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Phoronix has an article up about some interesting ideas of Lennart Poettering about what could be a possible future for Linux:
Lennart Poettering of systemd and PulseAudio fame has published a lengthy blog post that shares his vision for how he wishes to change how Linux software systems are put together to address a wide variety of issues. The Btrfs file-system and systemd play big roles with his new vision. Long story short, Lennart is trying to tackle how Linux distributions and software systems themselves are assembled to improve security, deal with the challenges of upstream software vendors integrating into many different distributions, and "the classic Linux distribution scheme is frequently not what end users want."
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New Linux Vision That Involves btrfs
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To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift.
-- Shelley
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LukeSkywalker on Monday September 01 2014, @09:10PM
Who would trust this guys vision of anything?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by present_arms on Monday September 01 2014, @09:19PM
Not me, that's for sure, I actively avoid systemd although I do use pulse audio ( I could remove it). As I have said here (I think, not looked) before that I would change distros to any that doesn't use systemd.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 3, Informative) by LukeSkywalker on Monday September 01 2014, @10:09PM
It seems all the major distros are moving to systemd, I'm considering PC-BSD as it uses KDE and seems to have good desktop functionality. I haven't tried all of the BSDs though.
Much of what Poettering is saying in his blog sounds like his personal annoyance with how the current systems work and he is trying to pass it off as a major problem that has a considerable number of people calling for changes, which in my opinion is just not true. He also seems to want to take away a lot of control from the end user. They may have some good ideas but I'm sure their implementation will be a flawed. Nothing this group designs is anything I will want to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @10:46PM
sounds like his personal annoyance with how the current systems work and he is trying to pass it off as a major problem that has a considerable number of people calling for changes,
If that's true then it won't get very far. Linux is far too big for just a a couple of loud-mouths to change.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NowhereMan on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:58AM
I'm sure that's what people thought about systemd after the PulseAudio debacle, but these guys have the support of Red Hat and they use that clout to push this stuff onto the distros through dependency issues.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Monday September 01 2014, @11:39PM
Actually, there are a considerable number of people starting to call for changes or limitations of SystemD.
You start reading up on this and the ardent defenders are dwindling, while the objections are growing as each new release starts taking over more and more of the system.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:15AM
It's going to be a disaster for the Linux community, regardless of what happens.
If there's no opposition, we'll see the widespread use of systemd by the major distros, and the obvious technical problems that will introduce (due to systemd being idiotic in so many fundamental ways).
If there is some opposition, we'll still see some systemd-based distros in the wild. This will cause significant fragmentation of the Linux community, and it will cause headaches for anyone who has to maintain or support these installations going forward.
If there is total opposition, we'll still have to deal with the installations put in place before the opposition was total, wasting valuable time and effort.
The Linux community will lose in the long run, regardless of what happens with systemd.
I think that the systemd threat is serious enough that it could significantly reduce the viability of Linux for all sorts of users. It has been very divisive so far, and created a huge amount of strife and discontent within the Linux community. There is social and technological fragmentation going on at this very moment thanks to systemd, and this will bring significant harm. Lots of time and effort will be wasted thanks to the schism that systemd has caused.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday September 03 2014, @12:06AM
>and the obvious technical problems that will introduce (due to systemd being idiotic in so many fundamental ways).
Please elaborate.
>It has been very divisive so far, and created a huge amount of strife and discontent within the Linux community. There is social and technological fragmentation going on at this very moment thanks to systemd, and this will bring significant harm.
All I've seen is a bunch of low foreheads who think they can change the Linux distros with dreams and talk. Most distros are moving ahead with systemd despite the objections. The people who actually make decisions seem to like it, it's only a bunch of naysayers on online forums who are bitching about it. These naysayers don't actually run any distros themselves. The real proof will be when most distros are running systemd (which seems inevitable with both Red Hat and Debian adopting it, and most distros being derived from these two), if users abandon them en masse, or if the continue using them just like they did with PulseAudio.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:04PM
"that has a considerable number of people calling for changes, which in my opinion is just not true."
I have seen this peculiar behavior from him before on other topics, as an example he states his opinion that the number one greatest concern that sysadmins have always had above all others is boot time. Above all other concerns, like reliability, testability, clarity, documentation, design, modularity .... My reaction to that opinion was pure WTF. And that misguided observation of his lead (in part) to systemd.
The guy's observations are just weird. If you do the empathy thing and/or lots of drugs such that you try for an experiment his really warped outlook, then his architectures and decisions actually make logical sense in that warped alternative universe. It is exactly like alternative history or hard sci fi in literature. Personally I prefer my OS to be based on non-fiction rather than a Harry Turtledove alt-hist novel. He does write good alternative history, I just don't want it in my machines.
And that's where the problem lies. If his observations were grounded in reality, then his code wouldn't be so poorly designed. The way they're product tying and strongarming people would still be politically and ethically obscene, but at least the code architectural design wouldn't suck so badly.
(Score: 3, Informative) by present_arms on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:13PM
To me linux should be made up of "bits" each working together to give a whole, systemd to me takes some of that away, making any fault finding that much harder, I think that Pottering wants linux to become more windows with huge pieces of code, yes it runs slightly faster but takes away the ability to fix what could be a small problem. I've seen this with both GRUB and X-Org both are now a much more pain in the arse to fix than either Legacy GRUB or earlier Xorg that relied on xorg.conf. (I know both of these are not Pottering' doing). I agree with you looks like I'll be going to PC-BSD (have it in a vm and it's actually quite nice)
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday September 02 2014, @03:03PM
Considering what a mess Pulse was at launch and how pathetically fragile it is to this very day compared to the alternatives which frankly were MUCH more stable and which could have had their bugs ironed out...do you REALLY trust them to take over boot with systemd? To me what this whole thing illustrates is just how controlled by corporate the "community driven" Linux really is, I mean did you hear the people clamoring and begging that an Alpha quality Pulse be shoved into their distro? Do you see the people begging for systemd now? Yet mark my words just as Pulse was rammed down the community's collective throats by the end of the year you'll be hard pressed to find any of the top 10 distros on the mainstream charts that doesn't have systemd.
