https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/8/12/459
An open letter to the Linux community on how adopting systemd is a mistake. I personally don't have a view but seeing this debate is fascinating as a young programmer.
From the letter:
I just dist-upgraded to Jessie, and voila - PID 1 was suddenly systemd. What a clusterfuck. In a 'One Linux' world, what would distros actually be? Deprecated. No longer relevant. Archaic shells of their once proud individualism. Basically, they're now just a logo and a default desktop background image. Because let's face it, there only needs to be One Modern 'competitor' to the Windows/Mac ownership of personal computing. A unified front to combat the evil empires of Redmond and Cupertino is what's needed. The various differences that made up different 'flavors' of Linux needed to be corralled and brought into compliance for the war to proceed efficiently. Um, what war?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Subsentient on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:34AM
Is why I wrote the Epoch Init System [universe2.us], because I didn't want my source-based i586 personal distro to use the abomination that is systemd, and I wanted something decent to take its place.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:41AM
Watch Epoch boot up a system! https://www.dropbox.com/s/u6q3nnr13uoohh3/SubLinux2.webm [dropbox.com]
I'm doing a bit of advertising here, but hey, it's relevant to the topic.
I suggest Debian adopt Epoch as it's init system for all platforms. :^3
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Thursday August 14 2014, @05:48PM
You'd have a better chance at winning the lottery. Check out the arguments/debates the Debian people had over systemd/upstart/init during the decision process some time, it was basically two camps: Canonical employees pushing upstart on one side, with GNOME devs and RedHat people on the other pushing for systemd. They had their own little holy war going on over it, and just like any proper holy war, any time a third party tried to get involved, both sides teamed up to shout them down before going back to fighting amongst themselves.
A few people tried suggesting they just stick with init, but both camps complained loudly at that, so it never gained traction. One of the better alternative suggestions was to adopt OpenRC as a replacement to init, since it was still a simpler design than upstart/systemd but solved a lot of the problems people were having with init, but that got shouted down too.
The fact that Debian still lets you use alternate init systems at all by using systemd-shim is a small miracle, considering how loudly the systemd camp complained against the idea.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:10AM
But how many mainstream will have your init and support it by default? And I have found that if you don't "follow the herd" and take what you are given you can count on ZERO help and support for ANY problem because it will automatically be blamed on the fact you "aren't using the tested configuration".
Frankly this whole debate highlights a serious problem in FOSS, the fact that a couple of devs in the right places can say "you are gonna take this like it or not" and that IS what you will end up with, like it or not. For recent examples just look at Pulse being dumped upon the world in a state that anybody sane would call alpha at best, with several major sound chips (including Realtek HD, which would be funny if not so sad since that is the biggest OEM soundchip on the planet) not anywhere close to stable and to this day its still fragile as hell, or KDE 4 and GnomeShell being dumped with again serious stability and usability issues.
If FOSS was truly about freedom of choice then we wouldn't see this insane bandwagon hopping, especially when we are talking about critical systems like sound and the shell and the "solution" being arguably worse than the previous release, yet over and over we see somebody from on high deciding "it WILL be thus" and every major distro of any note jumps on the bandwagon almost instantly. How is this any different than what MSFT and Apple does? After all you can use third party solutions you roll yourself on them as well and likewise you won't be getting any support if anything goes wrong because they'll blame it on the non standard config, so what's the diff? And who is it that is making these calls? Who is it that is deciding these alpha quality components are gonna be inserted into all the major releases almost simultaneously?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Informative) by My Silly Name on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:50PM
Not all of "the herd" is yet careening down the path of systemd. Pat Volkerding, responsible for Slackware, the oldest and still by far my favourite distro still declines to embrace systemd. Or PulseAudio, for that matter. And KDE works just fine.
Furthermore, I might add, provided that you have taken some trouble to research any suspected bugs properly, I can personally assure you that he is very forthcoming with assistance.
Of course, seasoned Slackware users will say "what bugs?", and they might be right. Last time I raised an issue, it turned out to have arisen from a misconfiguration of mine, and Pat was gracious enough not to rub my nose in it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:54PM
And last I checked slackware is pretty dang far from mainstream or user friendly, with less than 10% of the already small Linux desktop market. that also doesn't answer my questions which is who is making these calls that affect so many and why is a handful of people at the top able to affect so many with dodgy choices.
Again look at both pulse and KDE 4, in a sane world the majority of distros would have looked at those and said "Wow those aren't anywhere near ready for primetime, we'll stick it in the testing branch for now and stick with what is the more reliable choice" but instead we had pretty much every distro in the top 10 all switch at the exact same time...why did this happen? is it dev worship, where devs can do no wrong no matter what as long as they throw some buzzwords like innovation? is it a "keeping up with the Joneses" thing where each distro is afraid of not jumping on bandwagons, why?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Thursday August 14 2014, @06:08PM
Interestingly, Debian actually did that with KDE4. Even testing/unstable kept pushing KDE 3.5 maintenance updates and left KDE 4.x in experimental up until KDE 4.3 or 4.4. I avoided 99% of the KDE4 pain because of this.
Likewise, Debian has so far allowed me to keep pulse uninstalled, and I've got sysv-init as PID 1, with systemd only allowed to do the other shit it does, like the logind, where it can't trash my system as easily.
At this rate, Debian's going to be the only sane distro left because all the others are on a steady march over the insanity cliff.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:35PM
Sigh...again while Debian is used as a base for many of the mainstream distros (that all ignored Debian and went Pulse and KDE 4) by itself it isn't very mainstream or user friendly and I bet by any metric they measure Linux distros by it is practically nothing when compared to Mint and Ubuntu and all the user friendly. that does NOT mean its a bad OS, just that very few use it outside the server room is all.
And that STILL ignores my main question which is who is making these calls and why is it happening because it did NOT use to be this way, in fact before Ubuntu came along the top 5 distros were as different as different can be. It can't be the distros are just reskinning Ubuntu because just as many are using Debian as the base yet they also switched even when Debian didn't, so who and why is this happening? Who is deciding "it must be thus" and why is so much of the mainstream going along with him/her/them? again in a sane world each would judge the change on its own and decide that probably isn't right for them, at least SOME would but it seems like NONE of the top 5 didn't jump on, hell I wouldn't be surprised if all of the top 10 jumped on with Pulse and KDE 4...why? Is it dev worship? Is there some high muckety muck that is making the calls, why is this happening?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:21PM
KDE4 wasn't Kde's fault, it was basically a couple distros that happened to have a lot of clout at the time KDE4 came out. (Novell/OpenSuse rushed it into production and recommended status 3 releases before it was ready. (And then denied that they had done so).
KDE4 now is quite good, better than KDE3 ever was, and not as memory hungry as everyone would have you believe.
Pulse on the other hand really is a mystery. How did Poettering ever get that pushed into almost every distro? It replaced better working solutions.
There is a clique somewhere is the only answer I can think of. Some obscure IRC channel where these guys all decide to jump on some bandwagon in spite of their userbase and even in spite of their dev working group.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:50PM
Even the KDE guys said it wasn't mainstream ready so i can let them slide, it wasn't THEIR fault that they got bandwagon'd...but that don't explain Pulse, hell nothing explains Pukes which is STILL more fragile and crash prone than either ALSA or JACK.
