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[Ed's Comment: Not wishing to ignite yet another flame war regarding the adoption of systemd, I hesitated before publishing this story. However, although it is not an formal survey, it might still reflect the views of the greater linux user community rather than those who frequent this particular site. There is no need to restate the arguments seen over the last few weeks - they are well known and understood - but the survey might have a point.]
http://q5sys.sh has recenlty conducted a survey finding many Linux users may be in favour of systemd:
First off lets keep one thing in mind, this was not a professional survey. As such the results need to be taken as nothing more than the opinions of the 4755 individuals who responded. While the survey responses show that 47% of the respondents are in favor of systemd, that does not mean that 47% of the overall linux community is in favor of systemd. The actual value may be higher or lower. This is simply a small capture of our overall community.
Although the author questions the results could this be an indication that we're really seeing a vocal minority who don't want systemd while the silent majority either do or simply don't care? Poll results and the original blog post.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by emg on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:40PM
"And the main point of systemd is improve the desktop."
How?
I mean that seriously: what's it supposed to do to improve the desktop? The only benefit I've seen claimed for the desktop is shorter boot time, and my desktop machine already spends more time in the BIOS than it does booting the operating system. Those two seconds saved out of fifteen or twenty are irrelevant to me.
Systemd is supposed to magically make rainbows and unicorns, but I've never seen any real explanation of how or why.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:18PM
For the moment the main effect I can see is to make the freedesktop.org stuff less relevant to anyone that cares about portability.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21 2014, @06:44AM
init scripts were crap, but systemd sure doesn't look like it'll improve stuff. Nor does it look like things will really get better. Lennart has bad taste in design- binary log files, monolithic tightly coupled code etc. It's like a chef with bad taste. The guy will continue producing stuff like that and think it's good.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 21 2014, @07:01PM
I like the analogy. I see too many people saying things that, even if not meant that way, can certainly be portrayed as personal attacks on the man, and I do not want to come off that way myself. He's obviously a very smart and talented man. Perhaps too arrogant and sure of himself though.
Like a chef that cooks an absolutely stunning meal, that clearly very few could even begin to rival, but... his main dish is roast pork and the event he is catering is called "Passover."
Oy vey.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by jmorris on Friday November 21 2014, @07:21PM
Yup. Which is why I always say that if he hates UNIX (he says he does) he should contribute to ReactOS. They would likely welcome the help. But it isn't a big enough project for his ego. He will instead singlehandedly 'fix' Linux, curing it of it's UNIX taint.
Systemd is -not- about the init, it aspires to and is quickly realizing, it is nothing less than a brand new 'OS in userspace.' Replacing all of the device drivers in Linux is simply not possible, but as Google showed you can just take the kernel as a huge hardware abstraction layer and build almost any OS atop it. Pottering learned from that.
Sooner or later Windows itself will sit atop it as the burden of maintaining device driver support becomes more expensive than the alternative of just letting Linus and his merry band deal with it. Eventually *BSD might even run the Linux kernel with a BSD userspace for the same reason. (Apple doesn't support the universe of hardware that would drive that decision process, they can stay on BSD.)
Polls are unreliable on this since the future isn't going to be determined by votes. It will be determined by level of intensity, 90% could vote that they dislike systemd but RedHat will not care and unless feet vote, unless developers migrate, unless donors step up with server space for forked UNIX like Linux variants to reappear they are right not to. Given sufficient intensity, forking will occur if only 10% do not want to abandon The UNIX Way.
Given almost 40% voting to retain UNIX ways in the recent Debian voting, my money is on forks. I'd like to see forks and have BOTH forks survive. The refugees are out there and they must have a home so let them take a fork and build their Windows/Mac clone atop a Linux kernel. And be happy, productive and put good code into repositories. And let us UNIX folk return to building our own world, taking ideas from the PotteringOS side when we like them and they taking our ideas and code when they like the design.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 21 2014, @08:19PM
He insists that GDM has to pull in X and all of GNOME to do a simple login, because that's all required for his screen reader. So, blind people don't get access to a primary shell? Talk about second-class citizens. I think I would have made a screen reader with a lot fewer requirements, but then again I don't hate blind people.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Pav on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:38PM
It doesn't help with boot times [distrowatch.com], at least not on the default install of both Debian and Arch... for GUI or non-GUI.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday November 21 2014, @12:12AM
It depends on hardware as well as configuration, but for me, it did: substantially improve boot times in Arch. That's on an Eee 900A netbook, which had such short battery life I initially liked systemd for making shutdown/boot a practical alternative to suspend/resume.