I will find it interesting to watch to see if the community actually fights back on this one or if they will just blindly accept what they are given or even try to spin it as an improvement, again just like Pulse. Say what you will about ALSA and JACK but once those were set up they tended to be pretty stable whereas Pulse seems to be the first thing that breaks every time you update, it is seriously rickety.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday September 02 2014, @07:37PM
Major, maybe. Oldest (and still the best), definitely not.
Get Slack [slackware.org] and kiss systemd/pulseaudio goodbye!
Also still ships out with KDE (as well as XFCE, Fluxbox, and a few others...I personally use i3).
That all said, BSD's may be set to explode in popularity soon if the widely used distros keep going the way they do. Might not be the worst time to started getting used to slightly different syntax...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @10:05PM
I do. I love systemd, and I love PulseAudio, and I agree with most of Poettering's arguments.
There are A LOT of us, we just don't bother commenting in the sea of butthurt because we know it doesn't matter, it's not going to make any difference. Poettering et al's techniques are going to be adopted anyway in the places where it matters because they are the only realistic solutions.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @10:10PM
Dear Mrs Poettering,
What exactly do you "love" about PulseAudio?
What exactly do you "love" about systemd?
Thanks,
The Internet
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @10:48PM
Unfortunatly it is a mix of 'yeah we need that' and 'wtf'.
The wtf is going to create a shitstorm.
Some distros seem intent on being unique when they do not really need to be. For example see the installer wars of the 90s. We ended up with no less than 5 different ways to install software in linux. Thats not good. Thats confusing. I can not take my knowledge and move around between distros. I have to look up each one to see what damn quirk they put in. I can not assume that the upstream has not tweaked the package in some odd way. I have to look up the documentation every time.
We ended up with several dozen versions of sysv init.d. So as a developer I have to learn the quirks of 3-4 of the major ones and hope someone from the communities in each will help me out.
Some of this crap like 'how do we start our OS' 'how do we install our OS' should have been bashed out years ago. Instead its been used as part of the identity of each distro. This is a 'good' thing. But we should circle the wagons a bit and move experimentation of such simple core stuff out to forked distros.
So yeah we *need* this junk. However, its 'lets drag the whole kitchen sink in'. So instead of a 'yeah thats a better way' we end up reinventing tried and true tools and putting them in the init process. Where you can argue the init service should be 'start it and watch it' let each module handle whatever it is doing. Its a generic system trying to do the process of specific tools. Reinventing the same issues we have dealt with for years in windows. Even MS is trying to yank its OS apart into more modules not less.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @11:28PM
5 different ways to install software in linux. Thats not good
One Microsoft Way:
It's not just an address, it's the thinking that gets you an easily-exploited monoculture.
No, thanks.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @11:39PM
Just 5? That all? Guess we need to work on improving that number.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:53AM
It seems that there are about 4 main ways to software on Linux these days:
1. sudo apt-get install from debian repository
2. sudo yum install from yum repository
3. extract from tarball
4. ./configure, make, and make install
By contrast, EACH program in Windows has a completely separate installer. Most involve extracting from a zipfile, running a setup.exe or .msi installer, then following some prompts. The process can vary considerably by program. Updates and patches are also handled differently by each program instead of a central update process like debian and yum repositories have.
I'll take the Linux installation processes anytime over Windows.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:11AM
What is with all this sudo rubbish :P I only ever use that on OSX.
IIRC there was a proposal a couple of years back for fat binaries and OSX style .app folders on linux. It didn't get very far although I was supportive. If LP is involved in realising something like this, I remove any and all support. Furthermore, the only 'sand-boxing' I want to see is around systemd and it's access to anything that is not a part of the fucking init system.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 02 2014, @03:04PM
You think installing software shouldn't require rights elevation? WTF? And Windows does it, too, only they call it UAC, so it's on all 3 of Windows, Mac, and Linux.
IIRC there was a proposal a couple of years back for fat binaries and OSX style .app folders on linux.
Oh, you mean all installed programs should be "portable"?
It didn't get very far
Hence why we're continuing to do it the sane way (sudo).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Tuesday September 02 2014, @07:54PM
Installing software DOESN'T require privilege escalation. Nothing stops you from installing into your own ~/bin, ~/lib, etc.
Installing it system-wide, of course, does, and should, as system-critical files and directories require elevated privileges to write to them for a good reason.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:24PM
Ah, yes, good point. I'm dimly aware there's some debate about where to install stuff to that I'm not privy to.
"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 cykros on Monday September 15 2014, @09:01PM
It's less a matter of debate and more just something to consider when installing software. By installing system wide, you're generally aiming to make it available to more than one user on the system, whereas by installing in a home directory you're putting software in that is only to be used by that user (with normal permissions set up anyway). This makes it more suitable if you are using a multi-user system, such as a public shell server or shared work server. Furthermore, the decision can be impacted on your partitioning (or extra drives) scheme. In many cases, installing software into your /home partition means you'll retain it even if you choose reinstall your root system.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:06AM
I believe that you let out dpkg, but I understand why you might leave that off the list. If there's a .deb, there's likely already a package in the repository or you can just add the ppa. There's not too many systems out there that'd have dpkg and not have apt.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:06AM
dpkg is what works under apt-get. It's the same thing, just lower level. Normally you shouldn't touch dpkg directly.
(Score: 2, Funny) by citizenr on Tuesday September 02 2014, @04:21AM
You missed Lennart Poetterings preferred one
/bin/systemd -e -x89fe85aa6 /u "name of package to install goes here"
of course its temporary, plan is to migrate this interface to IPC only.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @07:34AM
Of course that's temporary. Didn't you read that he is now interested in btrfs? I'm sure he'll ultimately just migrate all systemd functionality into btrfs, making sure that you cannot boot a Linux system from anything else but btrfs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:07PM
On the bright side, after that destruction is unleashed, going back to JCL on MVS/360 will be an upgrade, so we can expect some retrocomputer action once modern linux is ruined.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Wednesday September 03 2014, @05:57AM
Wait, don't give him any ideas!