This is what i don't understand, if i didn't know any better I'd swear the community had let an Elop get in the henhouse because it seems like everytime Linux has a shot, because MSFT takes a shit on Windows or puts out a bloated crap or whatever HERE IT COMES, all the mainstream distros stand in a circle and shoot the guy to the right in the head.../facepalm/. When Vista came out here came Pulse and the broken as fuck wiFi manager, with Win 8 it was the shell shitpiles and the whole "X is crappy, so is Wayland, lets all make a stinky" video subsystem fuckup...its like somebody high up wants Linux to remain a geeker toy and is actively hamstringing any chance that Linux gets at gaining more than a token share.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zsau on Friday August 15 2014, @03:29AM
Every time someone comes up with an example of a distro that contradicts your statement about them all being bandwagon-hoppers, you say "but that's hardly a mainstream userfriendly distro".
And you're right.
But back in the days before Ubuntu, there were no "mainstream userfriendly distros". Linux distros in those days were all very fussy about who their friends were. Debian and Slackware have kept more-or-less to the old ways, Fedora and the Ubuntu derivatives have gone the Ubuntu way of "this is how it is, love it or like it".
For my part, I prefer Debian. Except when it goes for systemd. I started using Linux in those old days and I still run a system that looks like it. I remember when I had to decide, do I want a display manager (graphical greeter/login prompt/X (re)starter) or do I want to run "startx", and to turn it on I had to edit a text file. Compared to that Debian is very much the most userfriendly system in the world.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 15 2014, @05:03AM
As I often say, stealing a line from Tron Legacy "I speak for the users" and if YOU were a normal Joe that had never heard of Linux would YOU be on Debian? Nope you'd go to some popular site like Linux insider or Distrowatch and look under "user friendly". With that being the metric one can see the same names multiple times, Ubuntu,Mint,PCLOS, Puppy, and a few newcomers like Educational Linux.
Can you find a counter example? Dude this is Linux, you can find a distro that supports Pentium IIs, but the use numbers are probably lucky to hit triple digits. The folks that use Debian? Frankly know enough about Linux that it doesn't matter what comes default, they can "make make install" their way to anything they desire...but that isn't what the majority will experience, because most don't have the skills to do that.
Finally the WHOLE POINT of having "user friendly" distros is to bring in new users so they naturally need easy and stable....so you install alpha quality software? /double facepalm/..I swear if these distros had placed Elop in charge he couldn't have screwed it any worse.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by zsau on Friday August 15 2014, @05:23AM
That wasn't really my point. It was that one person deciding to make everything spiffy without giving you options was what "user friendly" means ... that going the Ubuntu way of pulse/systemd style solutions is how you make things user friendly.
No idea what Tron Legacy is.
If I was a normal person I wouldn't be on Debian, I would be on iOS or Android and whatever they gave me at work. Trying to get Linux to compete with Windows on the desktop is last decade. I get how my post might've mislead when I went on the tangent of trying to point out that even the user-selective distros are a lot better than they used to be.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday August 15 2014, @05:50AM
Okay, advance warning: this reply is going to be bit off-topic, is sort of long, and isn't exactly directed at you so much as a general opinion/statement about Linux advocacy and how to introduce people to a new OS, or whether it's even a good idea to do so. Your comments made me think about it, though, so you get it as a reply here because that's where I happened to be.
If you're installing an OS from scratch, very few are very user-friendly in my experience, even Windows. Familiarity makes it easier, nothing else. Anecdotal, I know, but the last Windows install I did (7) was more problematic than the last Debian install I did, and I ended up leaving some stupid random sound card feature as "Unidentified hardware" in the device manager because the sound card (SB Audigy) is old and, the drivers available for 7 weren't covering everything, and I just eventually gave up because I didn't care enough to keep fighting it with no guarantee it would work.
That's not really the point, though. For a true newbie, any OS install is going to be full of gotchas and pitfalls, even without random bad luck. What matters is the experience after it's set up. In the case of Windows, that's usually "got it with the PC", and with Linux it's "someone set this up for me or is helping me set it up."
That means the initial setup being drop-dead simple isn't as important as having the long-term system be unsurprising and reliable. It also means most people are going to try the distro that the person introducing them to Linux is suggesting. Helping the newbie have a good experience means taking more time than going "check distrowatch and find one lol good luck". More on that later.
What really matters isn't setup, it's a stable system that doesn't offer too many surprises, and that's why I like Debian for that sort of thing. You do the hard parts (turn on non-free repo, make sure the drivers/firmware are all there, make sure sound works, etec.) and then you hand over a system that just works. Debian has been very good over the years about picking maturity over new-shiny, which IMO is important if you're trying to give someone "just works".
Even upgrading from one stable release to another is almost always painless. You can set the repo to the alias "stable" instead of a specific release and always keep a "current" version with minimal fuss.
One thing I will say, though; one size does not fit all. Rather than just always suggesting a specific distro to everybody, I try to find out why someone is interested in Linux and then determine what would work better. Debian stable is often a good choice because of the reliability, so I tend toward it unless it's obvious someone's needs don't match what it can provide. In those cases, I've also suggested Kubuntu, ubuntu studio, mint, and even opensuse to people. (Though lately I've been less inclined to suggest non-Debian ones just because of the insanity that has been popping up in various distros.)
I also try to do the same with desktop environments; some people want Windows-like familiarity while others prefer other environments. Ask a few questions, narrow down the DEs a bit from that, maybe show them a couple of them in action or let them try them for a few minutes, and decide from there. KDE tends to be the environment chosen, but not always.
Ultimately it's about making the person happy, not forcing your personal preferences on them. I don't like Ubuntu but had my grandmother using it with KDE for years with no problems, while my grandfather is absolutely hopeless with anything more complicated than a Chromebook, an OS I have absolutely no use for personally.
If someone is suggesting Linux to others without trying to help decide what distro is a good fit, or whether Linux is even a good fit at all for that person (because it isn't always), the experience is going to suck. I got into Linux by having access to a working system at a job in the '90s. Being able to use it made me want to install it at home, and someone I worked with helped me with the process. That's the sort of thing that makes a long-term user, not "hey bro Linux rules go google it sometime".
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Friday August 15 2014, @10:13AM
Uhhh..the new user friendly distros? Run as LiveCDs so you really don't have to "know" anything, you just stick in the CD and see if your stuff works. this is one thing i will give them credit for, because while it may not update without crapping itself OOTB it is actually easier than Windows 7 when it comes to installing as Win 7 won't let you know if hardware won't work until AFTER the install.
And they can waste mod points all they want but i think even the developers at Debian would say its NOT user friendly, because they don't support non free like wireless which can be a royal PITA to get running if you are new to Linux. Also I think that one can take a look at the forums of a distro and get a feel of what kind of users it attracts and its pretty obvious that Debian users? are ones that have used several other distros and THEN moved to Debian, nobody starts there because again you have to know what you are doing.
