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posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the better-together dept.

Debian Jesse is going to have Gnome3 as the default desktop.

The desktop re-qualification page, used to help choose which desktop will be default, has in the Jesse version a weight for systemd integration, and of course only Gnome3 does it (at least for now). This will surely make the systemd/gnome3 fanbase happy, but possibly will make others unhappy, as it [may] be seen as another step towards mono-culture, until we soon end up with all distros being redhat clones.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:25AM

    by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:25AM (#97510)

    Looks like I'll be sticking with my Debian 7 install till they shut down the repositories, then move onto something else that doesn't have systemd.

    I hear Slackware is staying away from systemd.

    Oh well.

    --
    "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +4  
       Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=4
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @07:31AM (#97525)

    dude, just select xfce from the install menu. its not rocket science

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:39AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:39AM (#97554)

      Reading comprehension fail, my young rocket scientist: The grandparent isn't primarily concerned with the desktop environment but with systemd...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @12:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @12:05PM (#97608)

        I fear that Debian is going the way of Firefox. It has been one stupid decision after another from them. If they do go forward with this systemd and GNOME 3 stupidity, then they will drive away their most important users.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:09PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:09PM (#97662)

          which users are their most important users?

          the ones that bitch and complain the loudest, or the ones that know how to use apt?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @01:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @01:33PM (#97643)

        sudo apt-get remove systemd

        it aint rocket science

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by Blackmoore on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:30PM

          by Blackmoore (57) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:30PM (#97712) Journal

          Well why dont you try that and get back to the class with what happened.

          • (Score: 4, Informative) by joshuajon on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:19PM

            by joshuajon (807) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:19PM (#97784)

            I just did out of curiosity, doesn't work. And a bunch of stuff ended up missing from /sbin/ in the process including reboot, shutdown. When I reset the VM it now fails to boot with "Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init"

            • (Score: 4, Informative) by joshuajon on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:45PM

              by joshuajon (807) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:45PM (#97791)

              apt-get install systemd
              apt-get install systemd-sysv
              reboot

              now running systemd

              apt-get remove systemd-sysv
              apt-get install sysvinit
              reboot

              now running sysvinit

              apt-get remove systemd now works.

              • (Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:06PM

                by Blackmoore (57) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:06PM (#97802) Journal

                that's a magnitude less than optimal.

                well, I guess I stick with Mint for now. but keep an eye open for a new option that skips systemd.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @10:17PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @10:17PM (#97943)

                i guess if you remove an init system its kinda implicit that you install another

                hopefully in the final release they'll make the install of sysvinit automatic when removing systemd (same as the old gdm3 to gdm and many others)

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @09:56AM (#97557)
    I'll stick to Windows for desktop purposes and wait for the Desktop Linux bunch to stop sabotaging Desktop Linux (at least server linux still works). Might be unfair to call it sabotage but look at the market share which Android and OSX have got and the speed in which they got it. And Chromebooks too. And then look at the weird stuff the Desktop Linux bunch do every now and then, especially when the times were ripe for more switches (Vista, Windows 8).

    Yes in theory you can fork entire distros if you don't like them... But I don't need to. They can keep their GNOME or KDE till Microsoft goes completely insane.

    I was a bit concerned there wouldn't be any viable desktop path when the abomination called Windows 8 came out. But it looks like Microsoft will backpedal a bit with Windows 9. So they haven't gone completely insane yet.
    • (Score: 2) by efitton on Wednesday September 24 2014, @01:41PM

      by efitton (1077) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @01:41PM (#97649) Homepage

      Microsoft cares about money. Windows 8 was an attempt to leverage their desktop into the phone market. It failed and is starting to cost them business. Hence the backtrack with Windows 9. GNOME cares about, actually I have no idea. It certainly isn't having a user base. The shiny from Day and McCann? Beats me, but logic is getting no where and the funding is irrelevant and having users is irrelevant so away they go. At some point KDE or Cinnamon or MATE will clearly be ahead but it is amazing how the GNOME minority flexes its muscles to get their way with being the default in so many distributions.