BTW, I'm going to BSD if this SystemD stuff goes on for much longer.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:11AM
Isn't that where the Titanic went down?
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:37PM
butthurtfs
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:54PM
From what I've heard about this guy there's no way in hell I want him to be mucking around with how my data is stored on my own damn hard drive.
Oh yeah, let's make Journaling 2.0: The Sexy Time Right Way. Only unfortunately you have to rewrite the entire operating system around it and it coincidentally has a 50% chance of corrupting all your data.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @09:25PM
You misspelled INFAMY.
(Score: 1) by pyg on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:42AM
Yeah, prior to this I didn't realize he was responsible for PulseAudio (aka the reason sound doesn't work right until 'apt-get remove pulseaudio'). I have no judgments yet about systemd but I'm already there with infamy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cykros on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:03PM
In all fairness, Pulseaudio does some things that ALSA can't, such as outputting separate streams to separate sound cards simultaneously. This is why I went out of my way to install it on my Slackware system (which doesn't ship with it by default), and having gotten it without any upstream mangling or stupid default configurations, I can't say I have big complaints about its mere existence.
That it's being included by default despite most computers using only one sound card, adding unnecessary complexity and ensuring vast numbers of users won't have sound working right off the bat, however, is one of the most regrettable things I've seen happen in the Linux world (at least up until systemd). Pulseaudio should be like Jack; installed by users who need the added functionality, and otherwise left out for those who don't and/or don't care to bother with the added complexity. That software is being released now RELYING on pulseaudio unnecessarily (Here's looking at you Skype) is just beyond rationality. Maybe there's something I'm missing about what skype does (I'd peruse the source code, but then, it's not available), but it seems a little odd that other similar programs seem to make do just fine without pulseaudio (including Tox, which we've currently got a story up on here on SN).
Systemd, otoh, I can't see much reason to add in, and meanwhile, from what I understand, isn't really something you can add into an otherwise already set up system (without essentially ripping it down to replace sysvinit). It's mere existence is a blight upon the species; a reminder of the vast ocean of stupidity we're host to. Hopefully AV software will start flagging Linux ISO's that install it as the malware that they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @09:38PM
Err, it's worked for me for over 15 years. On my own machines I'd been happily running Arch for about 6 years and then along came the unholy, NIH, wheel reinventing clusterfuck that is systemd. So I'll go Lennart one better:
(Score: 1) by Kunasou on Monday September 01 2014, @10:07PM
If people didn't care about anything of Poettering, Linux would be a great place without systemd and pulseaudio (maybe somebody could make a better user audio daemon).
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday September 01 2014, @10:40PM
I generally just kill pulseaudio entirely and let ALSA sort it out. It works great!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday September 01 2014, @11:41PM
Exactly, since Pulse depends on ALSA anyway.
The days when ALSA couldn't handle more than one output device were over long before Pulse came along.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Monday September 01 2014, @10:01PM
I had a pretty good comment on HN along the lines of
1) The guy talks about historical attempts at "fixing" the problems and then goes off on a tangent instead of analyzing the attempts and how they failed and how his solution will not fail, which seems like a really bad game plan
2) The guys writing indicates he has no experience with distros or sysadmin work in general, which is weird. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes is a great idea, but maybe figure out the basics before rewriting everything. I WTF a lot at his proposed ideas of what admins want/need. Like a 40 yr old virgin dude talking about what a woman wants from a man.
3) As a specific example, the guy comically thinks the only difference between debian policy and rhat policy is namespaces and filenames. Clueless! Not bad for a noob, but for a guy trying to rewrite the entire OS and shove it down everyones throats, thats just weird.
The whole project of his, systemd, and now this, just stinks of embrace extend extinguish.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by digitalaudiorock on Monday September 01 2014, @10:37PM
I'm stunned frankly at the number of folks who don't seem to see that and defend this crap. I'm glad to see there seem to be fewer such folks here than on the green site. It's so obvious this is the case, simply from the fact that they've chosen to make none of that cluster fuck modular...that whole "take it all or fuck you" approach. What possible good motive could there be behind that alone?
LP really is a clueless, arrogant fucking child. That's putting it as nicely as I can.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday September 01 2014, @10:59PM
Yeah... Really starting to lose my enthusiasm. I can really only link to a post I already made (yay subscription-enabled infinite post history). It was looking so good too... http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=3454&cid=83030 [soylentnews.org]
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DECbot on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:59AM
In my previous post, I was off attributing this to systemd, but I think I nailed that everything short of your wallpaper is in Poettering's project scope. Up next, Pottering will solve the Linux graphics stack, from drivers to windows managers and beyond. I'll call it GNOME4 or how I forgot my worries and learned to abandon the Unix philosophy.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2, Funny) by Jesus_666 on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:21PM
That's why Lennart will soon present Lennix version 1.0, a single program that contains everything from the kernel to the init system to the shell to GNOME. This will give you unprecedented boot-to-GNOME performance and thus improve your productivity by orders of magnitude. It will also obviate package management because software packages are only required if your system can run more than one binary, which is completely unneccessary in Lennix.
Future versions of Lennix will also contain all data Lennart thinks you will ever need, thus removing the need to lug around a clunky file system.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 02 2014, @03:07PM
Maybe he could implement in mandatory Australis in addition to GNOME so I can ignore all the things I hate in one place.
"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 etherscythe on Thursday September 04 2014, @04:39PM
...followed by the HURD in a finalized distro called Stallix, paving the new commu^H^Hputing revolution towards prosperity for all Truly Free Software. Hail, user-comrades!
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:01PM
That's giving him the benefit of the doubt, something that may not be appropriate given how much control systemd takes away from users and what a mess it and pulse audio are. Inflicting pre-alpha software onto production distros is another problem with systemd. But then about the lack of users' choice, maybe that is the goal. His post suggests to me that systemd might also be lining things up for rolling out DRM in such a way that users will not be in a position to avoid it. Systemd needs to be stopped now and if LP wants to continue with it, he should spin off his own distro and work with that until he has something safe and viable to show.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:25PM
I too am a little apprehensive to charge ahead without a bit more development.