As I looked into systemd, I wasn't philosophically happy with a number of aspects, but I'd still have tolerated that version of it on that machine, solely for the boot time reduction. However, the project's further expansion, following the same sort of wrongheaded design principles, leaves me firmly in the anti-systemd camp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @05:01PM
"...substantially improve boot times..."
How is this beneficial for servers where boot times should not occur? Also, how important is it to shave a negligible amount of time during boot?
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday November 25 2014, @01:28AM
How is this beneficial for servers where boot times should not occur?
Did you miss where I said I found it useful on a netbook? (FYI, netbooks aren't servers.) And where I said I'd have accepted pre-feature-creep systemd on that netbook, implying that I wouldn't have accepted it in other use cases?
Also, how important is it to shave a negligible amount of time during boot?
Since, in my case, the time saved was not negligible, that question makes no sense.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Friday November 21 2014, @12:52AM
systemd boots so fast that your stopwatch will gawp on in amazement and its heart will beat faster at witnessing the beauty of such a vision of heaven unfolding before its eyes. That's why boot times seem so similar between it and sysV init.
In all seriousness, from my tinkering with it, there is... some difference in certain scenarios. I've got a new build HTPC running jessie from an SSD that I've tried with-and-without systemd, and systemd goes from grub through daemons, XFCE and XBMC fully loaded twice as fast as sysV; 2s instead of 4. The CPU is the limiting factor there but the time difference is barely noticeable even if you're looking for it. On spinning rust systems where you're likely to be IO bound the difference is much smaller or non-existent. For heavier-duty server loads (i.e. more time spent waiting for IO and network responses) they're for all intents and purposes identical. But besides the point IMHO since POST on any of my mobos takes at least 10s before the OS can even start loading.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Friday November 21 2014, @06:08AM
To be fair, I suspect it might help a bit more for boot times if you're running virtualised servers where HW/POST time isn't a factor, and particularly if you're running a *lot* of virtualised servers. The case also known as "Red Hat's probable customers"). In fact there's probably quite a win there if you're shutting down/restarting/migrating a lot in those environments.
(Of course, that's pretty much irrelevant as far as the rest of us are concerned)
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Friday November 21 2014, @03:27AM
today, I did an apt-get update of my rasp-pi board (I had pointed to jessie. probably not a good idea) and it borked the bootup process. sits there counting down 1:30 and then hangs. damn! glad I have a backup.
so far, I see no benefit to systemd and only down-sides. this 'upgrade' costed me time and now I have to blow away my sdcard and redo it all from backups.
I'm also going to be avoiding jessie until its known to work (at least on the pi).
I guess I don't see what was wrong with old init. it worked, it was understood and it was lightweight.
linux guys are starting to piss me off. they take functioning stuff and feel like they have to break it. damn.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21 2014, @03:39AM
You're yet another victim who has had to waste hours dealing with a problem that never would have happened if Debian had done the right thing and shunned systemd.
I don't care how much time this will "save" the Debian package maintainers. It has already wasted so much time of users whose computers have become infected with systemd that the maintainers' time savings will never even begin to approach how much time users have wasted dealing with systemd-induced problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @03:49PM
I don't care how much time this will "save" the Debian package maintainers. It has already wasted so much time of users whose computers have become infected with systemd that the maintainers' time savings will never even begin to approach how much time users have wasted dealing with systemd-induced problems.
Exactly. It doesn't help that there are 40,000 packages (and less maintainers) but millions of users.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Friday November 21 2014, @05:10AM
Follow the money and you'll see what the story REALLY is, and its all about "cloud computing" which RH is pushing. Are you planning to run a cloud computing datacenter? No? Then its not gonna help you and will in fact add a big fat single point of failure. For those that want to learn more this blog [blogspot.com] is a good place to start.
And before somebody goes "Ur teh windows guy u no get to talk" I have ALWAYS supported the USERS over the suits, I supported the users when Balmer was trying to shove Win 8 down the user's throats, I supported the users when Pulse was shoved out there in an alpha state, i was and always will support the users over the suits because hey, if you listen to the users you'll find their wants and needs are rather sensible.