      That doesn't address KDE and their "semantic desktop" or what will happen with the cluster that is gtk+ but... Winning? Year of Linux on the Desktop? Think I'll go cry myself to sleep now.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:26PM (#97710)
        Yeah I was going to say something similar about GNOME too (e.g. they don't seem to care), but since I haven't been using GNOME it would be more of hearsay coming from me.

        There might be hope for KDE yet - if they really hold to the "simple by default, powerful when needed" philosophy.

        Good defaults are important because >90% of them would be what 90% of the users would be using. This makes tech support easier, adoption by corporations easier. If you pick crappy defaults and practically everyone has them changed then most installs would end up being their own unique snowflake and that makes support harder. Powerful when needed (without resorting to conf file editing) is great too especially if discoverable - since that also makes support easier.

        But for some reason many (most?) of the major distros seem to prefer GNOME. I have no idea why.

        In contrast with the Windows Metro UI, discoverability dropped a LOT. Even merely logging out is harder than it was before and harder than it should be.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:22AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:22AM (#97579)

    Mass migration to FreeBSD?

    I have some freebsd experimental tests scheduled this weekend, going to be interesting.

    20 years ago this month I was downloading SLS linux floppy disk images from a local BBS and trying this new linux thing I had heard about on usenet.

    I'd follow a Debian schism if one happens. I want an OS with a window manager/DE (personally I use xmonad). Not a desktop environment with an attached init system that vaguely connects to an OS. Whatever happened to the "universal OS"? I guess its *BSD now.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @12:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @12:04PM (#97607)

      debian-women happened.
      They kicked anyone that wouldn't toe the line (Ted Walther etc) out of Debian.

      • (Score: 2) by metamonkey on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:02PM

        by metamonkey (3174) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:02PM (#97693)

        What is debian-women?

        --
        Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.
      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:35PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:35PM (#97717)

        I miss krooger. As a blast from the past here's his DPL platform from '06

        https://www.debian.org/vote/2006/platforms/krooger [debian.org]

        Troup's statue and Suffield's announcement post. Krooger's general resolution proposal. Those were funny times, yet in their own way insightful times.

        I remember when I got Suffield's announcement and I nearly wet myself laughing, yet it was so desperately necessary that it be sent.

        Its shocking really how nothing has really changed, post-SJW invasion. Political correctness and complete lack of humor hasn't really fixed anything at all, despite the endless promises and bitter infighting.

        "I am in Debian to change the world for the better, and have fun while doing it." - I miss having that guy in the project. There is wisdom in keeping a court jester around. Sometimes someone has to speak the truth. The corporate invader types hate it which is reason alone to support it.

        He wouldn't have made a good DPL, but he was NEEDED in the project none the less.

        And group of humans doing anything stagnates and dies eventually although a formal or informal court jester can keep it alive longer, maybe indefinitely. I don't think the corporate SJW invaders from the last decade or so see it that way, or maybe they're EEE-ing the project on purpose, hard to say... Malice and incompetence can be hard to tell apart.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:52PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:52PM (#97794)

          Maybe he can be pivotal in a debian fork. Got a way to get in touch with him. Now is the time. Last time I saw him he was at rootsoffaith.org .... Here http://www.rootsoffaith.net/profile/TedWalther [rootsoffaith.net]

    • (Score: 2) by drussell on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:02PM

      by drussell (2678) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:02PM (#97694) Journal

      Mass migration to FreeBSD?

      I have some freebsd experimental tests scheduled this weekend, going to be interesting.

      20 years ago this month I was downloading SLS linux floppy disk images from a local BBS and trying this new linux thing I had heard about on usenet.

