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Longtime Debian contributor Tollef Fog Heen has announced his resignation from the Debian systemd maintainer team. His announcement states that "the load of the continued attacks is just becoming too much."
He has since written a detailed blog article surrounding the circumstances of his resignation. As he puts it,
I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence.
This is yet another dramatic event affecting the Debian project in recent months. The adoption of systemd has been extremely controversial, even going so far as to result in calls for Debian to be forked. There have been other problems as of late, too, ranging from a serious bug breaking Wine just days before the Jessie freeze deadline, to the possibility of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD being dropped from Debian 8. And it was only just over a week ago that Joey Hess — another longtime Debian contributor — left the project, citing the "very unhealthy directions" that Debian has been led in lately.
Is the internal tension and strife caused by systemd about to tear the Debian project apart? Recent events such as the aforementioned have suggested that this is becoming more and more of a possibility. The repercussions of this drama will no doubt be felt wide and far, given Debian's own popularity, as well it forming the basis of other major Linux distros such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Monday November 17 2014, @12:50PM
BSD is not an answer for many of us. Desktop FreeBSD collapsed in a sad heap as soon as Apple decided to hire away key developers, and it has never really recovered. Was anyone surprised? In the early 90's when I discovered Unix Linux was fresh on the scene. The kernel only started getting a following because the GPL stopped closed forks (which was a big deal during the Unix wars) and the codebase didn't have the legal worries that came with BSDs commercial heritage. BSD was superior in almost every way, but developers voted with their feet. The second round of legal wrangling over BSD in 2003 seemed to be the final nail, at least among people I knew.
Perhaps the snarling and baring of teeth comes when paycheques and contracts are at stake. The Redhat and Ubuntu guys certainly seem to have invaded Debian and changed its ethos - Debian was a cooperative and volunteer-friendly distro for much longer than most of the others. I don't think the move-or-not to systemd would have been a problem once upon a time. Its hard to believe how much the culture of Linux as-a-whole has changed. I must admit I'm understanding the anger that had RMS performing coding-marathons against the commercial outfits, and mourning the non-commercial cooperative hacker culture at the AI lab. I just wish I had RMSs talent. ;) Still, I do what I can, and will lend my very small weight to any freedom-supporting alternative that respects its users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @12:58PM
That's all entirely your own fault. I invested in OpenBSD years ago and they are the same unmarketable asshole pricks as they were back then. Not even TSLA comes close.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @01:02PM
I'm gonna try anyway. I intend to start with the LXDE port for FreeBSD [lxde.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by SNK on Monday November 17 2014, @01:17PM
Just make sure that you use pkg instead of pkg_add as mentioned in the LXDE manual.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @01:21PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by fnj on Monday November 17 2014, @08:48PM
You might also consider PC-BSD. It is FreeBSD with mostly, but not all, FreeBSD packages, configured with a graphical installer to end up with a perfectly working DE with zero tinkering or intervention. When I say it is FreeBSD, I mean it. Complete with freebsd-version and freebsd-update. They maintain their own package repo though.
The usual precautions to make sure you have supported hardware apply - particular attention to graphics and WiFi hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:24PM
Well said and thank you.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday November 17 2014, @08:52PM
Nonsense. No it didn't. FreeBSD is still very much alive and actively developed. I'll give you that desktop installations are not the raison d'etre or prime focus. For that you have the PC-BSD customized FreeBSD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @03:47AM
Not churning the desktop is a feature. Innovation isn't needed there, it is a solved problem. It works just like it always did, and it did always work.