That anger comes from somewhere. We don't just go around picking random people to become angry with. Poettering has a lot of influence in core components of Linux (dbus, pulseaudio, systemd) and he's a bad developer. His designs are horrible, his implementations buggy and shoddy and don't fit into the overall architecture of the rest of the system. So, yeah, there's anger towards him and I think it's more than deserved.

> Also some don't like change, react aggressively

We like change just fine if it brings improvements. If not, we don't like those changes. Again, we don't go around hating on random changes.

>There are also technical reasons, but those tend to attract less of pure anger.

All of the anger is caused by technical reasons. Whether it's shoddy programming or shoddy reasoning about technical issues on the systemd developers part. Almost no-one personally knows Poettering or the systemd developers, yet we still think their software sucks.

There are all kinds of people and plenty in Linux community do pick up on people merely for not be deferential enough to authority. Or for asking question they find stupid (or don't know answer for). You can get flamed quite easily.

Not all, probably not you, but a lot of people there get quite aggressive quite easily.

> We like change just fine if it brings improvements.

I personally know people who get outrages over changes whenever change happen. Maybe not you, but you are not everybody.

> All of the anger is caused by technical reasons.

No, not all of it. A lot of it is cause by arrogance which is not technical reason. You don't need to know someone personally to get that feeling. A certain amount of the anger has faulty reasoning on itself.