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from the or-at-least-not-be-bothered-either-way dept.
[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: 2) by turgid on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:06PM
Which "community" would that be? Does it affect Slackware?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:29PM
Does it affect Slackware?
Not yet... It will. As slackware does pull from the other packages out there to feed its own ecosystem.
I personally am on the fence. I see the merits of both sides. I also see that the current init system could use some good improvements. More commonality sure would not hurt it any. It seems like we keep reinventing things. For something as 'mundane' as the init system we are spending a lot of time bickering about it. Most of my work is WELL after the system has come up. I can also see why chucking out 20 years of scripts could be a bad idea. Those scripts are battle hardened by years of use and are dead simple to fiddle with.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:57PM
Slackware has other problems, many of which are more severe than even the problems that systemd brings.
The first is that it's basically in a comatose state. It's not totally dead, but it's hardly vibrant, either. It's a stagnant distro, with a stagnant community. It's not that it has taken a stance against systemd, it's just that it hasn't even gotten out of the 1990s yet. Systemd is a good 15 years in the future, relative to where Slackware is today.
The second is that it's a royal pain in the ass to use. Again, this is because it's a fossil. Slackware trades off convenience, without getting anything in return. Debian, before it was ruined by systemd, was convenient to use and just as powerful as Slackware. The convenience actually made Debian more powerful than Slackware for a lot of people.
There are others, but I don't want to spend all day on this.
Slackware isn't a solution to the problem of Debian being infected with systemd. FreeBSD is. FreeBSD is basically Debian done right. It has a better kernel, better userland, better licensing, better developers, a better community, and yet it's still modern and usable.
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Thursday November 20 2014, @11:11PM
I started using Slackware in the 1990s. (I probably still have a few infomagic CD sets somewhere.)
I still use Slackware today, and it looks nothing like the first versions I used. It is a modern linux system with up to date packages.
The only thing it has left from the 1990s is its sanity.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday November 21 2014, @12:19AM
I have only 2 itty bitty minor problems with FreeBSD, only one of which will affect my adoption:
1. There's no updated version of Java. I actually quite like Java. To me it's how others view Python: in Java it's easy to bang out an algorithm and get things rolling. The only problem is that I also really like Eclipse and Netbeans (and I kinda have to have Java for work). Also, before someone chimes in with "you can compile it". No I can't, which leads me into #2.
2. It defaults to llvm as the C compiler. On my CPUs (all of which are AMD), GCC can curb-stomp llvm and then have a little bit of energy left to do 20,000 jumping jacks while llvm is still figuring out what's going on. Needless to say, I like GCC. I'm used to it, and it does everything I want it to. It's a shame that the version of GCC that can be installed on FreeBSD is from sometime in the last geological age.
Aside from this, FreeBSD has been awesome. I'm going to try out PC-BSD soon because it looks like the the BSD Ubuntu, but better (or at least, how Ubuntu used to be).
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Friday November 21 2014, @12:39AM
openjdk-7.71.14,1 not "updated" enough for you? How about openjdk8-8.25.17_1? Either one is only a "pkg install" away.
Really? We're talking about gcc-4.8.3_2 here. There's also gcc49-4.9.3.s20141105. Again, either one, and quite a few others, are a "pkg install" away. And they can coexist with clang and with each other.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday November 21 2014, @01:01AM
I just flipping tried this a month ago! It was probably a config problem on my part, I'll try again soon.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Friday November 21 2014, @03:32AM
is there a freebsd for the raspi or beaglebone? (I'm curious).
my raspi got horribly borked today when I updated it and systemd broke my boot. I'm not happy about that.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by tempest on Friday November 21 2014, @06:08PM
Raspberri Pi support was added in 10x, but still has some work to be done from what I understand. I haven't heard much about beaglebone support, but the arm relelease branch suggests it is: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/10.1/ [freebsd.org]
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Friday November 21 2014, @02:36PM
As a long-time Slackware user, I must take exception to this. The Slackware community is by no means dead or dying. There's a vibrant user help forum at LinuxQuestions.org, where you can find, among more useful things, multiple flamewars about SystemD. The packages are generally quite recent, though the distribution follows a consciously conservative update policy, which might be mistaken for "stagnation". For instance, right now it uses GCC 4.8.3 instead of 4.9.2, and it hasn't switched to Python 3 yet (but it is tracking the Python 2.7 bugfixes).
There is a package auto-updater included, although it's completely optional and, unlike apt-get or rpm, won't force dependency updates on you. There are also 2 or 3 unofficial ones, including slapt-get, which is what I use. And just in the past 2 months or so I came across, through Google, no less than THREE new unofficial Slackware package repositories that seem to have basically come out of nowhere:
http://sotirov-bg.net/slackpack/ [sotirov-bg.net]
http://slackonly.com [slackonly.com]
http://ponce.cc/slackware/ [ponce.cc]
I have no idea where all these repos are coming from all of a sudden. Maybe they're a front for the NSA ;) This is in addition to slacky.eu and slackware.schoepfer.info, which have been around for a while. And then there's slackbuilds.org which is a "run these scripts and make a custom Slackware package just for you" site rather than an actual repository, but still.
As another indication of vibrancy, we've got derivatives: Arch Linux and VectorLinux are the most popular, but there are others. So yeah. Slackware's doing fine.
As far as Slackware switching to SystemD? I don't see it happening, personally, and certainly not in a way where you can't disable it if you want. Slackware's known for customizability, mostly by not being so obtuse that you can't figure out how to dig into the internals and tweak stuff if you have to.
Re SystemD: I really don't think an apocalypse is coming where you can't run any software without needing SystemD as your init. Many people -- including in the Slackware community -- fear this happening, but, well, almost all "Linux" software also runs on the BSDs, and MacOS, and Cygwin. None of those except Linux even have SystemD as an option for their init. It's traditional in the Linux community for software to be portable, across archs, OSes, and system configs. I don't see that changing.
PS this is random, but I just now discovered that pkgsrc -- NetBSD's "ports" repo -- supposedly works on any Linux distro, as well as Cygwin etc. I've never used it, ever, but it looks cool.