Finally, and again the fanboys can bitch because i don't care, but you HAVE to draw a line SOMEWHERE when it comes to Linux because of the sheer number of distros. To use a car analogy it would be like saying "man the fact that all these new cars have shitty computers really sucks" only for somebody to chime in "No they don't because my handmade Russian car doesn't even HAVE a computer". With Linux pretty much ANY statement can be true if you allow enough one off distros in there, hell there is a distro that is designed to look and act like fricking Windows Vista for Pete's sake. think KDE 4 and gnome 3 are ass? Well you can bet your last dollar there is a distro that comes with only JWM or E17 by default. Pulse runs like crap? I'm sure you can find distros that only come with ALSA and distros that only come with Jack...but will an average user even know they fricking exist?
so perhaps for the purpose of discussion we should set some hard limits here, say desktop oriented distros that are in the top whatever of distrowatch? Because otherwise ANYTHING that has EVER existed in Linux will be a valid answer because you can bet your last dollar that SOMEBODY out there has a distro running it, hell I would not be surprised if there is a distro that comes with KDE 2 or gnome 1 by fricking default, that is just the way Linux is, doesn't mean that the majority isn't still having to deal with PukeAudio and whatever bandwagon that mainstream jumps on this week.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday August 15 2014, @10:18PM
Okay, I'm going to go completely off-topic, because I've been curious about something for a while.
Don't take this wrong, but sometimes I can't tell if you're trying for deliberate misdirection or you're just really good at missing the point of what others say. You get caught up on some small part of something said and try to tear that down when it's tangential to what the person's saying. Maybe you focus on that part because it's the part of the discussion you feel more passionately about?
Like in my previous comment, the entire post I wrote was ultimately stating that I think it's more important to focus on giving someone a good everyday use experience, even if it means you have to help them a bit more at the start.
Maybe I didn't make that clear, I don't know, because your reply didn't even touch on that. It's still completely focused on things relevant to initial setup. If that's what you think is more important than smooth everyday use, fine, but you could have said that and tied it in better, instead of talking over what I said like it wasn't even there.
And again, please don't take this badly; it's intended as an innocent question but tone is hard to convey in text, especially with a question that can easily be taken wrong. It's just something I've noticed in a lot of your responses to people, and I'm trying to understand where it comes from and how it happens.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Hairyfeet on Saturday August 16 2014, @05:12AM
But WHO is gonna help them at the start? Are you gonna go over to their house and install it for them? and please god do NOT say the forums, because the average Linux distro forum has more elitist condescension than the Internet has porn. Anybody that jumps into that snake pit will quickly be told how stupid they are for not knowing some arcane bash mumbo jumbo that is "so obvious".
Any retailer will tell you that first impressions MATTER, that if you give them a lousy first impression? Give it up Chuck, you've lost. This is why only the so called "user friendly" distros are even worth discussing, because all you get at the other ones are those playing "distro roulette" because the distro they had broke Foo or screwed up bar so they are hopping to another to try to find one where it works. those users? they really don't matter as they are the 1% that you already have, they won't leave Linux no matter how fucked the user experience is, they'll just keep hopping.
And you'll probably either agree or fucking hate me but Debian? Waaay too focused on politics to be user friendly, you have to REALLY know WTF you are doing to get your average lappy to work on Debian thanks to their stand on non free drivers. With the user friendly distros you have at least halfway decent odds that OOTB that lappy will work...whether it'll STAY working is a debate for another day but at least they won't have to know about going into some deep level settings and inputting the address for a non free repo just to get the WiFi working.
Finally as for focusing on one part? My dance card is full friend, hence why I'm often having to come on here in the wee hours of the morning, don't take this the wrong way but i honestly don't have time to write a 10 paragraph essay debating every single point somebody has, not when there is 20 people on each site ALL wanting to debate this or that with me. Being southern we are taught its impolite not to respond when somebody speaks to you so i try to grab what I think the "main focus" of their post is...do I get it wrong sometimes? Sure, with some posts its hard to see what their main point is versus the 12 other points they brought up, but when you have VERY limited time you can only do so much...sorry.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday August 14 2014, @04:56PM
How is this any different from proprietary software? At least in FOSS one has the theoretical ability to change it to what you wish, with proprietary software your option is solely to buy another product, if a substitute even exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @07:01PM
"The Ribbon".
"Metro". They turned Windoze into Windo.
On a 23-inch monitor, you can have ONE process showing??
...not to mention the Gorilla Arm thing.
Decisions forced on you? Pot, kettle, black. EULA.
...and Slackware and particularly Gentoo [soylentnews.org] (among the biggies) have been mentioned multiple times.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Hairyfeet on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:43PM
Actually there is NO difference...well with the exception of Windows and OSX having much better and lengthier support cycles, better and larger choice of software (since nearly all the FOSS software runs on them while most of the proprietary won't run on Linux) and just FYI but one doesn't "have to buy something else" when it comes to Windows and OSX because other options such as changing the shell DO exist. Oh and one thing that Windows gets a BIG advantage over Linux is that thanks to long support cycles you can just "skip" releases you don't like, with Linux that either leaves leaves you out of date or hip hopping between regular and LTS, neither an optimal solution. Thanks to the cycles I was able to go from 2K to XP X64 to Win 7 on my home system, skipping XP and Vista entirely. That is 8 years worth of skipping, just try skipping 8 years worth of releases and see how many critical security patches you won't have access to.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 14 2014, @05:03PM
FOSS is about freedom of choice. People jump on bandwagons because they've chosen to. There isn't any way in FOSS to force people to comply with demands, other than by peer pressure.
PulseAudio was adopted because it was better than what came before, and there apparently weren't any better choices. Yeah, it sucked that it had problems early on, but that's what happens with brand-new stuff, and again there wasn't anything better, just other cobbled-together hacks like ARTS that all had their own problems too. KDE4 and Gnome certainly made mistakes too (IMO), but pissed-off users did what users do: they voted with their feet, and moved to alternatives. There's lots of great alternatives to Gnome3. There probably weren't any good alternatives to Pulse at the time.
we see somebody from on high deciding "it WILL be thus" and every major distro of any note jumps on the bandwagon almost instantly.
That's because the people who run those distros actually agree with the decision. There's nothing forcing them to adopt something put out by some developer (who's frequently at a competing distro: Lennart works for Red Hat, a competitor to Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc.), so obviously they like it and are adopting it willingly because it's better than the status quo.
This of course doesn't mean the distros are always making the best decisions. I always thought it was a bad idea for the KDE-using distros to adopt KDE4.0 so quickly, without keeping KDE3.5 as a fallback option or even the default, and this caused a lot of bad feelings during that transition. Hopefully the distros have learned, though it'll probably be a long time before KDE does something that big again. But the Gnome distros (not all the same as the KDE distros) mostly did seem to do the exact same thing with Gnome3, which of course caused Mint to gain hugely in popularity. So it just seems like evolution in action: survival of the fittest (of those willing to listen to the users more).
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:31PM
No, that's exactly the opposite of the truth.
Pulse was not better, it was far worse.
There were at least three choice in wide use at the time which handled mixing where necessary, but let sound cards that were capable do their own mixing.
Maybe you should take a look at the actual architecture some day.
http://jan.newmarch.name/LinuxSound/Sampled/Architecture/ [newmarch.name]
http://tuxradar.com/content/how-it-works-linux-audio-explained [tuxradar.com]
http://www.alsa-project.org/~tiwai/soundsystems.pdf [alsa-project.org]
I have never met a single linux user who's sound system works better with Pulse than it did without pulse.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by urza9814 on Friday August 15 2014, @12:29AM
Oh god, seriously?
Before Pulse audio support on Linux was a *nightmare*. Nearly every single install I'd either have no sound at all, or sound from only one application at a time. There were cases where it took *months* for me to get it resolved!
Pulse, on the other hand, I can't recall ever having an issue with. And it provides full control over individual speakers or individual audio streams.