      Hmm, now that I think about it, it was about that time that I first FTP'd into wcarchive.cdrom.com and saw the login readme which said something to the effect:

      "Welcome to Walnut Creek CD-ROM's FTP Server... The hardware is [blah blah] and the operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy it is available in pub/FreeBSD..."

      The realization that there was a UNIX that ran on i386 hardware was a shocker and I was downloading the files to make install floppies for FreeBSD version 1 within minutes! :) IIRC, it was about version 1.1.5 when I first set up a dedicated FreeBSD server box and I wan 1.1.7.x on a couple machines for YEARS before upgrading to version 2.x as things progressed. I remember trying to put the only 387 I had (a 16 MHz chip) onto a 386/40 board but couldn't clock it above 20 MHz, IIRC or the math came out all wrong, so I put on my coat and went off to the wholesaler and bought my first
      personal 486 board and chip... :) That machine ran it's entire life (was about 10 years continuous!) without crashing due to software. The only times it was ever powered off were two or three kernel change reboots with an air dusting/cleaning of the chassis innards and hard disk additions, one power failure due to the charger in the UPS blowing up and the UPS shutting off in protection mode and one time where I didn't want to ruin my 700+ day uptime so I tried yanking out an ISA SCSI controller with the power on (it had 2 SCSI controllers in it at the time, one VLB Adaptec and an ISA originally basically just for the tape drive) needed the unused ISA one which crashed it. (I had synced the disks first, luckily, LOL)

      Now I've got Sgt. Pepper "It was 20 years ago today!" running through my head! :)

      Not one software-bug induced crash in over 10 years of service before retiring the ol' 486, typically 300-500+ days of uptime between reboots, FFS... Try THAT on a Microsoft box of that era! HA! :)

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:49PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:49PM (#97728)

        From memory around that time, wasn't there some peculiar restriction like linux worked with common PATA IDE hard drives but *BSD only had drivers for like three models of SCSI card so it was SCSI or nothin' with the BSDs? (And SCSI hardware cost about twice as much as IDE, although it was probably 10x as fast?) It was definitely a hardware reason like that, which kept me away from BSDs. Maybe it was graphics like my 256K VGA card worked in text mode but the BSDs only spoke to EGA cards or something. It was definitely something hardware related that kept me away from the BSDs.

        Do you remember the holy wars of IDE vs SCSI which as usual the technologically superior system lost? I remember old IDE interfaces masking interrupts for like a second per access. And you could tell at the command line just by how responsive the system was / low interrupt latency if you were on a IDE or SCSI box.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:14PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:14PM (#97964)

          Uhhhh, no, that was never the case.

        • (Score: 2) by drussell on Thursday September 25 2014, @02:52PM

          by drussell (2678) on Thursday September 25 2014, @02:52PM (#98259) Journal

          From memory around that time, wasn't there some peculiar restriction like linux worked with common PATA IDE hard drives but *BSD only had drivers for like three models of SCSI card so it was SCSI or nothin' with the BSDs?

          No, the AC is right. There was never a problem with MFM/RLL or IDE disks. The 'wd' driver handled both MFM/RLL and IDE. The 'ata' driver was introduced years later and dropped support for MFM/RLL but IDE always worked. I actually still have 2 machines here that I'm about to finally pull out of service (currently just doing DNS, internal mail and some logging and somesuch) to replace with less power-hungry hardware (these have been in service since 1999, so 15 years isn't bad :) ) that are using the 'wd' driver still on patched-up, cobbled-together FreeBSD 2.x...

          My first installation was to a 40 meg MFM hard drive, then I used IDEs mostly and a few SCSI. The SCSI was in there initially for a tape drive before I started amassing SCSI disks.

          I remember old IDE interfaces masking interrupts for like a second per access. And you could tell at the command line just by how responsive the system was / low interrupt latency if you were on a IDE or SCSI box.