But, I strongly suggest you all read the article. LP is clearly not a dull guy, and his article raises a very important point.
The BTRFS solution he proposes uses de-duplication to permit the "system" being arbitrarily booted with different versions of software. This might have a radical effect on linux being usable for the desktop of non-techies as it will become much easier to have systems "a la carte" distros.
And the points of systemd (that was not really visible until this current article) seem to simply allow the /usr to be separated from dynamic information via /etc/ /var etc.... and personal information /home etc...
It really was a very interesting article...
I am using Opensuse, and although it uses systemd, sysv still works just fine - transparently converted to systemd of course...
Ad hominem attacks rarely add to the debate...
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:35PM
The real attack occurring in all of this is the blatant intentional attack on choice by LP and everyone involved in this mess. Besides, have you read the way LP "debates" any of this stuff? It comes down to he knows everything and we know nothing...with his links to his endless lists of "debunked myths" etc...as if that's the end of the discussion.
Even if/when his ideas or goals are valid, the level of criticism his approach is getting in the Linux community is unprecedented and growing...yet he seems convinced that none of it is valid. That is the reason the criticism tends to turn into attacks.
(Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:42PM
my point was simply, that I am just as frustrated by the "dump" of a new system. But then again, I am not currently a developer, and opensuse and other vendors have plumped for it.
I was responding to the fact I read the article about using BTRFS to *improve* the distribution system, and I think it actually makes very valid sense.
If you have ever used the opensuse build studio, you would know what I mean. This allows you to essentially do what LP suggested. You can dynamically dial in a distribution.
The point LP made about de-duping in BTRFS and volume management, is that the major similarities between vendors will get shared, and only the differences propagated.
Having rebuild many packaged systems, I can see what this buys us. Validated packages trees (just like opensuse Tumbleweed/factory etc..) that have been tested together.
But I too have been a bit negative about the systemd debacle - although it is stable on this system (opensuse 12.2) as is pulseaudio. I have had a few nightmares with SSD freezing and laptop behaviour. A good thing that opensuse 12.2 only uses systemd under init!!!
Ultimately, if we want linux to be more mainstream, the current state of packaging is far from the idea. The average user simply needs to be able to get patches almost invisibly. Notice, that Micro$oft routinely breaks their users machines. Don't we want linux to be better?
And again, constructive criticism is welcome. Being rude is just not nice, and doesn't help.
But then again, I'm stil stuck on opensuse 12.2...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Monday September 01 2014, @10:57PM
This is Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers. Complaining about historical "problems", deciding they have the only valid solution, and then completely abandoning everything done previously, including any standards that happen to get in their way, while refusing to cooperate with anybody outside of their inner circle (GNOME/RedHat), is on par for these guys. So is letting everybody else scramble to fix the mess after everyone's eventually bullied into doing it through sheer stubbornness and refusal to cooperate with others.
Above statement applies here, too: lack of experience or understanding hasn't stopped them from rewriting everything before, why would it stop them now?
This is what it ultimately is. Poettering is a RedHat employee, GNOME is a RedHat project, systemd is a RedHat project, etc. It's been GNOME's plan -- as stated by GNOME devs -- to create "GNOME as the OS", where the entire software stack is GNOME from top to bottom. GNOME for the desktop, with GNOME-flavoured services and GNOME-flavoured init, on top of a Linux kernel (presumably because they haven't figured out how to rewrite it yet).
As far as they're concerned, any differences in distros are irrelevant because the intent is to control the entire stack and eliminate distros altogether, because nobody should want to use anything but GNOME anyway. Poettering is just saying the same thing GNOME people have been saying for years now. Any distro that isn't RedHat-derived is an obstacle to their GNOME-only vision. You comparing it to "embrace, extend, extinguish" is spot-on, because that's what it is, and other distros are happily marching toward that cliff because GNOME told them so.
It's even more insane when you consider that there are probably fewer distros than ever pushing GNOME as the primary desktop environment because of problems with Gtk3, GNOME3, and the GNOME vision. Debian's enjoying a bit of internal conflict over it, because the GNOME maintainers are pushing hard to get GNOME reinstated as the default. I've seen everything from "GNOME should be the default desktop because of systemd" to "systemd should be the default init because of GNOME".
It's all about controlling the entire stack and strangling the other distros and desktop environments.
--
Also, I liked the bit about "The classic Linux distribution scheme is frequently not what end users want, either. Many users are used to app markets like Android, Windows or iOS/Mac have."
This is especially hilarious because, to an end-user, a Linux distribution is fundamentally indistinguishable from those markets. You have a central repository, all your software is there, and you pick-and-choose without going to random sites to find it. Linux distributions created that model. The premise and conclusion don't even match. You can already add extra repositories if you need to get outside the curated "market", and some distros (such as Ubuntu) provide tools to make this even easier. Debian and derivatives have gotten this right for many years now. You can even, with some care, cross-install across derivatives, such as using Ubuntu PPAs on Debian.
The problem is that end-users don't care about RedHat distros because they didn't get this right before Debian-and-children did, and that hurts the "GNOME+RedHat world domination" plan.
If anybody thinks that isn't the point, consider this: if the distro is just namespaces and filenames, and their goal is just to satisfy end-users, then why doesn't RedHat just pack up shop and consolidate everything into Debian? Debian and its children have a much greater user base than RedHat, and most third-party software already provides .deb packages, so what benefit is there of handing stewardship of this fictional The One Distribution to RedHat instead?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday September 01 2014, @11:47PM
Still, I hate to see BTRFS getting tared with the brush reserved for SystemD.