When I first started using Linux around 10 years ago, going from a nothing to a fully functional system took between a week and a month on average. Now it takes about an hour. I'm quite happy with the changes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Friday August 15 2014, @01:47AM
Why does Pulse require 30% of my processor when there are no audio events? Why does it need more than 30% of my processor to play a MP3? Sure, my processor is from 2007 but Pulse shouldn't need that much resources to do something that can be done on the sound card's hardware. With all of its problems, OSS4 didn't need that much to play audio or even sit idle.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 15 2014, @11:48PM
I haven't a clue; I've never seen that. For me it's freakin' Xorg.bin that's always hogging 70% or more... :(
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Friday August 15 2014, @05:57AM
At the time when general audio support was a nightmare, Pulse was also a nightmare, just of a different type. You also didn't have X11 auto-configuring, either, but times change and so does software.
I've found Alsa to be in the "just works" category for many, many years. It kind of has to be, considering pulse still relies on it, and if alsa doesn't work, pulse won't magically work without it. That simplification of setup that you're attributing to pulse is just the result of maturation in various parts of the stack, not some magic pixie-dust pulseaudio sprinkled onto distros.
I said this elsewhere recently, but in almost any normal use case, pulse doesn't do anything alsa can't do without it, and the more advanced uses are better served by using JACK. Lower latency, lower cpu use, more powerful, etc. All you really get by using pulse on top of alsa is extra latency for nothing special.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tomtomtom on Friday August 15 2014, @09:11AM
Completely agree with this. ALSA really does just work - especially given that it's very rare I want to run more than one audio-using application at once so I don't even need a mixing capability. If you want/need something more complex, JACK really is what PulseAudio should have been and is what I've been using for ages.
By contrast, PulseAudio is *still* a nightmare. I recently tried to install it after Skype gave up on sensible audio. None of the issues I had with it 4+ years ago have been fixed. It causes noticeable latency. It causes jittery/broken sound. It won't let me use the microphone built into my USB webcam (in fact it won't let you select between hardware outputs/inputs AT ALL as far as I can tell). It takes away all the useful mixer options I have with bare hardware or with JACK. And for apps which weren't written to use it, the ALSA emulation layer is poor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15 2014, @07:29AM
PulseAudio is not a driver, it's a damon running on top of ALSA. if ALSA is not working, neither will Pulse. And if ALSA i working, audio works without Pulse being needed.
Originally, ALSA did not come with dmix enabled by default, and thus was limited to one program playing sound. But dmix has been enabled by default for more than five years, so that argument is outdated.
What weird hardware were you running on? AS/400?
Ten years ago, Installing Linux on standard PC hardware was as simple as next next next done. 20 years ago, when I installed Linux, it did take a week or two. But mostly because I didn't have an internet connection, so each day at school I would fill my ten floppy disks with the next "disk set" - one disk set for the base system, one for networking, one for X and so on.
But then, if my parents' PC had not been set up from the shop, I would never have gotten sound to work on the Microsoft partition. Those lines in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were "don't touch". Getting it to work on Linux turned out to be pretty easy with OSS (that was before ALSA).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Caballo Negro on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:40AM
As another old hand, my first thought on encountering systemd in some random Linux distribution was "What amateur dreamed this up?" Economy of means does not seem to have been a design goal. It seems to me to have too much to go wrong for reliability, and too many things running as root for safety.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday August 14 2014, @05:29PM
Lennart Poettering [wikipedia.org] and Kay Sievers [wikipedia.org], the same fellows that brought us PulseAudio and udev, respectively.
That explains a lot about what's wrong with systemd, actually.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:50AM
Breaking the article down the primary points seem to be:
1) I don't like it
2) Swearing
This is interesting why?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by arashi no garou on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:18PM
It's not the best argument against systemd, but it had some things that need to be said. I think this is pretty telling: The systemd devs' attitudes towards something that is fundamentally broken about systemd (corrupted logs) is to "ignore it" rather than fix it.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64116 [freedesktop.org]
If that's their attitude towards something as basic as logging and error reporting, I don't have a lot of faith in the rest of the project.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:38PM
Well said.
Its a rant, and a rambling rant at that. Its not well organized.
I'v seen much better takedowns of SystemD on the net(forget where just now). Google will find them for you.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:50AM
That letter needed writing. It was a good read, someone had to say it eventually. Never liked systemd's way of doing things since I saw it, and it's seemingly oppressive way of taking over other parts of the system which init shouldn't necessary need to control directly, or forcing silly dependancies such as using this particular init system (why?) to use certain programs (gnome stack) which goes against choice and openness. By extension, I dislike gnome too.
I didn't realise Debian had gone the systemd way too now. Shame.
I currently use Gentoo on my main servers because of the vast freedom to build all the pieces of the system together the way I want it, or without pieces I don't want (depending on dependancies required). Though with all the compiling, it's too heavyweight for whenever I need a new clean test VM up and running ***real quick*** for a short period of time.
What other options have we currently got in terms of distros that don't use systemd? Or other init systems - which are relatively straightforward to install. One command via a package manager would be ideal if even that much. I might have mentioned I use Gentoo so might be capable of fetching, configuring and building source directly, but that's hardly a friendly way of doing things, especially for quick and dirty VMs. (I use Ubuntu currently for these temp VMs because of the simple installation - Sorry, but I guess I'm part of the systemd problem simply by not saying anything and continuing to indirectly support it.)
(Score: 4, Funny) by Subsentient on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:56AM
The Epoch Init System [universe2.us] is available in portage. And I wrote it. And I use Soylent News. So now you have to try it.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:10AM
Is there an ISO with it? It's not just a matter of us trying it, it's convincing distro maintainers to drop systemd.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:22AM
Yes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ppaqw68q419n3ux/SubLinux2-Final-05-16-2014.i586.iso [dropbox.com]
This is what I run. It's my personal distro. Installer's a bitch, but get past that and you can see.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Informative) by forsythe on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:19PM
As the Gentoo Wiki puts it:
I like it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:05AM
systemd could be a boon for Gentoo as the systemd haters jump ship from the big Debian and Red Hat distro families. I think Gentoo is probably the most mainstream distro that is not forcing everyont to switch to systemd, although you can use it if you want. Even Arch is changing over which I am kind of surprised by.
My guess is that systemd is not actually awful enough to drive a mass migration but it will probably net a few new users.
I don't find Gentoo to be too heavy to start up in a new VM. If anything, it's the reverse; I keep around a "stage4" install with everything I commonly need, and it's usually faster to add what I need to that than to do a full install of some other distro. Usually you don't need to do a kernel build for this sort of thing unless the whole reason for the VM is to fiddle with the kernel, in which case you're going to have to do it anyway and most other distros are much grumpier about building your own kernel than Gentoo.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:32AM
Arch already changed over and systemd is such a source of constant headaches that I now only update (2 desktops and a bunch of servers) every few months. So much for rolling release, so much for the near-perfect distro.
Gentoo, I ran for a few years on my desktops (w/ slackware on the servers). I suppose my aversion to running it on servers could be overcome since Arch was no problem until all this systemd bullshit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:51AM
Gentoo + cloud services is really quite awesome. Rolling release is an alien concept for testers and ops but what you do is just make the OS and application bundle a unified thing. When you want to deploy, you spin up a new server with the OS and all the software together. They can bless the whole bundle and it can get deployed as many places as you need. Rolling release gives some folks the willies because OS upgrades are associated with downtime and major upgrade pain but with frequent releases you don't have much upgrade pain and with cloud hosting you don't have downtime to do the upgrade.
