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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: 0, Troll) by Lagg on Friday November 21 2014, @12:37AM
Even if the poll was perfect it wouldn't matter. It'd likely just get attacked for being impartial or whatever. Maybe even rightly so. If not then it'd be intellectually bankrupt comments like below saying "if systemd was good a poll wouldn't be needed". Because yeah that's how project polls work. This is what happens when you turn what should be technical discourse and merit into politics. That said I'm not too surprised that approximately half of a given community likes something and the other about-half doesn't.
The real educational value here are the comments about it like in this very thread. It shows how disgustingly low people will stoop. I just saw one hell of a passive-aggressive comment saying that essentially the only people who can like systemd are admins that don't care how things work.
First off, fuck you in general. Secondly, such comments fail to realize that sysvinit is a clunky piece of crap that was 90% shell script boilerplate while the other 10% of implementation was never touched. If anything what I'm seeing are people who do know how things work preferring systemd. I've looked at its code and they do some really irritating things in it like variable length arrays in structs and other things they should really know better about. There are also some design issues. But it's actually being fixed. How about you look at the code of bash and init(1) itself and tell me how it looks there since I'm clearly just an admin who doesn't care how things work because I think systemd has potential.
Then there are of course the comments (again, like below) that totally fail to realize that systemd is not one huge daemon. Probably because they never bothered to so much as look at the project dir layout (not that it stops them from calling people technically ignorant, of course). It's a project name encompassing multiple ones with systemd-the-initd at the center. The comments making this assumption sound as stupid as someone saying that Kwin is bad and uses an ebil binary file format because Kate writes a sqlite file (not that it does, this is just off the top of my head) while at the same time calling Kwin "KDE".
Or my personal favorite: The comments implying that people who are partial to systemd are young idiots that love overabstraction. I don't even need to explain how stupid the age argument is particularly when the very same people that do that haven't the slightest clue what traditional unix actually is. The unix philosophy we think of is better attributed to what plan9 tried to do stressing an importance of solid IPC with good process management. Guess what systemd does? Actual unix was a piece of shit and originally not even written in C. If you want to see what the traditional unix looked like, read the unix hater's handbook and then hit yourself in the face with it until you learn to argue like someone with balls.
Considering that it's really easy to see why sysvinit came out of it. Yet apparently people think this is the gold standard which all inits must be held to. Quite the laugh.
This also brings me to the next point. It's just another stupid social argument for people to fall into. Just like I did just now. That's why this stuff doesn't really matter.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Insightful) by E_NOENT on Friday November 21 2014, @12:58AM
Nice rant. You make some good points.
However, the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.
I, for one, no longer really give a crap about systemd, or Linux in general. Eventually the debate will die down as people either move on, or get over it.
I think the people complaining about systemd/redhate/gnome/pulseaudio/xinet/selinux/apparmor/whatever are finally realizing it's time to move on, but are working through their rage issues by complaining.
So, I say, let 'em gripe for now. It's part of the grieving process.
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by emg on Friday November 21 2014, @01:28AM
I think most people who know anything about it would agree that SysV init is a horrible kludge.
We just want to see it replaced with something that's clearly better, rather than a worse kludge. Systemd seems to add a lot of complexity, embrace and extend a lot of basic OS functionality, for little benefit.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday November 21 2014, @01:42AM
The maintainers are indeed adding complexity where it doesn't need to be but they're also removing a lot of it with the other daemons. For example networkd and timedated is much less of a pain in the ass both usage and code wise than dhcpcd and ntpd. Seriously, check out the code and compare. Despite the maintainers being asshats about good practice sometimes the simplicity difference is quite refreshing. I think if these were not under the systemd project umbrella and were their own thing people would be loving it.
But yeah I am getting very sick of always seeing "hai we added this big batch of features and will do cleanups later" but I think that can be helped by people stopping acting like braindamaged children and actually trying to communicate productively with maintainers /or send patches. I've also advocated booting the current maintainers. Even though I don't blame them for giving up trying to listen to people given the stupidity observed even at places like soylent I do blame them for being entitled pissants. Even though I have my own issues with Lennart the other maintainers I downright loathe. Particularly the one who had the gigantic brass balls to tell Linus that the kernel command line "belonged to them".
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by NotSanguine on Friday November 21 2014, @03:19AM
I think most people who know anything about it would agree that SysV init is a horrible kludge.
As an admin who, over the last 25 years or so, tracked through BSD Init, SysV init and now onto systemd, I was extremely annoyed when I was forced to learn SysV init and find moving to systemd to be almost as annoying.
