SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A developer affiliated with boycottsystemd.org has announced and released a fork of systemd, sardonically named uselessd.
The gist of it:
uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint) is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.
uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.
They then go on to tout being able to compile on libc implementations besides glibc, stripping out unnecessary daemons and unit classes, working without udev or the journal, replacing systemd-fsck with a service file, and early work on a FreeBSD port (though not yet running).
Responses from the wider Linux community are yet to be heard.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cykros on Sunday September 21 2014, @08:17PM
It's similar to the situation with pulseaudio.
Are there real benefits? Yes. Is there a NEED for most people to go through the upheaval of completely changing something as foundational as an init system or audio system in order to have those benefits? No....it's generally a minority that really see any benefit from the additional features, and the majority being dragged into the additional complexity with no real or perceived benefit.
I use Slackware, which doesn't come with pulseaudio by default, and I installed pulseaudio because I found that to do what I wanted to do, it was the best tool for the job. It DID add another layer of complexity, and I get crazy looks from other Slackers wondering why I'd use such a thing. When I explain my use case, I get a lot of "ahh's", and it is what it is. Go and suggest that they get dragged into needing to use it by including it by default in the distro, however (or worse, put out software that for no good reason requires it), and they'll go running off to *BSD right quick.
Systemd is similar. Distros people have used for years, and relied upon heavily have decided to just about overnight completely overhaul a very basic foundational element, bringing more complexity, for so called improvements that just aren't a concern to most of us. Faster boot time? Really? On the machine I reboot once or twice a year, if that? I'm sure that'll save me a lot of wasted time, and all I have to do is go read up about using a whole new system! In the end, it boils down to something that wasn't broken being fixed anyway, rather than an alternative being presented side by side for people to weigh for themselves and make their own choices (though at least in the case of Debian, while I don't quite condone every aspect of the transition, they did still maintain sysvinit support for those willing to go in swap out systemd).
I'm sure there are people who benefit from systemd, and it doesn't surprise me that it has its apologists. And I'm not saying they're deluded. Mostly just that the people managing these distros were relatively impolite and inconsiderate to their users. And do they owe anything to their users, who get their software for free? No, they don't. But likewise, the users don't have to just sit back and be treated like lab rats by their OS maintainers, and nobody should be surprised when they jump ship (or, what I'd honestly like to see, fork the distro/installer...Slackware is great and all, but there are definitely cases where the repository breadth of distros like Debian offers enough time-saving to make it worth going for for specific tasks).
In the end, a lot of it has boiled down to sabre rattling anyway. The amount of people that have only ever known Linux from LiveCD's and software centers for easy installation is something some of the people who have been around longer may forget about is staggering, which is likely the biggest source of the uproar. It's all open source software, and you're totally free to switch things out and reconfigure them as you see fit...provided you take the time to learn your way around, and then take the time to make the changes. Something it would seem is becoming a lost art in the world of Linux as it gains steam (or at least tries to) among normal desktop users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 22 2014, @11:31AM
There was no general resolution in debain.
Someone reported not having systemd as default was a "bug".
A technical committie stacked with current or former redhat and ubuntu employees voted.
The redhat camp had the chair, and tie broke.
They had promised to keep choice before they had won.
They have renegged on that after.
As we all knew that they would.
Abuse and bad faith.
Debian is an oligarchy.
It is not run by the users nor the programmers anymore.
Nor does it care for either.