Blessing an entire server image instead of just an app also avoids Gentoo compile times. You have them up front when you build the image (it is not that bad, really), but it's not like you need to go compile on every individual host you deploy.
(Score: 2, Informative) by My Silly Name on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:04PM
Now the package system is still OK, but the rest has none of the simplicity and elegance of Slackware. I more or less had to abandon it a couple of years back when dependencies to some program I was interested in required a bunch of updates that (doing it the pacman way) would have resulted in overwriting the /lib directory with a file. That kind of fuckup should just never happen, and that was the end of my experiment with Arch.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:32AM
Slackware still has good old init with BSD-style init scripts (and support for SysV-style).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @12:23PM
+1 to this.... One of the reasons I still use Slackware.
Plus, those who complain that sysvinit is bad, it is not the init process, it is the forrest of opaque symlinks that make up the sysvinit style system that makes it terrible.
Slackware's BSD style init scripts are a breeze compared to the sysvinit forrest of opaque symlinks.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:12AM
Everything people argue against systemd was just as valid when it was spoken against the LSB 20 years ago. Or POSIX and even BSD for that matter...
Fact is, all those UNIX principles everyone seem to like so much were abandoned circa 83 following Berkeley sockets, networking and Personal Computers when the original IPCs were found inadequate and the research\development team started conceptualizing a do-over - later in the form of Plan 9 - since they concluded it can't be fixed in UNIX.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:43AM
LSB was mostly a "here's how we already do things", and the rest of it never mattered. It demands RPM, but non-RPM distros never switched to RPM to comply. Some added Alien as an optional package, but that was the end of that requirement. All I've seen of LSB is /etc/lsb-release and a single file under /lib which I don't remember the name of, and the only thing requiring them is Google Earth, a binary-only program on an open source system.
LSB didn't demand /home being renamed to C:\Users or /bin and /lib being combined into C:\Win32. Systemd, however, demands (although Lennart keeps claiming that it's not true, every distro that has fallen for the systemd trap has been forced to do this) that everything from /bin, /lib be moved to /usr/bin, /usr/lib, but then /usr needs to be moved to the root drive, rather than being on a larger hard drive or even NFS mounted.
LSB also didn't get rid of the UNIX philosophy of do one thing and do it well.
Completely different.
As for POSIX, that was before my time.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:57AM
Furthermore, lets not forget that the guy that's demanding all these changes is the same guy that says about corrupted (binary) system logs: [freedesktop.org]
This is but one of many, many issues. We are not talking Posix or LSB style standardisation, we're talking a pied-poettering leading his weak minded herd straight off the edge of a cliff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @09:58AM
It's getting hard to avoid /usr on root, or at least mounted at boot time, which is nearly the same. Gentoo requires it now, for example. I don't think it is in practice a big loss to do this. The role of a minimal system on / which prepares the full system to be loaded is now filled by the initramfs. I don't think I've had /usr on NFS this century, but you can have / on RAID, for example, with initramfs.
I agree with your basic point, though. systemd is far too much of the "Windows Way" of doing things.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:16AM
Anyone who suggests initramfs as a solution, rather than as a problem, gets to fix a broken initramfs using only the tools available on said initramfs, and doing it over and over until they can get the change to stick long enough to reboot the system to re-run mkinitramfs.
If they ask for a boot CD, I'll hand them a Windows CD, while suggesting that they should be in the Windows group.
As for putting /usr on the root device, sure I'll replace the root SSD and the 1TB /usr hard drive with a 1TB SSD holding everything, as long as you pay the difference.
Oh, and first time I've ever heard Gentoo requiring anything. I thought Gentoo was where you go when you want to customize everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:51AM
You don't HAVE to have /usr on the root device. It just has to be mounted before the initramfs hands control over to the regular init system. Been that way for about two years now though I'm not sure when it became mandatory.
Like it or not, initramfs is here to stay. If you might break it, keep your old one around so you can boot with it if you need to. Unless your disk hardware just melted down, you should not be in a situation where your system won't boot and you can't go back to your old configuration and you don't even have a boot DVD.
(Score: 1) by pasky on Thursday August 14 2014, @12:48PM
What do you have in your /usr so that it doesn't fit on your SSD? And are you sure /usr is the right place for it, rather than, say, /opt or /srv ? (I.e., having the big data on different filesystem than all the static junk in /usr/bin, locales, icons and whatnot.)
(Score: 2, Informative) by phantomlord on Friday August 15 2014, @03:48AM
The man responsible for asking the Gentoo Council to mandate an initramfs for /usr, William Hubbs, is also the lead of openrc. It was the very first thing he pushed when he got elected to the Council, despite his knowledge that tested patches exist so openrc doesn't need an initramfs [gentoo.org]. He not only refuses to accept the patches, but also failed to inform the Council that such patches already existed. The Council, being lazy, did no research on their own and took him on his word... given that a number of them are systemd proponents themselves, they don't really care and blindly voted based on their personal desires rather than any technical merit. So why would williamh do it? He's also a systemd dev and I would presume would like to see openrc held back to systemd's artificial and arbitrary limitations. The Council even went so far as to say that it is fine to deliberately break packages so that a separate /usr won't work.
The good news, is the patches exist and work despite williamh's efforts to cripple openrc and gentoo in favor of systemd. I'm also hopeful that, as Daniel Robbins has agreed to co-maintain openrc now, progress can finally be made.
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:05AM
I have tried to solve this problem by thinking that /usr/bin is actually /bin and /usr/local/bin is the /usr/bin. The only problem is when I actually have to put something in /usr/local then I install it my home directory without root.
It ain't pretty but it solves the retardness. On my other machine I use gentoo but it involves too much fighting to be productive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:39PM
So, I'm supposed to move even more stuff to non-standard locations, breaking everything that tries to find it, just to work around the stupid idea that /usr/* should take the job of /*?
How am I going to keep such an install up to date? The package manager will not have any idea that things were moved away from /usr.
How about rather than creating workarounds for a stupid init system, we start allowing some freedom of choice - including the choice to not install systemd? This whole thing is becoming more "One Microsoft Way" than Microsoft has been for years.
(Score: 1) by cubancigar11 on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:21PM
Hey! I am not defending systemd. I am just a nobody - a user level developer who has to live under the shadow of great system developers. I like OpenRC of gentoo, its just Gentoo is not developer friendly.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:46PM
A hobbyist distro I once worked on decided that there would be no /usr/. We spent a lot of time repackaging software to fit, but early on one of the other devs just made /usr a symlink to / for the default installation. Whenever we screwed up a package, we'd still get warnings about it, but as far as I can tell, nothing on the user side ever complained.
All that, and separate partitions still allowed root to get in and fix things after FS corruption. So it may be possible in this day and age to `fix' /usr/ with a single ln.
(Score: 1) by NoMaster on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:20PM
Although I have no great opinion one way or another on systemd, I agree 100% with you comment.
The uncomfortable fact too is that Linux's init scripts, having been shat on by various distros and software developers over the years, were a complete and utter mess. They might have been a readable mess - but they were still a mess.
At least systemd (as I understand it; I'm a Mac & *BSD user these days) tries to impose a framework of logical consistency on the whole thing. The only real downside - apart from the non-human-readable configurations - it that it's grown like Topsy and now appears to be only a kitchen sink short of a 15-bedroom mansion...