Back in the days of proprietary Unix, we had no choice as to the init environment or the management tools (smitty was pretty annoying, and don't get me started on sam). You took what they gave you and loved it.
These days, there are a plethora of choices and, while I understand the hate on systemd (especially the lack of a mechanism to choose between SysV init and systemd), for better or worse the folks who develop and maintain the various Linux distributions made a conscious choice to move ahead with systemd as the only path.
We don't have to like it, nor do we have to use it. As many have mentioned, several flavors of BSD are available without systemd or even the SysV init.
What is more, nothing is stopping anyone (which is completely different from the bad old days) from creating their own Linux distribution which uses whatever init system they choose.
I absolutely agree that those who don't want systemd should shout from the rooftops ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" anyone?) as they have been doing. If that (as it has been and things don't look good) is unsuccessful, perhaps it's time to move on.
I'm not a big fan of systemd, nor am I very fond of SysV init. I may decide to move to a BSD variant or I may decide to just eat it and stick with my preferred Linux distribution. As I have neither the time nor inclination to fork my own Linux distribution, I can (as it was in the old days) take what they give me and love it, or move to another platform.
Getting all butthurt about design decisions when you aren't even involved in the development of the platform is pretty dumb if you ask me. To those who really want to use Linux and don't want systemd, you have the tools and the access to do something about it. The rest is just bellyaching and hand-waving, IMHO.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by emg on Friday November 21 2014, @05:05AM
Yeah, because everyone has the time and ability to create their own distro.
And, of course, when a significant number of people who use a distro do decide to fork it, the people who were telling them 'if you don't like it, make your own distro' start whining about them being 'splitters'. And the trolls come along shouting that Linux is far too fragmented to ever compete with other operating systems.
(Score: 1) by NotSanguine on Friday November 21 2014, @08:04AM
Yeah, because everyone has the time and ability to create their own distro.
I don't have the time either. Which I said. But I'm not going to throw a tantrum (not saying you are, but with some of these folks that seems to be the best description).
And, of course, when a significant number of people who use a distro do decide to fork it, the people who were telling them 'if you don't like it, make your own distro' start whining about them being 'splitters'.
Which is why I don't pay those folks any mind. Forking is one of the best parts of FOSS. These are tools, not religions.
Except emacs. Everyone should use emacs. :)
And the trolls come along shouting that Linux is far too fragmented to ever compete with other operating systems.
That was never the problem with Linux anyway. It gained acceptance because FSF couldn't get the HURD going quickly enough. If they had, Linus' creation would have probably ended up like Minix and that would have been that. And it found its niche just as HTTP and commercialization of the Internet were taking hold.
It wasn't simple enough for the average end-user, and MS used its market dominance to keep it off of the major manufacturers' builds (with their pay for every machine you sell OEM licensing), so it never took off as a desktop.
And now there are distros that could be decent desktops, but that won't happen on a large scale for some time, if ever.
Which means the trolls are talking out of their asses and it smells that way too. Why pay attention to them either?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday November 21 2014, @06:06AM
Not worth getting into most of what you said, but a few things stood out and I wanted to comment:
How about you look at the code of bash and init(1) itself and tell me how it looks there since I'm clearly just an admin who doesn't care how things work because I think systemd has potential.
Does anybody actually use bash for init scripts? Debian and its derivatives use dash, which is much smaller than bash, fewer features but safer. I would hope other distros do something similar. Given that dash is 110K and sysv's init is 39K, there's a lot less there to break than in systemd, whose main binary (the one that I believe is the init) alone is over 1MB.
Now, I'm not saying that "well it's got more code so it must suck", but I think it's premature to be pushing everyone to it as an init when it's fairly new, has a lot more code to it, and is just generally less tested.
The comments making this assumption sound as stupid as someone saying that Kwin is bad and uses an ebil binary file format because Kate writes a sqlite file (not that it does, this is just off the top of my head) while at the same time calling Kwin "KDE".
That comparison is only valid if you can run the individual parts of systemd separately without kludges like Debian's systemd-shim. Yeah, it's in a bunch of individual parts, but they aren't intended to be used individually. That's like claiming a jigsaw puzzle isn't a single picture broken into a thousand pieces, it's really a thousand separate pictures. That's only true if the individual parts are useful without the rest.
Considering that it's really easy to see why sysvinit came out of it. Yet apparently people think this is the gold standard which all inits must be held to. Quite the laugh.
I haven't seen many (any?) people arguing that sysvinit is awesome. The argument is generally that it's either simpler and easier to grok, or that it's well-tested in a way that systemd currently isn't, or that it's interchangeable in a way that systemd isn't.