BTRFS is stable, reliable and has a lot going for it. Its a Btree-based file system similar to ResiserFS but significantly improved performance and reliability and built in snapshot capability. Opensuse is moving toward it as the default in future releases.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @11:57PM
Fair point. If I were involved in BTRFS, I'd be furious enough to puke blood. We can probably expect Lennart to fork it and integrate an incompatible branch right into systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:18AM
The btrfs developers need to go on the offensive now. They need to make it publically clear that they do not support systemd, that they do not support anyone advocating for the use of systemd, and that they are not in favor of any sort of integration between systemd and btrfs. They need to put an end to these shenanigans before they even begin, solely for the good of btrfs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:03AM
I think that's inevitable considering it was an Oracle project in the first place. That's going to damn it in the opinion of a lot of people no matter what its merits may be. Poettering advocating it is small-time compared to the hate people have for Oracle.
Personally, I have no opinion on btrfs, because I'm extremely conservative with my use of filesystems; I have a tendency to hit obscure bugs in software due to niche use cases, and I'd rather not tempt fate with immature filesystems. I'm still using ext3 and XFS, though I'll be switching to ext4 for the next update I do. By the time btrfs is on my radar, they'll be working on btrfs2 :P
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:12AM
Actually it started well before Oracle got involved.
They paid the salary of some developers, true. If you want to toss out all of Oracle's contributions to Linux just because they are Oracle you would end up doing serious damage. The principal implementers came from Suse, had worked on ZFS, and ReiserFS (for suse), and went to work at Oracle and was given free reigns to develop the system.
Btrfs is a true open source project - not just in the license, but also in the community.
http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/ [lwn.net]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by nishi.b on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:37PM
Right with you on this.
I hope to use Btrfs and its snapshots, checksums and all.
Reading LP's projects to use hundreds of subvolumes means it will be such a mess that I won't know what I am using, which subvolumes I need to backup...
And he says ext4 will be supported... by putting btrfs filesystems in a loop file !
Please keep this on ONE distribution if this feature-set is right for you but do not push this everywhere...
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:44PM
btrfs is good, but ReiserFS is a real killer!!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:32AM
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:05AM
Horse and carriage, love and marriage, lalalaaaaa...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:40PM
Sorry, I can't hear you. Must be a Pulseaudio problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jimshatt on Tuesday September 02 2014, @10:57AM
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:17PM
Great post. You hit the nail dead smack on the head. BUT I do see the point of where this is leading to. It is both good and bad. I'll explain later.
To me the goal of RH with these ambitious "one ring to rule them all projects" is to make Linux distros nothing more than a skin on top of a common core OS. If you ask me they want Linux to be the next OSX. A Unix like kernel and functionality under the hood but with a common set of libraries and services on top all the way up to the UI. Gone will be X and other legacy API's/daemons and say hello to GNOME OS(Wayland, Pulseaudio, dbus, systemd, GTK, Gnome desktop).
Linux will no longer be a collection of software packages but rather a more complete core OS. Distros no longer have to worry about maintaining separate kernels, libraries, packages or repositories. Instead they pull in the Linux core OS, include whatever packages their version targets (education, Audio/music, Video, business/office, EDA, etc.) and throw in a custom logo, background, bootsplash and icons. This makes the life of the package maintainer easier as they can now provide a binary package that will work on any distro. This of course will have the effect of culling the distro herd as now who cares if its Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Suse or Redhat? It's all the same thing with a different background, packages and icons. My only hope is they distill the package install process to OSX, have a
THE GOOD:
If their vision works, it is NOTHING but good for the *Desktop* community. That will help move Linux closer to the year of the "Linux desktop" than any supposed "killer app" or Steam can dream of. Look I am going to be honest and say that as much as I love Linux there is still too much inconsistency and niggling problems which the average user does not want to EVER deal with. I can deal with it, most of you reading can deal with it. It's a challenge with a reward for us. To others it's a "fucking headache that needs to die in a fire." as my perpetual Linux newbie friend puts it. I am not saying I agree with this path, I don't. But I get it.
THE BAD:
But, there is a catch. And this is where it can turn sinister. If the concept of a distro is wiped out, many distros will die. Some will live on but the ones who stand to survive are those who provide commercial support. And who is in a better position to do that than RH? So the balance of power will shift to companies providing support for the new "One True Linux" and RH happens to be in the perfect position to do that. What do you think Valve, EA or Ubisoft will want to publish games on (besides the PS4 and XB1)? You guessed it, the "standard" unified LinuxOS. It will also open the floodgates to more proprietary software looking at moving to Linux as the platform will be viewed as homogeneous and easier to work with. No more worrying if your customer is running the latest Ubuntu and you only certified your CAD software to run on a Redhat version from 2 years ago. It "just works" like OSX and Windows.
THE UGLY:
And another major problem this is giving the finger to our open source, Unix brothers in arms, the BSD community and Linux purists. They now have to live with desktop software that won't work on their operating systems without heavy modification, compatibility layers or worse yet, adopting the LinuxOS userland and jamming a BSD kernel under it just to keep up. Sure strictly POSIX stuff will port like command line applications but this will break the desktop.
So it is a double edged sword. One one side you make Linux easier for the masses but on the other you concentrate power to a few players, if not one player.
You want my ¢2? They should have looked back to what the Unix greats were doing with Plan 9's 9p: make every bloody thing a file. That would solve a lot of issues relating to interprocess communication, messaging, video, audio, networking, etc. Instead of reinventing the wheel over and over they should have thought "Hey, how do we break these problems down to a common denominator?" That common denominator being how things communicate which is what all these goofy protocols and daemons are trying to solve. The sad part is the problem was solved 20+ years ago when the Unix developers saw the limits of how things were and are to this day, done.
My favorite Quote:
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:53PM
Oops, posted instead of previewing.