Besides anybody that doesn't smell a tuna factory sized fish at the way things have been going on, what with stability focused distros like Debian jumping on when even the supporters admit critical parts aren't complete, with users being banned and discussions being erased...WTF? And wadda ya know, this critical subsystem required by every distro, including those focused on privacy and security, which replaces a part that even nitpickers like me honestly had no real complaints with, is being pushed like its the most important thing since the kernel.....by a company that gets more than 85% of their revenue from the 3 letter agencies. Look it up, DoD,NSA,CIA,FBI, if the US government quit buying RH licenses tomorrow the company would be dead in the water. And to add to all this the stomping of any opposition with bans, erasing threads, and treating everyone who says they are opposed as some sort of troll or idiot? Yeah after snowden I'm sorry but I think everyone with a brain should be worried about putting a critical subsystem like that in the hands of a company practically owned by the US gov. Its just common sense.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 21 2014, @08:43AM
Ur teh windows guy - why ur OS not taken into consideration? This pole only considered how popular systemd woz - which is about 1% favouring it. 90+% of people prefer windows. If popularity is an important metric for the systemd supporters, then they have lost.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21 2014, @09:44AM
So you stopped reading at "windows" and missed his points entirely.
Bravo, bravo!
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Friday November 21 2014, @04:46PM
If you wanna take my OS into consideration? Fine its a perfect example of how voting with your wallet empowers users more than the so called "meritocracy" of Linux. After all when Balmer tried to ignore the will of the users with Windows 8 the users refused to buy, OEMs stopped pushing it for Win 7, and Balmer ended up replaced by Nadella who has given the users EXACTLY what they asked for as Windows 10? Its just Win 7 with improvements to speed and ease of use. Hell I've got it running on a circa 2009 AMD netbook and even with such a weak APU and every driver running in compatibility mode its faster in every way and even has hardware acceleration.
Compare this to the supposedly more user oriented Linux, the users as you pointed out have said loud and clear "We don't want this!" only to be told they were idiots, have their voices silenced with secret votes, users banned, and threads erased, and the heads of the major distros saying loud and clear "We don't give a single fuck what you want, you can take it or leave". And wadda ya know, many are doing just that and leaving. There are many tutorials on how to migrate to BSD popping up all over the place and some have even said they are taking my advice and running Windows 10.
IMHO the mess with systemd just proves what I've been saying for years, that Linux is a server OS controlled by corporate interests. If you are not running a fortune 500 datacenter? Your voice is worthless and ignored by the PTB. At least with Windows we can use the power of the wallet to change the direction, it looks like nothing the users say or do will keep them from getting system'd right up the butt.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday November 21 2014, @08:59PM
They did what everyone wanted: nuke that atrocity of a start screen, and make metro apps run in a damn window with a full screen option. 99% of the problems were solved right there.
There were no AMD APU's made in 2009. The Bobcat series did not debut until 2011. Hell the Core i7 was still very new in 2009. Perhaps you were speaking of the first Bobcat APU's? That was 2011. A netbook most likely has a cheap, SLOOOOOW 5400RPM disk and low memory, maybe 2GB.
I had Windows Vista running satisfactorily on an AMD x2 w/2GB RAM as long as you turned off all of the stupid fucking services that ground the hard disk on a near constant basis (system restore, RAC, ReadyBoost, Superfetch, Windows Search, and Windows Defender.) Windows 7 fixed those services and they no longer trashed your system. 7 runs fine without tweaks on an old P4 with 2GB RAM and can run office apps and a few others without much effort. Using a fast disk with more RAM can make an old PC feel like a new one. Vista damaged their reputation not because of a bad underlying architecture but because of shit services that ate up I/O and CPU for no reason.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday November 22 2014, @01:14AM
My bad, got the presentation and the release date mixed up, it was presented in 2009 and released in jan 2011. I grabbed one of the first units, the 1215B [asus.com] which is still fucking great to this day. I slapped in 8GB of RAM and it makes a hell of a mini workstation, even does 1080P over HDMI for those times I have a support call with a customer that has lousy eyesight. they really need to bring back the netbooks, when they were sub $300 I couldn't keep 'em in stock, I ended up having to buy up refurbs as the stocks ran out.