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Friday August 15 2014, @02:46PM
"it that it's grown like Topsy and now appears to be only a kitchen sink short of a 15-bedroom mansion..."
Thats what makes the whole subject a comic farce. We've got "architects" that can't even recognize a simple design antipattern of inner-platform effect, and that inability to recognize it dooms the systemd project.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday August 14 2014, @06:02PM
Except for in this case, LSB, POSIX, and BSD actually make sense. SystemD really doesn't have a good use case, while POSIX and LSB made it easier to write userspace applications targeting just about all of *NIX. BSD provided a standard set of utilities to make using *NIX easier. All of those projects still follow some pretty *NIX-y design principles. SystemD does none of that. It doesn't make life easier, or allow for clear-cut standards-compliant interfaces, or follow any UNIX principles. Not only that, but SystemD is displacing the other major standard (SysV init), when there is no reason to do so. There was ample reason for the other projects.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2, Informative) by DNied on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:24AM
1) Thank Bob I run Slackware
2) If Slackware ever switches to systemd, I switch to [Open|Net]BSD
(Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:21PM
Why not FreeBSD? And why not switch now?
It's intended as a genuine question.
(Score: 1) by DNied on Thursday August 14 2014, @07:38PM
I don't like their deprecation of procfs, nor do I like how it came to be (pure and simple negligence).
There's still too much reliance on Adobe Flash, which isn't impossible to run on *BSD, just impractical and memory inefficient.
But Flash is fading fast (at last). Once flashless Google StreetView is fully functional, for example, I'll have one less reason to keep Linux (but still no compelling reason to switch).
Another Linux plus is better ACPI support than the BSDs. That might change when I get new hardware, though.
(Score: 1) by E_NOENT on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:56PM
+1
(Oh, and it's "Bob")
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 1) by arashi no garou on Friday August 15 2014, @02:49AM
So I've done some reading on systemd, and decided it's definitely not for me. It takes so much control from my hands, I may as well be using OS X instead. If I wanted my OS to tell me what to do instead of the other way around, I wouldn't be using GNU/Linux in the first place.
I've been running Crunchbang Linux for a while now, and I absolutely love the defaults. Openbox with Tint2, nice default apps, nice "gets out of my way" light grey theme, and the menu is set up logically. Unfortunately, the forums are full of people calling for systemd to be made default in the next major release. With Debian going systemd too, it looks like that's where we're headed for good.
So, now I'm left choosing between going back to my old friend Slackware and spending the equivalent of days that I don't have tweaking it to get my #! workflow back, or try to get one of the BSDs working on my workstations. I'd just throw GNU/Linux out completely and go to BSD if not for the fact that FreeBSD has panicked on boot on both machines I use, and OpenBSD hangs during installation. (No, it's not bad RAM or a bad drive, both tested and verified, and all other OSes work fine, even experimental stuff like Haiku).
I guess I better spin up a Slackware VM and start building out a good /home and config files to copy over while I can still use #! without systemd.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:42AM
this is by far the biggest problem holding back the adoption of GNU/Linux on anything with a display plugged into it. even something trivial like setting up an HTPC is a choir that I don't enjoy doing, there certainly shouldn't be 5 different daemons running that all are responsible in their own special way to signal if an application can suspend a monitor, but there are. god forbid you use a less than standard desktop environment (ie. XFCE) that isn't the latest flavor of Gnome. here's a great example of this fragmentation in action in a real world scenario.
VLC for instance, look at this funny bug report https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/9718 [videolan.org], to summarize it, a user reports that VLC 2.1* branch broke inhibiting sleep during video playback, the main VLC dev says its not a VLC problem and tells the guy to pretty much fuckoff, only for another dev to confirm the issue and try to help fix it to no avail, its over 10 months now and VLC is unusable for XFCE users because you can't watch a file without the monitor turning off unless you fully disable all power-saving features. look at the shotgun approach they have to use just for such a trivial thing as inhibiting sleep, https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/master/modules/misc/inhibit/dbus.c [github.com]
things like this aren't just bad for the community, but outright harmful. The critics of systemd are on the autistic spectrum because they are unable to comprehend that people WANT systemd, it wasn't just some ill-conceived abomination that just appeared one day like they would have you believe, developers and distro maintainers alike were sick of writing 1000+ LoC init scripts to handle trivial shit like restarting a daemon. now we just need the rest of it to become more standardized in the same way and I think we've got a fighting chance at really making a difference and improving our software.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:00AM
I do run XFCE, although I don't use screensavers but power saving has always worked as I'd expect with mplayer. The part you're missing is that dbus introduced another fragment. I'll wager this all worked fine back in vlc 1.x days?
What in all of the known universe are you talking about? You provided an example of something that presumably worked fine before systemd / dbus and then accuse those criticising systemd of being autistic. Was this intended as some kind of surreal humor?
There isn't anybody denying that init could have been improved, most "critics" are of the opinion that systemd is not that improvement.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:13AM
> The critics of systemd are on the autistic spectrum because they are unable to comprehend that people WANT systemd
Actually the reverse is what is true:
The creators of systemd are on the autistic spectrum because they are unable to comprehend that NO ONE WANTS their crappy, do everything in pid 1, piece of shit.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @12:34PM
speak for yourself, you and the other five BSD users are a vocal minority and quite frankly if you love the unix philosophy so much why don't you just use *BSD already?
(Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:25PM
Some of us did migrate to BSD when linux committed suicide. Happily.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Friday August 15 2014, @08:36AM
Let me be clear.
I don't like an all-consuming, Skynet-in-a-tarball, unaudited, binary-log-having, QR code generating [fedoraproject.org], dbus requiring, udev assimilating, black box for an init system, that sends jpegs of crop circles to Poland for all I or anyone else knows. 6MB is a conservative estimate on systemd size, but you know what?
6MB for an INIT SYSTEM is MASSIVE (and does NOT include dependencies!), and CRIPPLES attempts at ALL pocket-sized 10-20MB linux distros if systemd gets their way and becomes an assimilating part of this nutritious linux breakfast.
systemd is an abomination that should have been thrown over the cliff like a sickly baby, spartan style, before it hit FEDORA.
I'm using good old udev 182, not systemd-udevd or eudev, and I'm using the Epoch Init System [universe2.us], and I'm using ConsoleKit with my PolKit, and I'm using ALSA with no fucking pulseaudio, and guess what? I'll sooner add all users to the 'audio' and 'video' groups to fire up my XFCE before I install systemd or logind.
I want to be honest, I hate systemd so much, I wrote my own fucking init system, and it took me seven months, just so I wouldn't have to stare at systemd's evil fucking boot sequence whenever I flicked the power switch.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:24PM
Presumably, most of systemd's adopters are of the opinion that systemd *is* that improvement. Of course, the majority isn't necessarily right, but if no one else can create an init system and convince others that it is an improvement over both init and systemd, you'll forgive me for doubting the claims of systemd's critics.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:10AM
> fragmentation.
> this is by far the biggest problem holding back the adoption of GNU/Linux
Actually no. What is holding back adoption of GNU/Linux is the simple fact that 99.95% of the joe-sixpacks out there think "me need computer" and they go to BestBuy and buy something off the shelf.
And what does it come with ... mswin ...
