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Choose Your Side On the Linux Divide
snydeq writes The battle over systemd exposes a fundamental gap between the old Unix guard and a new guard of Linux developers and admins, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. "Last week I posted about the schism brewing over systemd and the curiously fast adoption of this massive change to many Linux distributions. If there's one thing that systemd does extremely well, it is to spark heated discussions that devolve into wild, teeth-gnashing rants from both sides. Clearly, systemd is a polarizing subject. If nothing else, that very fact should give one pause. Fundamental changes in the structure of most Linux distributions should not be met with such fervent opposition. It indicates that no matter how reasonable a change may seem, if enough established and learned folks disagree with the change, then perhaps it bears further inspection before going to production. Clearly, that hasn't happened with systemd."
Much like pulseaudio, it will probably become quite good when Lennart stops working on it and hands it over to someone else to maintain.
Who really needs systemd?
I've been working with Linux since 1995, where I started with Slackware, moved over to Redhat until it went all "enterprise-y", at which time I moved to Fedora.. Stayed there till a friend turned me on to Ubuntu in 2007, where I stayed pretty much till the recent Unity shitfest over there, where I then moved to Debian.. I cut my teeth on /etc/init.d and a stock standard init() process.. I could do pretty anything I needed to do in troubleshooting/starting/stopping daemons from memory.. Can't remember the last time I consulted a man page regarding anything having to with init() or logging.. Now with this $#@$%%$#@ systemd, I have manpages up ALL the time just to do simple shit that I could do with init() and standard logging in my sleep before systemd. It also seems like this crap is spreading like sewage over pretty much of the standard distros.. Debian/Fedora/CentOS.. The only one I'm somewhat familiar with (haven't used it recently) is Slackware and from what I've heard Patrick and the devs over there feel the same way I do about systemd.... Maybe its time to revisit an old friend.....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
What's broken is that some people would rather change Linux into something else fundamentally, rather than wait for the rest of the world to catch up. The result is going to be the same kind of pain that's happening in the browser arena. There, you have reasonable standards bodies who move "too slowly" for a few, who wish to replace the web with a new version that's obviously even more flawed, all in the name of progress. Sometimes the old guard aren't just holding back progress, but don't tell that to inexperienced youths and bitter old men who want to make a name for themselves.
This is the problem with systemd, Gnome 3 and a lot of other recent stuff.
Unix was originally designed rather like a tinkertoy set. The individual parts might not be very smart, but you could glue them together however you wanted. A "RISC" architecture, if you will.
Recent "improvements" to Linux have attempted to be all-in-one solutions. By making them one-size-fits-all, you lose useful, important, sometimes critical functionality. Because no one system can be all things to all people. It's a "CISC" solution, and what you are left with is what the designed wanted you to have, not what you wanted to have.
So that's the Great Divide. Turn into another Apple, where you can have any solution you want as long as it's the one the providers want to give you or retain the original spirt of the system, and allow it to be powerful at the expense of the presumed masses who'd gladly chuck Windows if only Linux was more friendly to the casual user.
I think, for a lot of people, they don't have the challanges that systemd solves.
Conversely, systemd daily inserts problems that never existed before.
Actually they did. I dealt with binary log formats in Windows, OS/2, and IBM's mainframes. IBM has a really bad habit of creating a different binary format logfile for every app, complete with special binary utilities to be able to read them in any way you like - as long as it's a way IBM supports.
The old text logfiles might not be as tidy, but I constantly string together strange concatenations of the text utilities to garner critical information from them. Something that's nowhere near as easy when the logs are in binary form.
What systemd reminds me of is the Windows Registry. A fine concept that turned out to be a nightmare in practice.
That, I must say, is one of the arguments that turns me off to it. I really could not possibly care less how long it takes any system other than my laptop to boot. My laptop does run a distro with systemd, and I do like that it boots fast....I would not hesistate for a second to give that speed up if I needed to for something I do once a day usually and twice a day at most.
The majority of systems I deal with are servers. They mostly have plenty of CPU and memory available and typically run very few services..... they boot plenty fast without systemd.
Really the most annoying thing about it for me isn't going to be learning it, its going to be training other people to deal with it and supporting them when they find the software they are installing isn't setup for it properly and they need to troubleshoot and fix it.
If there was some real benefit, I am all for it but....boot speed? Talk about not worth it if that is the "benefit"
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This is something that has benefited Linux greatly in the past: the fact that a Solaris user could feel fairly comfortable with picking up Linux and just dive in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Anyone that uses something besides Linux. One great thing about Unixen is how they share common interfaces. The more you change that, the less interchangeable the various Unixen become. The more reason their will be to resist moving from one to another.
Except that's actually false. Unixen really don't share common interfaces. Mac OS uses launchd, FreeBSD uses init.d, many Linuxes use systemd.
On Linux you'll find devices named /dev/hda(n) and sda(n), while on OS X you'll find /dev/disk(n)s(m), and on solaris you'll find /dev/dsk/c(n)t(m)d(l)s(o).
All unixes differ. Trying to claim that the way it happens to have been done in Linux for a while is the "one true unix way" is frankly bullshit.
There is no "fundamental change" to Linux with systemd
I'd call moving DBUS into the kernel, assimilating udev, and making the init system a large complex system that does lots of things rather than the old school ideology of doing one thing and doing it well, some pretty big, somewhat fundamental changes to GNU/Linux.