SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.devuan.org/os/announce/chimaera-release-announce-2021-10-14
Dear Friends and Software Freedom Lovers,
Devuan Developers are pleased to announce the release of Devuan Chimaera
4.0 as the project's newest stable release. This is the result of lots of
painstaking work by the team and extensive testing by the wider Devuan
community.What's new in Chimaera 4.0?
* Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10.
* Your choice of init: sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC.
* Improved desktop support - virtually all desktop environments available
in Debian are now part of Devuan, systemd-free.
* New boot, display manager and desktop theming.
* Enhanced accessibility: installation via GUI or console can now be
accomplished via software or hardware speech synthesis, or using a
refreshable braille display, and Devuan Chimaera has the ability to
install desktop environments without PulseAudio, allowing speech
synthesis in both console and GUI sessions at the same time.
"without PulseAudio", eh? Speculations on the reason for that are welcome, he asked them knowingly... -- Ed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday October 15 2021, @07:02AM (16 children)
Are we still supposed to hate it? I thought that particular streak of online outrage was out of fashion by now.
Oh well, whatever floats your boat. I guess choice is good.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mockingbird on Friday October 15 2021, @07:15AM (4 children)
I am curious how you can ask this, after you laid out the problems with pulseaudio, which after all is the mother of systemd.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday October 15 2021, @07:55AM (3 children)
Well, I find systemd rather pleasant to work with and fairly stable. I mean sure, it has features that I dislike - chief of which are the non-plain-text logging and Poettering himself - but on the whole, I like the way it journals things, I like service files... I'm probably not enough of a power user to have a real informed opinion about it, but for what I do and the few packages I maintain, it's flexible and it just works.
Pulseaudio on the other hand... I don't care about it. I just needed it to do one trivial thing and it got in my way and wasted an entire afternoon. And yes... Poettering.
It goes to show that the same guy can code something I rather like and another thing I profoundly dislike. What a concept eh? :)
Bear in mind that I have nothing for or against either of those software packages. This is just my experience.
(Score: 5, Funny) by srobert on Friday October 15 2021, @03:51PM
"sure, it has features that I dislike - chief of which are the non-plain-text logging and Poettering himself"
LOL. I didn't know that Poettering was a "feature" of systemd. Some might say he was the bug of it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @05:07PM
I've never had an interaction with SystemD that was pleasant. I've had plenty that were decidedly not. Diagnosing an unbootable system wasn't fun with initd, but it is nearly impossible with SystemD, happens much more frequently, and always turns out to be SystemD's fault.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday October 18 2021, @07:01PM
To each his own I guess, but SystemD introduces a whole lot of bullshit that just isn't necessary. I'm looking for security first, so I can't find a whole lot of trust in SystemD at this time. Maybe in 20 years if the code base was thoroughly vetted, but I doubt that will happen and keep up with all the new code.
That's why I like OpenBSD, because of the philosophy, the relative security provided by the code.
It's not that I hate SystemD, it's that I can't trust it for mission critical systems, infrastructure, and security. For a desktop OS being protected by all of that? Maybe.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MadTinfoilHatter on Friday October 15 2021, @08:14AM (2 children)
Yes. Because it's still an abonination. :-)
Here is a pretty long but informative write-up of, both the kind-of-good ideas behind systemd, as well as why it ended up the way it did. systemd 10 years later; a historical and technical retrospective [darknedgy.net]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by shrewdsheep on Friday October 15 2021, @10:13AM
TLDR so maybe some of my points are not relevant. I believe it is important to distinguish concepts from implementation. A lot of criticism around systemd focusses on particular implementation. Conceptually at the time, it was very important to formalize and supervise the boot process. Also, performance improvements became important when a lot of daemons invaded the desktop. Finally, centralized logging is advantageous in many situations. Systemd ran fasted with these ideas (stealing from Mac among others) IIRC with alternatives coming in late. Systemd rightfully deserves crticism based on its architecture but which piece of software doesn't? It's a matter of fact that systemd has solved the mentioned problems to a satisfying degree and time has told. Making systemd more modular and configurable (e.g. format of logging files) is desirable and could be achieved within the systemd project. Or an alternative would come along, but it would have to be conceptually very similar.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 15 2021, @10:45AM
Uh, wow. I've seen and/or used more than half the inits mentioned. Seldom interacted with them, TBH, but now and then, one of them stood between me, and something I wanted to do. And, each time, I had to search for documentation to figure out how to do what I wanted. Mission accomplished, I forgot everything I knew about each of them. It's surprising to see how many of them I've poked at!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @08:47AM (1 child)
SysVinit is old and creaky, and a new improved startup/init system is not a bad thing -- upstart, runit and openrc were/are all noble efforts to improve it.
But, all the usual systemd whining and complaints aside, I believe systemd (and Chrome/Firefox/Webkit as well) represents a significant and unforgivable sin: the forcible usurping of FOSS by corporate, profit-driven interests from technical passion/elegance-driven interests (I call them 'old-school itch-scratchers' here.)
Systemd is more than just a new startup/init system. It's nothing less than a needlessly comprehensive rewrite of the glue between the Linux kernel and userland, providing a full-employment program for a bunch of resume-burnishing for-profit developers and support-contract salesmen. Old-school itch-scratchers would *never* have attacked the startup/init problem in this way.
The big boys (except for Google/Android) can't make Linux proprietary, so this is how they take control. IIRC the Pale Moon guy has basically gone on record saying that it's no longer possible for old-school itch-scratchers to build a new browser from the ground up due to the corporate-induced accelerating growth in the standard's size and complexity.
I salute the Devuan itch-scratchers for their herculean efforts, but I'm certain they will falter once enough systemd-dependent features are infused through the Linux app ecosystem. Users like the new shiny and will never care what it looks like under the hood. Of course I hope I'm wrong about this prediction. [/rant]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @12:11PM
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @09:31AM
People have moved on/away. Hating on systemd is no longer sexy, but I'm sure it will come back into fashion one day. Meanwhile, Debian still ships sysvinit, Gentoo has elogind, Guix uses shepherd. Some run Devuan/MxLinux/Antix, and some have moved to FreeBSD.
Personally, I use s6 as service manager, but it does mean writing my own service files. That's not that big of a problem, because I already have everything stored as code, and storing a runscript along with the package/service configuration isn't that much of a problem. I mostly like how s6's use of exec chaining plays wonderfully with Selinux' concept of type transitions.
(Score: 0, Troll) by FatPhil on Friday October 15 2021, @01:33PM (2 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Friday October 15 2021, @02:00PM
The systemd version of Devuan is known as Debian. You do have the choice.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @02:00PM
Isn't Devuan with systemd just regular Debian though? There's already that choice.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @01:35PM
>> Are we still supposed to hate it?
Not necessary any more... Poettering's added self-loathing functionality to systemd as part of his neverending feature creep.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 15 2021, @03:50PM
Those of us who hate systemd have moved to systems that give us an alternative.