And that same joe-sixpack has never, will never, and could not, install windows, or any other os, on any computer. When that same person finds that his new computer is now slow, he does not fix it, he brings it back to BestBuy where the geeksquad does a virus removal _for him_ and he heads back home with thinking "me computer faster now".
That is what is holding back adoption. The fact that joe-sixpack, who could likely use GNU/Linux just as easily as mswin (since all he does is: "me click the pretty pictures - facebook appear..."), but the only option for him is a computer infested with the original virus (mswin) from bestbuy/etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:25PM
This is almost exactly true though I would "apathetic" to the "too stupid" category. The number of people who do not care even a minuscule bit what OS they are using is very high -- they just care that Facebook and youtube work, and that they can type out something and print it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:41AM
No we DON'T want systemd. You're the one who fails to comprehend that we want freedom of choice, and the reason that we complain is that it's being forced upon us. YOU may want systemd, and nobody wants to stop you from using it, but that should be your choice, not something that's forced upon everybody.
We didn't complain when Red Hat switched to systemd, because it's their project. We just stuck with Arch Linux or Debian, the distros for geeks like us. But they changed also. Soon, the choice for us will be between BSD and Windows, after having run Linux for close to 20 years (I started in 1996). Because that's the only freedom to NOT choose systemd that will be left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @12:49PM
who says you don't have freedom of choice? you're free at any time to use any flavor of BSD you want, you're also free to make your own distro and use whatever init system you want, or, you could code an alternative that systemd that is as fast and flexible, but no, that would be actual work and you would never stand for that.
you'd rather force GNU/Linux to adhere to this archaic method of doing things just so you can continue using your shitty init scripts that you wrote in the 90's instead of learning a few new commands. seriously, you argue that people should have a choice, so long as that choice IS NOT systemd right? I hope you do realize that's hypocrisy at its finest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:14PM
"you're free at any time to use any flavor of BSD you want"
See also: "You don't like XXX about America? You're free to live anywhere in the world you want!"
(Score: 3, Informative) by fnj on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:28PM
I can't speak to the way Debian adopted systemd, but the way Arch did it was to lay down the law, shut off dissent, and drown out all objections.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:37PM
And that is why I dropped Arch Linux and went back to the eternal hunt for a good distro. Apart from systemd, Arch's high handed manner put me off. The rolling upgrade process made a real mess out of the change to systemd, had to do all kinds of stuff by hand. If you didn't, if you missed something, you ended up with an unbootable system.
But Debian going to systemd really cut down the options, since so many distros are derived from it. All the Ubuntus and Mint are now systemd. Outside of Debian, the RedHats are systemd. I hoped SUSE would steer clear, but no. What is left?
(Score: 2, Informative) by arashi no garou on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:08PM
> What is left?
Slackware.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:41PM
Gentoo
(Score: 4, Informative) by tibman on Thursday August 14 2014, @04:28PM
Gentoo. It has 3 init systems to choose from (2 stable): sysvint (via openRC), epoch, systemd. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems [gentoo.org]
If you want choice, then Gentoo is worth a try.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday August 14 2014, @05:41PM
Debian's adoption in Jessie isn't quite as bad as it seems at first. You can keep a sane init system and have a working desktop, still. The problem is that doing so isn't something you can easily discover, requires installing some new packages to retain init compatibility, and isn't done by default.
The gotcha here is that systemd has its tendrils in so many other packages that you can't have a functional desktop without at least some of systemd involved. So, you can avoid using systemd as init, but you still get stuck with the other parts, like the logind and journald if you want to use any desktop software at all.
The hard-to-find and fairly undocumented trick is to install "systemd-shim" and "sysvinit-core". With the systemd-shim package installed, the other parts of systemd will install and work without changing your init. Sysvinit-core is the normal init, replace with whatever init system you normally use.
It's still insane, but it's not as insane as other distros. Debian's about the only one that's still trying to provide an alternative.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:29PM
You do have freedom of choice. You have the freedom of making your own distro that doesn't use systemd-init. You seem to be suffering under the misconception that freedom of choice means that other people should cater to your unique needs, but that is not what freedom of choice means. The distro devs have the freedom of choosing between all the init systems currently in existence, and they chose systemd. THAT is what freedom of choice in Linux means. Is there a closed-source binary blob in the kernel that locks you out from using any init system that is not systemd? Then nothing is infringing on your freedom of choice. Hell, take Arch Linux. The wiki even describes how to get openrc working.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @12:39PM
No, it doesn't. It's too controversal. Quite the opposite: Just like with desktop environments, you'll almost certainly see further forking of distributions by people who don't like systemd, and want to maintain a distribution that is just like $FAVORITE_DISTRIBUTION, except for systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:28PM
Linux Mint Yerba Mate
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:31PM
Does it pollute /usr/local like the regular Linux Mint?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:42PM
You haters really like that word. Fragmentation.
In the FOSS world, we use different words for the same thing: Freedom of choice. And freedom is really not a problem that needs to be solved, unless your name is Steve (either) or you are going for the title of "El Presidente".
(Score: 2) by monster on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:32PM
Freedom of choice without compatibility is fragmentation. Even if you like it.
If LSB had been implemented in a useful way and not just as a minimum, let's-make-everybody-a-winner way, many of the problems now called fragmentation would be moot. Sadly, it wasn't.
(Score: 1) by Kunasou on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:21PM
There's another VLC issue in XFCE, funnier and easier to find. Just start VLC, open a random video and try to go fullscreen. If VLC is maximized it won't work well. Xfce-panel still shows and that height is lost. If you try again unmaximized it works as expected, the whole screen is showing the video. More than a year since I found this both in i686 and x86_64.
I used systemd, upstart and system V. Since my distro is Fedora XFCE it uses the first one, sometimes I think it's too much for an init but it works well on my PC after few tweaking.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:11PM
I've worked around that by setting the VLC window to always-on-top, which then layers over the panel I guess. You don't actually have to *keep* it always-on-top but if you set it once, it seems to fix the problem for the life of the window.
VLC seems to be...a bit problematic lately. They apparently feel no need to add an option to disable the incredibly annoying popover that gets in your way when you mouse over items in the playlist, and I have to figure out why every time I open the program the undocked playlist is gone...can I change that or is this another WONTFIX? :P
All this crap showed up the same time they redid the volume control, too. I liked going by 12.5% increments and actually being able to see volume over 125% graphically.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:13PM
Not according to 80% of the posts whenever it comes up here...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by harmless on Thursday August 14 2014, @04:32PM
Well, that's probably because people who do like systemd have no reason to speak out because distros are adding it anyway.
(Me, I'm using a Mac and launchd seems to work just fine.)
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Thursday August 14 2014, @07:12PM
Those few people who hate something are much more vocal than those who are content...
In addition, 80/20 isn't a bad distribution. Those of us who run large clusters of Linux servers really count thousands to one over home/hobby users on installed base, and many times more still on money spent on Linux software.
SystemD may or may not be the ideal solution, but it is *A* solution for major problems that have been dogging Unix and Linux for decades. If it existed long before now, we wouldn't need to have DaemonTools and the manifold other ad-hoc versions of the same thing.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by quitte on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:08AM
At the time I watched a presentation of how launchd works on google videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD_s6Fjdri8 [youtube.com]
At this point I realised that sysv init really does need a successor. And every now and then I would check on the progress of upstart and would be disappointed again and again: It had all those cool ideas but it was impossible to use it to do things the new way. Instead all it focused on was being sysvinit compatible. Now that sucked. I wanted to try booting the new way! Impossible.
