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From El Reg:
Lennart Poettering, creator of the systemd system management software for Linux, says the open-source world is "quite a sick place to be in."
He also said the Linux development community is "awful" – and he pins the blame for that on Linux supremo Linus Torvalds.
"A fish rots from the head down," Poettering said in a post to his Google+ feed on Sunday.
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Linux systemd Dev Says Open Source is 'SICK', Kernel Community 'Awful'
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Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
-- Lord Acton
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:11PM
"I'm moving to FreeBSD, too. I've been a Debian user since 1997"
Yes AC about the same here. I'm documenting my "adventures" in the conversion and will likely turn it into a blog post or article or wiki or free ebook when I'm done. AFAIK there isn't a Debian (or linux in general) to freebsd resource out there.
One annoyance with existing freebsd docs is they baby talk and assume you've never touched a unix-ish machine before, while glossing over the critical differences that really need to be emphasized by real world refugees. Don't gimmie three screenfulls on the concept of a CLI and then like two short lines on the almost identical to linux conceptually but completely different names for the freebsd kernel module system, and the weird (to me) way they spec modules to be loaded. How many freaking cascaded shell scripts and config files can you bsd guys have just to change a lightbulb, anyway?
Most of the fun isn't just syntax, but conceptual differences. Like instead of the one true apt-get to bind them all that does all upgrading on Debian, figuring out the whole "theres one app to upgrade the core bsd system" and pkg for some binary packages but not everything and ports to build from source, like WTF freebsd could you add more alternatives?
Speaking of alternatives, I know that system inside and out and love it on Debian so my vi is not nvi but is vim when I run vi, but conceptually what runs that on freebsd? I'll get something working eventually even if its more a work around than anything else.
I'm completely successful so far in what I've attempted although I've burned a lot of google time and still have a laundry list to complete.
Even if all the systemd stupidity blows over, I'm gaining valuable experience and perspective with another OS, just can't lose. For those reasons I should have played with freebsd a long time ago. Would strongly recommend everyone install freebsd on a spare drive / machine / partition and learn it a bit, just in general.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:16PM
I've been looking in that direction more lately also..
Have you tried Debian kFreeBSD? I'm looking into it now, and it seems a bit more mature than I'd thought. That gets rid of most of those nasty BSD packaging issues... :)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:50PM
With the linuxisms in systemd and it being required as init and more and more software depending on it, I don't think that port or the hurd port have long left to live.
Based on my three or so hours of screwing around now making me a freebsd expert, you can pretty much search and replace "apt-get" with "pkg" and the rest of the command line and general behavior will be the same. With the minor exception that I keep being told that not everything is in "pkg" and sooner or later I'm going to get to experience the ports system.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:48PM
Debian is already making plans to drop kFreeBSD. I was going to submit this when it came out but got lazy:
http://lwn.net/Articles/614142/ [lwn.net]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:35PM
Slackware and gentoo both work great with no systemd.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:20PM
Yeah but I don't really care about the kernel as much as I care about emacs24 and apache and vim and perl and a jvm and a decent terminal and chrome(ium)
Also your two examples "could" at least theoretically be poisoned by systemd and even worse by systemd architecture / philosophy / culture / dev style but there's too much linux-ism in it to ever poison freebsd, so I don't have to worry as much.
From about 15 yrs ago I remember the idea behind gentoo was academically fascinating but I didn't / don't feel it practical to always be compiling all the time on prod boxes. Dev box sure. Test box sure. Prod box probably shouldn't be compiling anything, ever. To each their own.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:05PM
You're entitled to your view but I doubt it is accurate. Gentoo allows systemd as a choice, and seems very unlikely to remove the other options, while Slack gets by just fine without systemd, or GNOME, or PAM, and has for years.
"From about 15 yrs ago I remember the idea behind gentoo was academically fascinating but I didn't / don't feel it practical to always be compiling all the time on prod boxes. Dev box sure. Test box sure. Prod box probably shouldn't be compiling anything, ever. To each their own"
There's no reason whatsoever you should be 'compiling all the time' with gentoo. You dont have to compile at all with it, in fact. If you WANT to recompile world with different options it makes it easy to do, but it's certainly not obligatory.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by boltronics on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:00AM
Question: Can you install Gentoo these days without a compiler? Ideally a compiler toolchain wouldn't even be installed on a production machine.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:19AM
Gentoo allows systemd as a choice, and seems very unlikely to remove the other options, while Slack gets by just fine without systemd, or GNOME, or PAM, and has for years.
Ah, but going forward is what we are concerned with, not what has been happening for years.
When Systemd gets it hooks in every piece of user space software, you will have nothing to run on Gentoo or Slack without a massive patch list to remove all the dependencies on systemd.
Not many people want JUST a terminal anymore. The want a desktop environment (or three) and the resources required to keep those working without systemd just do not exist. Gnome, KDE, et al are just not going to support alternative builds when all the money is coming from red hat and ubuntu.
systemd will extinguish everything that doesn't get in line.
Its ok for you to not think his opinion is right, but for god sake look around you. Its happening before your very eyes!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:22AM
How's that? I thought this was all open source stuff. It'll only extinguish things that let themselves be extinguished, things that simply roll over and die instead of creating alternatives.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:42AM
"Not many people want JUST a terminal anymore. The want a desktop environment"
No, they don't, thats the craziest part of the whole story.
