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from the Boot-him?-I-just-met-him! dept.
jbernardo writes:
"Having had several issues with systemd, and really not liking the philosophy behind it, I am looking into alternatives. I really prefer something that follows the Unix philosophy of using small, focused, and independent tools, with a clear interface. Unfortunately, my favourite distro, Arch Linux, is very much pro-systemd, and a discussion of alternatives is liable to get you banned for a month from their forums. There is an effort to support openrc, but it is still in its infancy and without much support.
So, what are the alternatives, besides Gentoo? Preferably binary... I'd rather have something like arch, with quick updates, cutting edge, but I've already used a lot in the past Mandrake, RedHat, SourceMage, Debian, Kubuntu, and so on, so the package format or the package management differences don't scare me."
[ED Note: I'm imagining FreeBSD sitting in the room with the all the Linux distros he mentioned being utterly ignored like Canada in Hetalia.]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Natales on Wednesday February 26 2014, @03:27PM
Interestingly, systemd along with etcd and docker are the basic building blocks for CoreOS [coreos.com], a Linux distro targeted to massive scale deployments. The link explain why it's seen as an advantage for that particular use case, one of them keeping boot time under 1 second.
Some folks here have said that's irrelevant in the server world, but I'd argue it depends on what are you trying to do. In fact, Linux (IMHO) is all about choice. In one end I believe that if you want to use systemd or you don't, it should be entirely up to you. It may be a default, but changing it should be as simple as update-alternatives [ubuntu.com].
(Score: 1) by jbernardo on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:14PM
(Score: 0) by Bill, Shooter Of Bul on Wednesday February 26 2014, @04:15PM
http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/ [islinuxaboutchoice.com]
(Score: 0) by Bill, Shooter Of Bul on Friday February 28 2014, @06:06PM
To further elaberate. Linux is FOSS, where things are a meritocracy. If you don't like something, you usually have the freedom to change it, through code. Anything more than that is frosting on the cake. Some have distilled all of UNIX to piping text manipulating commands through the shell, for those people, I guess UNIX would be about choice. But linux in general, is not about choice. Its about a kernel for an operating system which necessarily limits what you can and cannot do with it ( in terms of api usage) without changing the code. Various Distros may put a userspace around it that may or may not introduce utlities that may or may not be switched out and around, but that's not linux and not gaunteed by anyone.
I think when people say "Linux is about choice" the usually mean one of two things:
1) A general statement that they enjoy being able to swap out userspace applications as they please.
2) Other people should change the way they code things so that they can swap something they want to use in for something else.
#1 is okay to say. #2 is telling other people to work for you, which is wrong. Especially in the context of FOSS. You want it done a certain way, you do it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 26 2014, @07:08PM
Linux is not all about choice at every level of the OS. How many Linux distros use non-Linux kernels? How many different versions of the Linux kernel are out there? Except for some older projects, everyone's on the 2.6/3.0 kernel tree now, with few variations. The Linux kernel has never made any attempt at being ABI compatible with other Unix kernels, and instead has preferred to forge ahead with new Linux-specific features like cgroups.
There's also been attempts to standardize parts of the Linux stack, namely the LSB. That standardization hasn't happened yet, but there've been attempts to move that way to some degree.
Basically, the lower in the stack you go, there more need there is for standardization. It's harder to swap kernels than image-editing programs or text editors on a system. The init system is pretty deep in the stack, only sitting directly on top of the kernel. If you're getting this worked up over an init system, then maybe you should take a look at other systems like FreeBSD, Solaris, or AIX. None of those use sysvinit either, and all of them have only a single init system, each one totally specific to that OS and kernel.
(Score: 1) by weilawei on Wednesday February 26 2014, @09:16PM
Linux is the kernel. It wouldn't be a Linux distribution if it used another kernel. It would be something like GNU Hurd.</pedantic>