Last sentence of second paragraph: "My only hope is they distill the package install process to OSX, have a" should have read:
My only hope is they make package management as simple as OSX. Seriously OSX does that one basic task right because it is as simple as can be. It feels more more like the Unix way. No scattering files all over creation, no idiotic registry entries, no goofy installers and uninstallers, or package managers. Installing a package is drag and drop. The application list in Finder is analogous to your bin or program files directory. The folder icon is pulled from inside the directory automatically and clicking on the folder launches the program. So in essence you just double click the programs directory to run it. Perfectly simple. A Linux package should be a tar.gz that in uncompressed to /user/apps/ or ~/apps/. Then you simply double click it to run. The GUI menu just needs to search those two directories to populate its program list. To categorize them you make a directory tree with links, the Unix way.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:24PM
The problem I see with the GNOME OS goal is that it's like trying to kill a mouse with a nuke: it might get the job done but you're destroying everything else in the process. Simplifying cross-distro installing for third-party packages is something that's been done before, multiple times, and never required destroying distros and handing the keys to the kingdom over to Redhat. 0install [0install.net] is one example that worked pretty well (especially coupled with rox-filer [sourceforge.net]) but didn't catch on; we've also got Docker [docker.com], which is the current golden child of this sort of movement; and even Steam shows that it can be done without obliterating the underlying system. Games have been packaging static-linked binaries to circumvent package management for years, and some even provide deb or rpm files. Then you've got things like Debian's checkinstall command, which lets you take a non-Debian installer and automagically make a .deb out of it for safe, clean removal later.
It's a great argument to make, citing ease of third party distribution and getting proprietary software companies on board, but it can (and has) been done without going the "GNOME OS" route, and should really remain that way.
The really sad part is, Linux was moving steadily toward that route for a long time, including things like adding the /sys/ mount, and then something happened. I don't know if we got an influx of a new breed of Linux user, or ex-Microsoft employees, or what, and they brought with them a desire to tear all that down and make everything binary logs, registries, blobs, hidden functionality, single-user systems, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @10:23PM
See subject
(Score: 3, Informative) by yellowantphil on Monday September 01 2014, @11:23PM
Maybe Lennart Poettering should go ahead and integrate a kernel, GUI, web browser, office software, and everything else into systemd. Then he can have his One Binary to Rule Them All, and the rest of us can go back to the good old days before we had ever heard of him.
Systemd doesn't wait for my network to come up before trying to mount NFS shares, and I don't know how to fix it. So every time I boot up, I have to type "mount -a" as root, because my network card takes several seconds to connect, for whatever reason. If I were using init scripts, this would be trivial to fix: if nothing else, I could throw in some sort of hack like trying to ping my other computer before mounting the NFS shares. Ugly, but simple. In systemd, I don't even know where to begin. And my old computer booted faster with init scripts than with systemd, probably because systemd felt the need to start ten billion services that I don't want. I can do without Lennart's vision of "progress."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 01 2014, @11:41PM
Sounds like Windows, smells like windows, breaks like windoze.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday September 01 2014, @11:51PM
I feel for you my brother. This is the end of Linux.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:18AM
If this were a math problem and you were calculating the limit of f(t) as t approaches the year of the Linux Desktop, where f(t) = kernalDev(t) + systemDDev(t) + distroDev(t), t would equal infinity.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:53AM
"This is the end of Linux."
No, it will likely be the end of any distro that goes the systemd route.
If enough people want a Linux distro that doesn't use systemd they will create it.
I've been using, and recommending to clients, Debian with a KDE derived desktop (I use "Trinity Desktop Environment", check it out) for 14 years because I like the modular nature of it. When I work with Windows at work invariably there is some problem with the registry, svhost.exe or some service running that shouldn't be. If Debian goes systemd I will go to another distro that doesn't use systemd.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:24AM
Been a Debian user since 2000 and been happy with it, but they're still committed to moving to systemd as the Linux default for jessie's release as stable. Currently, in testing, systemd is required for all desktop environments because of how its tentacles are reaching into every part of the stack. The only thing that hasn't pushed me to jump to a different distro is you can still use other init systems, at least for now, via installation of systemd-shim package.
That lets the other parts of systemd that the desktop bits want live without needing to give in and run the init replacement. I'm fine with that for now, and hopefully sanity is restored before they obsolete the shim package and require systemd as init. Gentoo has that udev fork with the intent of removing the systemd dependency, so maybe that sort of thing will spread the same way Gentoo's gcc fork did back in the day.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:11PM
"systemd is required for all desktop environments"
Only the shitty ones that most people don't like but the corporates are pushing really hard. No need to accidentally tar and feather something like xmonad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:44PM
What's wrong with tar [wikipedia.org] and feather? [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:47PM
I was specifically referring to desktop environments (KDE, Xfce, etc.), rather than window managers like xmonad, because there's a fundamental difference in the two. DEs and WMs have different scopes and different use-cases, and while the big DEs usually contain WMs, they don't have to because it's not their primary purpose. Sometimes a WM is all you want, but other times you want things a DE provides, and it's not fair to either category to lump them together. Apples and oranges.
Actually, I wasn't blaming the DEs for the current situation, either, because it's not really their fault, either. They, with the exception of GNOME, aren't even necessarily trying to become dependent on systemd; it's a side-effect of the Poettering/Sievers relationship to systemd. If a DE tries to provide user-friendly access to USB devices (which it should), it ends up requiring something like udisks. That, in turn, requires udev. Sievers, being the udev creator, decided that udev needs to be tied to systemd. Now every DE that handles USB is dependant on systemd through no fault of that DE's devs.
This is deliberate, insidious, and like you said above, reeks of embrace-extend-extinguish. In Debian, the udev/systemd dependency isn't even obvious at a glance. udev doesn't say it's dependent on systemd when you check, but there's this underhanded situation going on where if you update udev, one of the libs it uses forces the install of systemd on you. On top of that, if you don't know about the systemd-shim package, that will obliterate the sysv init you had without warning.
It's not just the DEs, either; USB support in general is a minefield for apps with regard to systemd right now. The way I found out about the systemd/udev dependency was updating a webcam app, because it wanted me to update or install udisks, which in turn wanted a newer udev, which demanded systemd. It's rather . . . surprising . . . to update a single, simple user-space application and see the proposed changes list trying to obliterate sysv-init and update half the underlying OS. That's putting it mildly, because what I actually said when I saw it was much less polite.
