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posted by LaminatorX on Monday September 01 2014, @09:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the puttering-about dept.

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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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:34AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @09:34AM (#88427) Homepage Journal

    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.

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:31PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:31PM (#88572) Journal

    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.