What I mean by interchangeable: I never had to keep a sysv-shim process running just to make dbus or hal happy before. I could change syslog daemons at will and not have to do anything special. For example, I was using a deprecated syslogd instead of Debian's rsyslog for years because I never noticed they changed the default out and init didn't care. I didn't get forced into it, and I could switch out inits the same way. None of that affected me being able to use power management or removable storage, either.
Then systemd shows up and suddenly your syslog and init have to be blessed by Poettering or you can't use power management, removable storage, and some other desktop feature stuff that's worked for years regardless of your init. Is it really a surprise that some people don't consider that an improvement?
The only reason you can use a non-systemd init right now in Debian without being punished for it is because some devs (Ubuntu or Debian, not sure which) made systemd-shim, which is faking what systemd components expects so that you can run the init (and thus syslog) of your choice without the higher-level parts knowing. That shouldn't have been a kludge, it should have been standard behaviour. If that had been the case from the start, there would have been a lot less outcry.
You see, I don't have any particular issues with some of the parts of systemd. I have the logind part of it running (thanks to the systemd-shim package) without having to change my init, and so far I've had no real issues with it. It's just another chunk of userspace crap, akin to having hal or dbus going, and I'm indifferent. If I hadn't had to jump through multiple hoops to get it installed with the shim instead of changing my init abruptly, I wouldn't even have cared about its addition, it would just be another oddball piece of desktop crap that got added in an update.
Likewise, I didn't care about the init side, until updating desktop software started quietly attempting to replace sysv with systemd. The default behaviour for existing sysv users should have been to set up the shim instead. Having more init systems isn't bad, and it could have gradually been brought into mainstream use by making it an installation option or something. I think if it had gone that way, a lot of us wouldn't have minded. It's harder to be pragmatic about something like this when it's shoved in your face and you're told "TOO BAD, GET USED TO IT, IT'S THE FUTURE"
Doesn't matter how awesome it may theoretically be, people are going to be pissed about that, especially the ones that want to approach huge system changes cautiously. And you know what? That's the kind of user that Debian generally appeals to, so this complete change of behaviour and relatively quick adoption of systemd was like poking a hornet's nest with a stick, except the nest was filled with grumpy admins.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Friday November 21 2014, @11:59PM
Hehe. I see the ones who modded the original post are doing wonders for convincing people I'm wrong about this being twisted into an emotional and political issue. Why discuss technically when you can bury what you don't agree with I suppose. Good job guys.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday November 22 2014, @09:05AM
Hehe. I see the ones who modded the original post are doing wonders for convincing people I'm wrong about this being twisted into an emotional and political issue. Why discuss technically when you can bury what you don't agree with I suppose. Good job guys.
Dude, what did you expect? You started with "people are just going to attack the poll", followed it with calling commenters "intellectually bankrupt", and then topped it off with a "fuck you".
Just because I, along with a few others, chose to overlook the tone and bad attitude and responded to other parts of your post doesn't mean the people that downmodded you for it were wrong. You can be 100% correct and still earn a flamebait or troll mod by being a dick about it. You earned that moderation, regardless of any good points made, because of how you opened fire right from the start.
(Though I think it should have been flamebait instead of trolling, but that distinction tends to be lost on people)
You see, you make good comments sometimes, but I've noticed before that you're also pretty abrasive with some of your posts, and that's going to get downmods. That doesn't mean you're wrong about something, or that people are trying to bury you for disagreeing. It's just as likely that you came across like a jerk, got downmodded for it, and not enough people came by and modded you back up on the merit of the rest of your post.
If I hadn't commented before you posted, I probably would have downmodded you too, because it read like an angry flamebait rant. I almost ignored it and didn't comment, but you seemed sincere so I decided to go for rational discussion instead and wrote a reply about parts of the rant.
TL;DR: don't let the downmods bug you, it's probably over your tone rather than an attempt to bury dissent.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Saturday November 22 2014, @01:58PM
True I do have a tendency to be an asshole about things but I'm just sick and tired of the passive aggressive political nonsense. They deserved both the observation of it being intellectually bankrupt and they deserved to be told to fuck off. Because it's childish shit flinging. It gets old, it got old quickly and it gets really old seeing it clustered together in one place.
and let's be honest. If I were to use that exact same tone but in a way that was critical of Lennart or the other maintainers I'd get a +5 interesting. It was modded troll because I don't take sides and tell both parties that they're being stupid. The downmods in themselves don't bother me, but that they do this and yet still have the sizable brass balls to call other people ignorant, groupthinkers or cultists does.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:12AM
Thank you for making sense...