And I'm sorry but I ran 8.1 and it was STILL deep fried ass, as Metro crap was still too tightly ingrained. As I ran it it was like playing pop goes the weasel, you never knew when something Metro'd would be slammed in your face. With Windows 10 all that crap is gone, the only Metro is a few live tiles on the task panel and a simplified control panel that you have the OPTION of using as a quick shortcut to most common control panel uses, kinda like "sort by category" on Win 7. I can't wait until its released, if the rumors are true and its free or less than $30 a pop I'l be grabbing copies left and right.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:22PM
10 looks to be the ticket. I believe it still has Metro as the weather and news apps looks and acts like a metro apps but in a window. And lets be honest, its not like they couldn't window metro apps, they just wanted to play the "me too" game and force them full screen to act like they knew about mobile.
The price is 30 bucks or less? Shit, i'm all over that. I spent $300 on Win 7 Ultimate and spent $130 on numerous copies of OEM Win 7 pro at work. Now that 7 is ending mainstream and going into extended support, OEM and retail versions will be hard to find. I only hope 10 comes out sooner rather than later. I wont touch 8, even my manager refuses to let 8 in the building. The only experience I had with it was testing in a VM and deleting it the same day.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Sunday November 23 2014, @12:52PM
You didn't hear? here is the scuttlebutt straight from the mouth of Mary Jo Foley who usually has the inside track at Redmond.
According to her the IMHO frankly awesome new CEO Nadella is tired of the XP holdouts and is fearful that 7 will become another XP so he wants to nip that shit in the bud. Since so few of their sales are from upgrades he is debating either making Win 10 free for everybody or making it free for everybody who bought Win 8/8.1 as an apology and making it a flat $30 for the Home version for everybody else. If the rumor is true you'll be able to upgrade at any time to a higher tier if you need to OR, get ready for this, you'll be able to just buy any of the higher features ala carte. So if you just want bitlocker or domain support? Just buy it! Its not as solid as the pricing rumor but there is talk the higher tiers will likely see deep cuts as well, with pro being $75 and Ultimate $100 but there is serious talk of just getting rid of Ultimate and just having Home and Pro.
And I'm running the latest on my netbook and while they do have a few of the simplified Metro apps like the Music and News apps along with the Windows Store again it appears its all gonna be OPTIONAL so you can just run what you want which frankly is what pissed everybody off about Win 8, lack of options. You can even switch to Metro if you want which IMHO is fucking awesome as the Metro UI is great for HTPCs as a 10 foot UI so with Win 10 we can have the Win 7 UI for work and play and Metro for HTPCs, best of both worlds.
But Foley is usually right on the money and if it turns out to be free or just $30? I'll be all over that shit. I'll probably keep 1 system on Win 7 simply for Windows DVD Maker, I have yet to find anything that makes nice DVDs simpler than DVD Maker and on my home system I'll probably make it a dual boot for a year like I did with XP and 7 before I nuke 7, just in case I find an old program that don't like Win 10. And the rumor is it goes RTM summer 2015 so that the OEMs can have it for the big back to school rush so we should be able to just glide from 7 to 10 without any worries. I know it let me keep ALL my programs I had installed under 7, and I do mean all, even the drivers and lower level stuff like codecs were switched over to Win 10 without me having to do jack shit! That's right, you happy with the programs you have installed on Win 7? You can KEEP EM ALL, they will be right there in all programs after you upgrade! Honestly I have NEVER in all my years seen a more easy upgrade, it was less than 40 minutes from sticking in the flash to surfing the web in Windows 10, fucking awesome.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Friday November 21 2014, @07:24PM
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
-- Steve Jobs
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday November 21 2014, @07:38PM
I never said systemd WILL improve the desktop. My point was a majority of the responders to this so-called poll appeared to be desktop users. And supposedly systemd will make desktops better. How? I dont know. And I don't know because systemd doesn't appear to fix anything. It only breaks POSIX which is what Unix is and what Poettering apparently knows nothing about.
And I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I bet there are plenty of clueless Linux desktop users out there. The other day I was reading about speeding up the boot time of the raspberry pi. Everyone kept spouting the same nonsense: "Use Arch instead of Debian cus it has systemd which makes it boot faster!". Then you had me too posts about how systemd made their pi boot twice as fast. Meanwhile they completely ignored the whole bit about how both distros are completely different and have different init loads to handle. I mean seriously, there are some dumb people out there.
And those are the kinds of people who will vote in favor of systemd, people who think they know shit but don't know shit.