What happens if (when?) systemd gets its tentacles into Xorg or Wayland? Not even the WMs will be safe.
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:27AM
Have you checked if spanning tree on the switch is causing a delay in the interface coming up?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:16PM
Find out what auto-negotiation finally settles on as working, and temporarily hard code it, and see if its faster. I've seen weird fights between auto-negotiation algos that take quite awhile sometimes to settle down.
Sometimes a symptom of dodgy cable, the auto-negotiation would be just fine if you weren't dropping 10% packets due to errors because the cable is almost but not quite broken or is wrapped around fluorescent light fixtures or something. If you have a smart switch, bring it up and watch the interface stats on both the switch side and the device side simultaneously after "awhile" and see if error counts are going up excessively. Or for that matter if its re-negotiation every 10 seconds and you don't notice till you look.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:51AM
After ANY change, you'll have to learn how the new thing works. It was true for alsa, udev, and everything else before it. If your only complaint is that something is different, and you don't know, and don't want to learn, how to use the new thing, that just makes you a Luddite, and doesn't actually speak to the item in question.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 1) by snakeplissken on Tuesday September 02 2014, @07:37PM
Systemd doesn't wait for my network to come up before trying to mount NFS shares
so that's possibly why i now have to manually mount my nfs shares after booting!
at least i now have something to google for :)
snake
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jasassin on Monday September 01 2014, @11:48PM
I'm sick of this shit. If logs aren't that great, improve syslogd... Mounting works fine. Booting works fine. These features are solutions looking for a problem. Fuck you systemd you are a cancer to the Unix philosophy of do one thing and do it well.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:47AM
Are you kidding? Every distro and desktop environment out there is tacking on auto-mounting hacks, as well as permission-granting on storage/scanner/printer/etc. devices, all to give desktop users a straight-forward experience they would expect, rather than needing to know the cryptic ins and outs of checking dmesg and fstab to even tell what and where you need to go.
And how about WiFi? How about USB and network-connected TV tuners? The world has gotten complicated, and Linux just keeps getting a series of crazy, disjointed and dead-end hacks that keep getting duplicate effort, and still replaced after a few years as their limitations are demonstrated.
There's very much a need out there. I don't care if it's systemd or something else, but so far, I haven't seen anything else that addresses the problems.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @10:00AM
Every distro and desktop environment out there is tacking on auto-mounting hacks...
Which is the reason we have distros in the first place, and should be of no concern to you.
Project maintainers make software packages work. Distro maintainers make these packages work together. Users use the result. Everyone happy. Except Lennart and his employer, that is.
And how about WiFi? How about USB and network-connected TV tuners? The world has gotten complicated, and Linux just keeps getting a series of crazy, disjointed and dead-end hacks that keep getting duplicate effort, and still replaced after a few years as their limitations are demonstrated.
This is called evolution. Windows and Mac had their share of dead-end technologies, but no one was running around in circles claiming imminent doom. Which is just as well because any catastrophe failed to materialize.
There's very much a need out there. I don't care if it's systemd or something else, but so far, I haven't seen anything else that addresses the problems.
And as soon as it grows into enough of a problem to get noticeable, and worth the effort to really fix, a number of competing solutions will appear. As they always have. Without some corp cramming its monopoly into everyone's throat.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @11:51AM
It's very much a concern of mine. Every time something that affects functionality gets significant changes, I have to figure out EXACTLY how it works, and I certainly have to know the ins and outs between the major distros. I'm not just an end user with a couple Linux boxes.
Your belief in the magical Linux/OSS fairy is misplaced. The world doesn't work that way. I know that from experience. You're welcome to sit back and let others work it out, but they've all decided to go with systemd.
There have been several patchwork half-measure solutions before. systemd isn't the first, and it has had to compete with upstart and several others. It's just that every major distro out there decided systemd wins. Just because it has a few noisy detractors, doesn't mean there's something wrong with it.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:13AM
I got part way through his blog post. I had to pause a moment to go throw up.
He claims to be concerned for the developer of embedded systems. BULLSHIT! The first step to building an embedded system image will necessarily be to rip out his nomination of an init system. Truly a mouse built to government specs. I need something lightweight that does its bit and gets the hell out of my way. That is not systemd. What I need is exactly something like Debian as it is now where I can carefully choose a minimalist set of packages that support the target application.
He clearly hasn't a clue how the toolbox model works. It makes the exact version number of various things largely irrelevant. It's how the adventurous can use Debian Sid as a daily OS if they like. It's why you can choose to download one or two packages from upstream and compile them if you need the latest and greatest.
That doesn't work very well with his kitchen sink dependency model which is why so many object so strenuously to systemd.
It's also fairly clear that he doesn't run any multi-user systems.
I strongly recommend he just borrow the Linux kernel as-is and build Poetterix to be exactly what he wants and leave the rest of us out of it. If it's really that great, people will adapt current distros to it. But what will really happen is he will use it and his 3 best friends will pretend to.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @06:49AM
Well, he is a RedHat employee; maybe he misses the dependency hell of yore? :)
It's the repeating history of computing. Multi-user systems are out of fashion currently, so people that don't know any better are following the fad and ripping out multi-user bits while worshiping the gods of "boot time" and "efficiency". Later, when multi-user systems are fashionable again, they'll be scrambling to re-implement all the bits they left out. See also: X to Wayland. Rip out all the multi-user stuff because "nobody needs that" to make local, single-user use faster; realise later that people need that stuff; put it back in and hopefully it will be as usable as what you threw out.
There are people that seem to think the current trend of excess, where everybody has at least one desktop or laptop, is never going to end, so why bother supporting multiple users on a single system? Just get another system, they're cheap! Who knows, maybe they're right? If so, losing multi-user features doesn't matter. I think it's more likely we move back into the multi-user part of the cycle for some reason. Maybe with people using tablets and laptops as cheap, long-lived thin-clients that are used to interact with powerful home-systems that do the bulk of the work; one home-server per household generally, with resources shared.
