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posted by
janrinok
on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:25AM
from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.
from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.
Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.
The vote results can be found here
The winners are:
Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"
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Debian General Resolution to Prevent Init System Coupling Fails to Pass
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If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:26PM
I stopped using Arch right before they switched to systemd, but not for that reason (in fact, back then I was looking forward to trying out systemd to see what it was all about). I stopped using it because, when they switched from a great bare-bones installer to an obtuse, script based sado-masochistic method, they outright said they switched to keep anyone new from being able to use Arch. Their attitude was "it's our private club and we don't want anyone else in it". The new installation method wasn't difficult for anyone who was used to the Arch Way; I mastered it pretty quickly. But when I went to the forums to search for some specific issue that I had ran into, I came across a discussion that told me everything I needed to know about the Arch maintainers; basically, they are so anti-user and against anyone new discovering Arch that they will bully and mock people who ask questions until they give up in frustration and drop the distro.
I promptly removed Arch from my machines and went back to Slackware (and Raspbian on my just-acquired Raspberry Pi), as to my mind this was wholly against the spirit of GNU/Linux and open source. Later I found that they had completed the switch to systemd, and by that time I had had a chance to research it enough to be doubtful of its merits. But, I still wanted to try it out, so I grabbed the Arch Linux image for the Raspberry Pi, complete with systemd, and gave it a spin. On the whole, everything seemed more or less the same as pre-systemd, but for one thing, I noticed performance was even worse than before[1], and I also noticed that systemd commands using systemctl didn't always do what you told them to. For example, I'd tell it to stop and then start a process, and about half the time the process wouldn't actually stop, even giving it several seconds to do so. It was issues like this that led me to research systemd further outside of the Raspi environment, and after weighing the pros and cons, I found that I didn't want it.
So, to answer your question, I wholly believe the Arch maintainers switched to systemd in an effort to further alienate the casual Arch user. Take a once great distro, hobble it with an obtuse installer, hobble it further with a broken and unfinished init system, and top it off with hateful dismissal of anyone not in the inner circle, and you have the true Arch Way.
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[1] The Raspberry Pi's performance as a desktop OS, even on the command line, is already so abysmal that anything slowing it down further is immediately felt. Pre-systemd Arch Linux was the fastest modern OS on the Pi (classic OSes like RiscOS and Plan9 run acceptably well on it, modern GNU/Linux not so much), but post-systemd Arch Linux is dog slow, even slower than Raspbian. The performance difference was striking, and was the reason I looked deeper into systemd instead of blindly accepting it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 21 2014, @08:55PM
Did you try Antergos at all? Basically it's just Arch with the old installer restored. I did the whole manual Arch install a couple times and it wasn't too bad, but they screwed the wiki regarding how to set up disk encryption at one point and I decided to just start using Antergos instead of wasting any more time screwing around with it. Quite happy with Antergos though.
Of course, it *is* still Systemd if that's a problem for you. I don't like it, I've got four line shell scripts with features Systemd is lacking, but it's not bad enough to push me to Slackware or Gentoo yet. Used Slackware for a while back around '06 or so...it was nice, but I just don't have time for that anymore.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Friday November 21 2014, @10:39PM
Of course, it *is* still Systemd if that's a problem for you.
Unfortunately, it is. I don't fall into the "hate systemd for...um...reasons" camp, but until a) the political furor surrounding it calms down and b) it has matured and proven itself as superior to what we have now, I'm going to avoid using a distro that contains it. Besides, I more or less grew up on Slackware; it wasn't the first GNU/Linux distro I tried but it was the first that I understood and was able to learn from, instead of curse at. I've had at least one machine running it in some version since 1999. I'm still going to get up to speed on FreeBSD in the mean time, as it's been years since I dove into it deeply.