So I gave up but ever since felt like that sysvinit needs a successor that isn't afraid to break things.
And then a lot of nothing happened. Upstart became default in ubuntu and fedora - but it still was just sysvinit with extra weirdness to do some things in parallel. And then I didn't follow the progress closely, but the scripts in init.d never went away. They just became more complex and tagged with meta information.
And now all of a sudden systemd comes along and everybody is up in arms. Unfortunately I haven't made the time to look at it myself. But if it makes sysvinit finally go away and can be fixed I'm all for it. Yes it probably is a little too far reaching and in the hands of not enough people. But it could be forked at any time. So I'm conflicted, but I also know that this finally needs to happen. So instead of going back to sysvinit I hope that finally we can move to something more modern. And then fix that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:50AM
Imagine if there was a company out there that actually used launchd, so that you could get their OS without the rest of us being forced into it.
If that was the case, those of us who don't want it, would not be complaining, we would just stick with what we prefer.
Unlike systemd, which is being forced upon everybody.
As for launchd itself, from the video it sounds very much like systemd, so not something I would choose. I like the flexibility of init, I like that I'm in control. I don't want the system to tell me how I should be doing things. And that's why I don't own a Mac, and refuse to run systemd.
(Score: 2) by quitte on Thursday August 14 2014, @04:30PM
How about you give the *BSDs a try? Also just because it is the default doesn't mean you have to pick a given option. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed [debian.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:42PM
After having typed my hard disk password my login comes up after 2 seconds, thanks to systemd. So I like it.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:33PM
maybe i'm a bit slow in TEH head but maybe that's because they were testing devices that suck the life-force from future unborn generation on some scantly clad atoll in the pacific when my dad was humping my mom.
anyways it used to be "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" for me, with "win" at the end, but this linux is really the sh1tz man! you can run like multiple stuff at TeH same time (even though you could not start them all at the same time).
anyways my new autoexec.bat is now:
start vm1
start vm2
start vm3
...
i think those vm's are all using something new called systemDee .. i haven't had time to learn it yet : )
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:27PM
Frankly, I couldn't agree more with his assessment. The degree to which the entire approach of systemd resembles everything proven to be wrong with Windows is stunning. I mean seriously...a Windows-event-monitor-like logging system that requires a running system for viewing??...how is any Linux user not totally dumbfounded by stuff like this? Not to mention the horrific Swiss army knife, try to cram an entire OS into the init system approach. There just are no words.
I don't believe for a minute that any of this is really being done because it's the right thing to do. It's being forced on the world by RH, simply because they can, by virtue of funding the development. If you ask me the real goal of forcing this monolithic approach on everyone is to turn all other distros into just another (possibly more difficult) way to install what is essentially RH/Fedora/CentOS....at which point, other distros will just cease to exist.
I can't imagine how any sysadmin would put up with RHEL 7, running that bloated mess which, whatever you think about it otherwise, doesn't belong within 1000 miles of any server. Best case, it'll mean way more reboots due to all the inevitable security fixes to that complex mess...reboots that used to be required only for kernel fixes. Worst case, the wrong people will find the vulnerabilities in it, and folks will just get rooted outright. I for one will be sitting back with the popcorn watching that mess unfold.
Gentoo and OpenRC for me, until it's pried from my cold dead fingers. If that's ever not an option, I'll move to something non-Linux.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by CoolHand on Thursday August 14 2014, @07:29PM
Here's a pretty funny animation about systemd tweeted by nixcraft. [googleusercontent.com] (sounds like creator is Piotr_Karbowski )
----------------------
nixCraft Linux Blog â€@nixcraft 5m
Nicely done. #systemd still hungry :P #funny #humor #linux https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-bZId5j2jREQ/U-vlysklvCI/AAAAAAAACrA/B4JggkVJi38/w426-h284/bd0fb252416206158627fb0b1bff9b4779dca13f.gif [googleusercontent.com] … via /u/Piotr_Karbowski
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 1) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:58PM
HAHA! Classic. Made my day. Thanks.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jdccdevel on Thursday August 14 2014, @05:33PM
I've been using Systemd on some of my systems for a while now. As a replacement for init, in environments where parallel service startup is beneficial, it's really not that bad.
That said, for some systems (i.e. Servers) startup time is a non-issue, and for them traditional init is probably a better solution. Servers require predictability. When things start in parallel, the exact startup sequence can be subject to race conditions and whatnot, which can make problems difficult to diagnose. Once you're over the learning curve though, systemd does a decent job of solving a fairly difficult problem. It's just that most people who I've seen rant about the way systemd starts things don't see startup time to be a problem at all; and as such don't see why systemd needs to exist at all. OpenRC (Gentoo) is a good hybrid approach (Some parallelism, but still sysv style init) for those people.
On the other hand, the Systemd Journal needs to die.
As far as I can tell, the Journal exists only to "solve" the problem of log tampering. That's it. Unfortunately, there's really only one way to solve that particular problem (store the logs on some other PC, disconnected from the network.) In their attempt to come up with some other way, they created an abomination. Binary monolithic log files. Ugh.
What's wrong with binary logs?
- Unreadable offline with standard text tools
- Breaks all the log-watching utilities (they need to be updated to support the journal)
- No more per-process log rotation intervals
- possible incompatible journal versions
- SLOW log searches (Queries that took 1 second before, can now take a minute or more, depending on the size of your journal.)
- Corrupted logs are unreadable
That's just the issues I can remember right now.
Thankfully, it is possible to configure the journal to pass everything to a syslogd process. (Journald acts as a pass-through for the syslogd service, and keeps no logs of it's own.)
You can be certain that any systemd installations I have to deal with will be configured that way.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @06:43PM
The only issue I ever had with linux startup time was waiting for dhcpcd to timeout. As for journald, yes it's unthinkably bad but why stop there? Systemd is an entire ecosystem of bullshit, a cancer placed to destroy both userspace and the kernel. Poetterix - it's like Linux except it's shit!
(Score: 5, Funny) by meisterister on Thursday August 14 2014, @06:08PM
Why is SystemD trying to become its own operating system? We already have emacs for that! (ducks under table)
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 4, Funny) by PReDiToR on Thursday August 14 2014, @07:18PM
And you thought you had to duck!
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday August 14 2014, @08:11PM
From the letter:
In a 'One Linux' world, what would distros actually be? Deprecated. No longer relevant. Archaic shells of their once proud individualism. Basically, they're now just a logo and a default desktop background image.
It sounds like someone with too little Linux experience to be claiming systemd is killing Linux. There are exactly three things differentiating distros:
1. Default package manager (and a lot of distros share the same package managers (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint))
2. Default repos
3. Default package set (and you can and will customize your package set after installation).
As anyone who has seriously used more than one Linux distro can tell you, distro choice is trivial, since it doesn't restrict you in any way. At worst it makes certain things harder since those packages aren't in the default repos. Distros have always been about picking the one closest to what you need to minimize the need of building it yourself from scratch, and *not* some sense of individualism and "my distro is better than your distro".
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @11:22PM
No, your comment reads like someone with no experience of running linux. It's been 10 years since I moved on from slackware, that or freebsd now look to be the only sane choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 16 2014, @07:38PM
How bout one car model world? One ice cream flavor world? One true color world?
The all of above are bad ideas for the same reason.