The last part is just random imagination, but I think it's more likely than infinite single-user excess.
Off-topic, but my desktop system is a real-life example of your statement. Bulk of the system is Debian testing, with unstable (sid) pinned at lower priority for the purpose of cherry-picking newer packages as needed, and stable also available for the rare instance when I need to go back to something really old. Plus a handful of external debian repos, and even a few Ubuntu PPAs I pull packages from. All these disparate sources, not even from (or for) the same distro, and it's all handled smartly until I try to install something like GNOME or KDE from an external repo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @07:43AM
Somewhat ironic, given that at the same time the cloud is all the rage ...
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday September 02 2014, @08:17AM
Yeah, I considered going into that but didn't want to stray too far from the point. The cloud thing could be the first push back into the multi-user part of the cycle again, being another step toward a repeat of the thin-client model. If that's the case, it'll be funny if people like Poettering finish gutting the multi-user parts just in time for multi-user designs to become en vogue again.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:13AM
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 [markshuttleworth.com]
"...even by members who voted against it; from my perspective, it has been a pleasure to support the efforts of people who want to create truly great free software, and do it properly. ...
...Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd,..."
Says it all, really.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:34AM
Dear Mr. Poettering,
F*ck you.
Sincerely,
Meisterister
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Tuesday September 02 2014, @12:58AM
I've had a six year hiatus from Linux (it was a bit of a pain when I started writing music [techno and tech house], especially for the hardware) so I'm not really up on pottering and systemd.
The final straw was when I replaced the 3G modem in my Dell XT3 with a Dell branded 4G one and a I couldn't figure out how to use a debugger to get the password for the whitelist for the driver. Of course, my old favorite, Debian stable could use the modem right out of the box. That and the arrival of Bitwig (which is AWESOME if you're into sound design) was when I decided that any windows was going to be a VM from now on (this is an ongoing process).
Anyway, seems like everything has gone nuts while I've been not paying attention.
(Score: 3) by Subsentient on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:34AM
Because Poettering likes it. Hey, I've always loved EXT4. Now I just have another reason.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @02:20AM
will not work over the long term: see MULTICS
(Score: 2, Insightful) by LukeSkywalker on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:37AM
True, and that is why Unix was created in the first place.
Brian Kernighan described Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie's "Unix" project as "...one of whatever Multics in many of..."
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:38AM
You really screwed-up the joke...
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:39AM
the life Well, maybe you can say that the timespan 1967-2000 i(33 years) s not to be considered long-term, but it is surely longer that the timespan os MacOS, any Windows release. Surely, Linux is taking longer (given that Multics development ended 1987 (only 20 years), but now that it is being scaled for a large set of use-cases it is starting to suffer riots.
well, maybe Red Hat PRs will prefer to call it a munity.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:34AM
His proposal strikes me as completely wrong-headed. He wants everyone to have the libraries for every different Linux distro installed in parallel, so that you can run a program designed for RedHat on your Debian system, by launching the app with the Redhat libraries.
Why? You're replacing the simple effort of a developer recompiling his application for a different distro, with libraries in a different place, and putting it in a distro-specific package, and replacing it with having to trust every single distro out there to provide updates for their OS, as well as a mess of mismatched libraries when one of these applications wants to display something on your desktop that's using a different version of X11 or whatnot. And forget about the nightmare of security auditing multiple distros on every system, that are all only used for select purposes.
Who would want to stop having to trust their vendor for application updates, and have to start having to trust EVERY VENDOR for base OS and library updates? RHEL users were conveniently immune from Debian's OpenSSL bug, but with this, you might be running one application using the library with the bug, and another without it, side by side, with no obvious way to know.
And besides that, part of the reason you choose a vendor is to select the tradeoff of just how much auditing and stability you want, versus fresh bleeding edge versions of everything. I certainly don't want to bypass RHEL's audits, and just use the latest upstream versions of everything, just because I CAN with the new app-store model. It sounds to me like something that'll come in hand for developers who want to repackage their software for multiple distros without running a bunch of separate VMs, but absolutely not something desktop users, system admins, or embedded system developers would touch with a 10m stick.
Some of the other stuff he only briefly mentions, like verification from firmware through the boot process sound like a good idea, but he doesn't discuss them at all. The only thing he covers, sounds like a complete mess that introduces far more problems than it solves.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:31PM
It is blatantly apparent that RH and its minions want a more OSX like system where things "just work". And by just work I mean they want to unite Linux into a unified OS where a distro is just a skin on top of a common OS core that eliminates the fragmentation of distributions. Just have a look at OSX: Unix bits under the hood with a common interface and libraries on top. To the hardcore user it still works like Unix. But to the layman, it is a shiny bubbly easy to use OS that looks cool. This is the goal of RH. Not a bad goal but not a good one either. Distros will be nothing more than a collection of hand picked packages, logos, icons, wallpapers and boot splash screens. Software projects just worry about linking to the new core Linux OS API's, and distributing a binary package. Done. Sounds good on paper but there is a disturbing concentration of power in the court of RH.
(Score: 2) by subs on Tuesday September 02 2014, @10:27AM
I'd really appreciate if somebody could please explain to me all the transgressions of systemd upon the poor sysadmin. I come from a Solaris background and while initially I hated SMF, I've come to appreciate its finer points over init scripts. Yeah the syntax is whacky and I would have massively appreciated had they gone with something like OpenStep property lists instead of XML, but it is declarative and relatively straightforward in terms of usage. At times I curse at it, but usually not because of something SMF has messed up, but something somebody else did when using it.
That having been said, I haven't used systemd, so I don't know if I'm missing something. The declarative service configuration syntax, the service tracking and restarting and stuff like that all seem to me to be fine features, stuff any modern Unix-like system should do. But then I hear that systemd is trying to do device & removable storage management and some permissions stuff and I don't know what else - WTF? I thought it was supposed to just be a replacement for init and provide service tracking.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Tuesday September 02 2014, @01:41PM
...this visionary dick crammed down my throat. Historically, people like personal choice in Linux. Sounds like his vision is his choice.