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from the it's-already-perfect-is-not-the-right-answer dept.
We all know about Microsoft's latest OS, so I won't rehash. A lot of us intensely dislike it, to put it politely. Those of us who can, use other operating systems. This is Soylent, so let's focus on the one that is the most important to us: Linux.
I have been using Windows as my OS since right after Atari times. A few years ago I bought an ARM (ARMHF/ARMv7) netbook and put Lubuntu on it. I had problems with my first Linux experience, mainly in the area of installing software: missing packages in Synaptic, small dependency hells, installing a package at a time by hand, some broken stuff. I put it down mainly to the architecture I have been using, which can't be supported as well as x86-64.
Now, we all know that no software is perfect, and neither is Linux, even though it is now my main OS. We support it in spirit and financially, but there is always room for improvement.
So, the question is: What are your problems with Linux and how can we fix them? How do we better it? Maybe it's filesystems, maybe it's the famous/infamous systemd. Let's have at it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday February 23 2017, @05:35AM
In stark contrast to Bourne shell, so many of systemd's unit directives are highly specialised building blocks which aren't easily reusable. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that because systemd units aren't real programs, there's no way to escape to more basic primitives as required. Inevitably, what this means is that more and more directives will be added over time as more and more use cases are discovered.
There was another way that could have given us the best of both worlds, but it wasn't taken. Bourne shell isn't required for init scripts; it's fully possible to implement an interpreter for a systemd-style declarative init format and use it where convenient, and then fall back to writing programs when you need something "low level" that it can't do. I explain this in more detail in my other comment. [soylentnews.org]