          SCSI is definitely a beter system for many reasons, and certainly was MUCH better at the time but was much more expensive so for many applications was cost prohibitive. I had to use mainly IDE drives for many years due to cost. Now I still have boxes and boxes of things like factory refurb Seagate 7200 RPM barracudas and a bunch of Fujitsu 7200 and 10k RPM drives. I'll probably never use them all, they just last too darn long! :)

          I still use 9.1GB Seagates as boot disks for most of my servers. Ultra robust and I think I still have at least 3 unopened 10-packs and at least another 50 lying around already. :) I also have a whole stack of 2/3 GB Elites. (the 5.25" Seagates). Huge, noisy and suck a TON of power so, of course, I haven't used them for anything for years but they are a great lark to fire up an array of 5.25"ers for someone who's never seen them before! LOL

          Of course, I also still have a working 8 Meg, 8" Shugart MFM in my Wang 2200LVP, and a couple of 14" hard disks, a 10 Meg and an 80 Meg... Most people have never seen a 14" hard drive before! (and, they weigh like 250 lbs) Great conversation piece :)

          My 80 Meg CDC Phoenix was built (completed) Dec 31, 1980... I'm sure it took more than one day to build those suckers! :)
          http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/cdc/discs/brochures/CDC_9448_CMD_Brochure_Jan81.pdf [trailing-edge.com]

      • (Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:12AM

        by EvilJim (2501) on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:12AM (#97995) Journal

        That's pretty sweet, my first 486 sx25 ran my BBS under dos/desqview/RemoteAccess for years with no problems whatsoever, never monitored uptime though, if I had known about linux/BSD in those days I would have been in balls deep. I remember some of the other Sysop's looking at linux, I dialled into one at one stage but just got login/password prompt with no option to request an account so didn't persue it any further as it was unfamiliar territory. I still remember paying $800 for 8mb RAM for my 486 and VGA was the shit! LORD was the untimate in multi-player games. :)

      • (Score: 2) by EvilJim on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:16AM

        by EvilJim (2501) on Thursday September 25 2014, @01:16AM (#97996) Journal

        I also forgot where I was going with that last comment, here it is: I accidentally connected an ISA modem with a machine powered up, flash/bang and the modem was dead, fortunately the MB survived as it was a customers pc. I think those old ISA sockets with the amount of tilt you could get would short the pins, pity, hotswappable components would have been awesome.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by schad on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:46AM

    by schad (2398) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:46AM (#97592)

    Yep, that was my reaction to CentOS 7 as well. "Guess I'll run 6.x until they turn out the lights, and then migrate to... FreeBSD?"

    I'm very frustrated by the current Linux server situation. If you want a server OS -- something that you can use on a couple hundred production servers -- you're pretty much shit out of luck right now. RHEL/CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, SLES... all going, or already gone, systemd. Because those are all supported for a really long time we have a few years left. But just because they're getting patches, that doesn't mean they'll be getting new versions of software. And because so many developers and managers are brainless children obsessed with the latest and "greatest," it's going to be increasingly difficult to make those servers actually work while keeping them in a supported and supportable configuration.

    It's so fucking infuriating. You know, you read the defenses of systemd. The real ones, the ones saying things like: "It's just too clumsy and unreliable to handle hardware connects/disconnects with SysV init." And that's a fair point. I can see why that could be a problem. But servers don't do any of that shit. They are configured at installation time and then not touched. Or, to be more precise, there is considerable process and procedure around how servers may be touched, and when, and who can do it, and so on. For a server, there is no use for systemd. None! It confers absolutely no advantages. Fuck, when we add a LUN to a server at work, we reboot the box even though we don't have to. It'll usually have been up for a couple hundred days by that point, so we take it as an opportunity to install kernel updates and make sure that everything that's supposed to start automatically does. And even on those occasions when we want to plug in some kind of external drive, we don't use USB. We use a NAS and plug it into one of the unused onboard NICs. (In practice, NFS over gigabit ethernet is usually faster and more reliable than direct-attached USB 3.0.)

