My parents have an Alexa and I have no choice in whether they install one in our house or not. I doubt they would be convinced by my pleas about privacy. So unfortunately and reduction in whatever privacy that was left is a shame.

i’m sure they will appreciate your BSD 2 Clause contributions at Microsoft HQ

explaining the difference between a Toyota and a Honda

It’s proprietary so, no thanks.

systemd is an init system and just has not played the same role in the development of GNU/Linux distributions like GNU has. before systemd there was sysvinit, and there are number of alternate init systems. It’s not about system functionality that we name operating systems.

Uh no, it’s not. GNU has been integral to the GNU/Linux project for years. Without GCC, coreutils, glibc, there would be no linux distributions. Systemd has not played the same role.

Debian GNU/Linux has been called Debian GNU/Linux since at least 1997 https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00013.html