuse that he has described publicly as severe.

In 2022 he moved from Red Hat to Microsoft, where he continues to work on systemd. Whatever one's view of the architecture, he is the primary author of code that now runs on nearly every Linux system in production.