    Well, the nice thing about OSS is that if there's really a market for a truly server-only OS -- one where GNOME and the like aren't even installable options -- then someone will make it. Or, more precisely, someone probably already has made it, and it will just become more popular.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by CRCulver on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:25PM

    by CRCulver (4390) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:25PM (#97669) Homepage

    Looks like I'll be sticking with my Debian 7 install till they shut down the repositories, then move onto something else that doesn't have systemd.

    While Debian packages systemd now (and thus can return to having GNOME as its default desktop for novice computer users who don't know what desktop to select), it does not require systemd. You can continue to run sysvinit, and Debian offers the package systemd-shim to satisfy dependencies on systemd without actually using it as one's init. No need to get hysterical and jump to another distro.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:24PM (#97708)

      Incorrect. Systemd is needed even for Gimp in debian Jessie.
      It's either systemd or get the fuck out.

      • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:22PM

        by CRCulver (4390) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:22PM (#97812) Homepage
        You are mistaken. Installing the systemd-shim package satisfies the dependencies without running systemd as the init system. You can continue to use sysvinit and run Gimp or whatever.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:17PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @11:17PM (#97966)

          As far as I'm concerned, systemd-shim is just as bad as systemd. They both should be totally unnecessary.

        • (Score: 1) by coolgopher on Thursday September 25 2014, @02:13AM

          by coolgopher (1157) on Thursday September 25 2014, @02:13AM (#98030)

          As of a couple of weeks ago, it's not. At least if you're using something which depends on PolicyKit. The only solution for me was to hold PolicyKit back to a pre-systemd version, and reconfigure it to give all users full access. I hadn't known what PolicyKit was before this, and now that I know I'd really rather not have it installed, but I do use the udisks2 package for convenient mounting of removable disks (via wmvolman), so for now I'm stuck with it. At the rate Debian is going, my next upgrade will be to Slack or Gentoo I suppose.

          • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Thursday September 25 2014, @02:51AM

            by CRCulver (4390) on Thursday September 25 2014, @02:51AM (#98051) Homepage

            You are doing something wrong. Running GIMP even with current Debian unstable does not require running systemd as your init system.

            Perhaps you are confusing the fact that some systemd packages will have to be installed in order to use GNOME apps, but that doesn't oblige the user to run systemd as his/her init system. With the systemd-shim package, you can continue to run sysvinit as your init, and at the same time install a bare minimum of systemd dependencies to run such desktop applications.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25 2014, @05:19AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 25 2014, @05:19AM (#98099)

              Yes it does, this has even been discussed on the mailing list in the last day or so.
              And it is all by design.

            • (Score: 1) by coolgopher on Thursday September 25 2014, @08:07AM

              by coolgopher (1157) on Thursday September 25 2014, @08:07AM (#98131)

              I'm doing something wrong? Well, you know what, perhaps you're right.

              But that doesn't really excuse the mess - rather it reinforces the fact that it is a mess. Never before in my experience has the choice of init system had such a nasty impact on, well, everything else. If systemd truly was a choice in Debian at this point, I wouldn't be bitching about having to hold packages and mess with configuration settings I've never had to muck around with before. Sure, I'm running Jessie, so I shouldn't expect everything to be smooth sailing, but at the end of the day I'm coming away with the feeling that Debian is no longer a good choice of distro for me, as a user and developer.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @06:58PM (#97830)

        Citation, please.

        • (Score: 1) by quixote on Wednesday September 24 2014, @08:44PM

          by quixote (4355) on Wednesday September 24 2014, @08:44PM (#97877)

          Sheesh, man. You're the one posting as AC and you want a citation?

          Tell you what. Start Synaptic (leftmost upper or lower corner main menu button > System > Synaptic), enter password at the prompt, type systemd-shim in the search box, install, close Synaptic, reboot, aaand see what happens. (Precise instructions in case you're really as clueless as you sound.)