99.9% of the population wants a web browser and the occasional full screen video viewer or full screen game, and the admins/devs want a terminal. Almost nobody wants a "desktop environment" or the features that come with it. Enormous amounts of code, unused.
At work one of my desktops runs windows 7 with all this desktop crap piled on top of it. All it does is firefox/chromium because the corporate world has been moving to the web since the mid 90s, and outlook because for no clear reason that has webmail disabled (security paranoia, probably). None of my coworkers use desktop applications either.
It never fails to amaze me how stuff that used a desktop app and GPIB or RS232 in the 90s, or USB and a desktop app in the 00s, is all moving to a web interface over ethernet in the 10s. You can see the lure for the devs. No software installation, no desktop support, no troubleshooting, its just a web page. Works fine on my phone, tablet, or desktop, as long as their web designers don't do stupid things.
Management uses Excel as their DBMS, word processor, report generator, numerical analysis platform, and well, frankly, their desktop environment. Personally all my spreadsheets are in google docs, but they aren't very important to me. So they need like one app. There are specialists who need like "one" application. Not a whole environment. The CAD blueprint lady, I know all prints come from exactly one app. The HR people used to use powerpoint for those boring PCI/DSS and harassment training but that all moved online. Higher level mgmt does occasionally still use powerpoint but that fad kinda peaked a decade or so ago. The receptionist used to have a desktop application that talked to the PBX for advanced fast call routing, but that all went online on a web page interface. I don't really know what the accounting people use. I can't think of any employee at work who uses more than 3 applications. You don't need an "environment" for that.
The desktop environment as a metaphor is dead and was buried a long time ago but people just keep flogging the horse. Its just a grease stain on the pavement now. "But we gotta change everything because without that nothing will ever work again, I order you to pay no attention to the horse that worked perfectly well before" and then they get all pissed off when someone points out horses are dead and its all cars now.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 10 2014, @03:50AM
The point I was trying to make, and with which I accidentally stepped on your bee's nest, was that nobody running linux wants just a shell account any more.
Hence, they will all want SOME FORM of desktop environment, or graphical environment. Which means that when ALL the graphical environment projects adopt systemd, those distros like slackware who want to avoid it will have to custom build of even the simplest graphical environment, backing out all the systemd hooks for sysVinit, or what ever.
But, I, still wondering, in a discussion of systemd, how did I get sandbagged with a windows rant?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 10 2014, @03:22PM
"how did I get sandbagged with a windows rant"
Because this mythical "they" that everyone has an opinion on but no data actually want a program launcher, not an "environment"
Trying to hyper-tightly couple everything together is a losing system design strategy. Your USB shoudn't have anything to do with your IRC client.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:20PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:21PM
Please do have fun with freebsd, but don't forget that the linux kernel developers are still working hard to create the best unix kernel they can make.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:46PM
A kernel alone does us no good, though. That's where FreeBSD shines. They do the kernel right, and they do the userspace right. Debian used to offer much of the same, but they're clearly fucking up the userland side thanks to the introduction of systemd. Unfortunately, we need both the kernel side and the userland side to be done properly. We can't just have one or the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:06AM
So then why is it that people are only bitching and whining about sytemd instead of getting together and making a better replacement? If its as bad as the extremely vocal group claims, then its in high demand and would be very welcome. The fact that nobody's working on an alternative suggests that its not really as bad as they're claiming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:20AM
Not this crap again.
We had a better replacement 20 years ago. For some reason it's called sysv-init, even though it doesn't dictate sysv-style init scripts. On slackware it runs BSD-style init scripts just fine.
The problem is not the lack of an alternative, it's that more and more distros drop support for anything but systemd, due to Gnome (and probably soon KDE) dependencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:58PM
...which is exactly why they need to be forked, instead of simply bitched about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:21PM
Hey, when you make that doc could you post it to Soylent/your SN journal/email me?
fox [ta] cyberfoxfirecom
I've wanted to build an apt-get -> pkg analog... Like, the FreeBSD equivalent of adding repos, purging packages, pinning packages, listing dependencies, etc... not just installation.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:23AM
Most of the fun isn't just syntax, but conceptual differences. Like instead of the one true apt-get to bind them all that does all upgrading on Debian, figuring out the whole "theres one app to upgrade the core bsd system" and pkg for some binary packages but not everything and ports to build from source, like WTF freebsd could you add more alternatives?
That's pretty standard on all the BSD's. Its almost impossible to avoid the three methods, and installing any BSD without going full hog on source tree is going to leave you with a pretty minimal (but secure system). Until someone finds a bug, which is rare.
Then they force you to compile the patches until the next major release, so my advice is don't even think about not installing all full source tree, and compile capable system.
Packages are somewhat easier to install, but they don't get updated very fast. BASH is not part of the normal Openbsd release, but it is often installed. And as of today, it is STILL vulnerable.
Ports? Good luck.
Stay away from ports if you can, because they are not very well checked out compared to the rest of the system.
I'm running OpenBSD (because they are security obsessed).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.