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Lennart Poettering gave a talk recently in Beijing about the state of systemd and its future ahead.
Lennart keynoted at the joint FUDCon Beijing 2014 with GNOME.Asia 2014 event and he talked about the current position of systemd and its future going forward, while acknowledging it's evolved more than just being a basic init system to being "a set of basic building blocks to build an OS from."
Among the expressed objectives of systemd are turning Linux from "a bag of bits into a competitive general purpose operating system", building the Internet's Next Generation OS, unifying "pointless differences" between distributions, and causing greater innovation within the core OS. Systemd developers want to reduce administrator complexity, make everything introspectable, provide auto-discovery and plug and play, and fix things when they are broken.
Read more on Phoronix, including a link to (a badly converted) PDF with slides from the talk.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 07 2014, @08:27PM
"Maybe they just don't have much choice when Red Hat's behind it and Debian has already switched."
There is a second mistake in that, the actual problem is some overgrown window managers (aka desktop environments) require systemd. So if you want gnome 3.8 the system needs to be systemd and early on the os devs decided supporting multiple init scripts is just a little unreasonable.
That puts enormous pressure on the OS devs, either drop gnome ... or switch init systems. As a guy who doesn't use gnome, I'd say drop gnome like a hot potato and keep a real init system rather than switching to the toy, but I can understand the perspective of a gnome user not entirely agreeing with that.
As a philosophical point one problem with the systemd and Debian folks is the systemd are all into discipline and limiting choice as much as they can, whereas the Debian guys are all about not restricting users any more than necessary.
So without the pressure from the desktop people, the Debian (and presumably redhat) people would always have it as an option, much like installing GNU R in no way prevents you from installing Octave, or installing EMACS in no way prevents you from installing Vim. It would be trivial to intentionally introduce a conflicts: line to force sysadmins to select from only octave and R, or only vim and emacs, but that wouldn't be very "Debian-ish" The force against the users will is coming entirely from the desktop people.
In summary the "we have to switch" pressure is the direct fault of the desktop people, not the OS devs. The OS devs are victims just as much as the end users.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 07 2014, @09:47PM
I *WAS* a Gnome user before they screwed it all up in the name of tablet computing (yeah, there's a GREAT idea, follow Microsoft's lead!)
xfce4 is nice. I've heard good things about Cinnamon and Mate. I vote to give Gnome the heave-ho until they recover their senses and get rid of crazy dependencies and recover from their obsession with removing functionality.
If someone wants to cobble together a new init, I don't mind at all as long as they keep their hands to themselves. The crazy dependencies need to go.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 08 2014, @01:23PM
"The crazy dependencies need to go."
That is a good summary of the hatred toward systemd. Insane as it sounds the best analogy to the current situation is "you will expunge ALSA from your OS because EMACS will only use pulseaudio in the future so either get rid of EMACS or get rid of ALSA". And then blame the OS guys. Like an insane IT hostage situation.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 09 2014, @04:27AM
Exactly true.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 08 2014, @02:44PM
I moved to Mate a while back but recently switched to Xmonad on my laptop(though not exclusively, yet). I must admit that at first I couldn't imagine a GUI without a desktop. But the more I use it the more I like it. In Mate I am always clicking, dragging, clicking, moving windows around. But in xmonad I use dmenu to launch stuff and have even moved to a few command line applications like audio players and chat programs. I can forgo using the mouse for most of my work and xmonad is not one of those cut the cord type WM's (which is good because I am a crap typist). You can use the mouse as much as you want. Believe me it is a much better way to work a desktop.
I would suggest giving it a try.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday July 08 2014, @12:44AM
So this could have been solved by making systemd start from init and making systemd a dependency of gnome3.8 but the disadvantage was longer boot time? Instead, known bugs in systemd which cause dmesg to crash require a workaround in the kernel? If that is the case then the flaming is entirely justified.
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