Slashdot Mirror
You Got Your Windows In My Linux
snydeq writes: Ultimately, the schism over systemd could lead to a separation of desktop and server distros, or Linux server admins moving to FreeBSD, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. "Although there are those who think the systemd debate has been decided in favor of systemd, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise. I've seen many declarations of victory for systemd, now that Red Hat has forced it into the enterprise with the release of RHEL 7. I don't think it's that easy. ... Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows."
Not having to manage licensing... is a gift all its own. I'm not talking about not buying licenses, I mean not having to deal with ANY of that shit for servers... a blessing.
THIS is the reason I build so many linux servers. When you compare costs of a typical Windows based small business server vs a linux server, linux wins hands down. Unless there is a very specific reason to run a windows based server, I always run linux servers. No licenses to keep track of, no extra up front software expenses.
systemd reminds me of Solaris' svcs, and I DO NOT WANT.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I've never used the "Support" on any Linux box yet. And almost never on Windows either. It's quicker to look it up yourself. In fact, out of the 3 times I called Microsoft Support, twice I got refunded for figuring it out while on the phone with the "experts".
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Except we don't see systemd solving any problems. It is a solution searching for a problem.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
My main problem is that the old init system was dead simple to administer. You only needed to know basic shell scripting as well as grep and you could figure out most things you ever encountered. Systemd again is a horribly complicated program that probably no one except the developers understand inside out.
It seems to me like this whole systemd/upstart etc. nonsense started when someone wanted to make machines boot up faster. The problem is that in today's world how fast a machine boots is completely irrelevant. On VM's you can clone a running machine, so how the OS starts is unimportant. A classic server is always on and rarely gets booted. Laptops, which seemed like the obvious target, are typically just suspended to disk, so they rarely run through the whole boot process. Desktops are typically sleeping too when not in use.
In other words, I still haven't figured out why anyone would need systemd. I've never had a reason to need it. I've only had reasons to hate it when something that used to be very simple is now hidden behind some complicated shell commands.
Almost everyone I've asked that has expressed hatred of SystemD hasn't actually used it. The vast majority either hate the creator or read some blog post, all but one had never used it or tried to understand it. I attribute much of the hatred to a "I hate change" attitude that is unfortunately common in the *Nix sphere.
Likewise. In the process of migrating a considerable proportion of a large RHEL estate over to BSD here. A general lack of satisfaction with RHEL6 started our look at alternatives - including other Linux distros - but SystemD was our deciding factor in the making the slightly more drastic leap from Linux to BSD. Despite the dream of Linux on the Desktop, most of us are actually running Linux on servers with (hopefully) competent personnel, so we don't really need some cuddly desktop OS that needs to pander to the lowest level of luser or the additional cruft and abstraction layers that brings, let alone the mess of package dependencies that seems to be afflicting Linux at present. In some cases we're seeing significant perfomance gains for what, in theory, should be the same basic set of code so for us it's more performance for less cost, and possibly an interesting call with our RHEL rep when the first tranche of RHEL licenses come up a renewal we are not going to need...
The King is dead, long live the King!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I hate posting a "me too" post, but you nailed it. Who the FUCK thought that having to run a separate command to find out if your service started was a good idea?!?
I work in a shop that has ~2000 Red Hat servers / VMs, and my advice will be to switch to something else unless Red Hat gets their heads out of their asses, and gets rid of systemd. Unfortunately we don't really have the option of moving to FreeBSD (tooooo much code to port), but I am sure their will be a distro that fills the void. At least we have a few years to worry about it since 6.x is supported for a few more years -- hell I might fork the final 6.x release.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
I would be interested in the anyone's response to Lennart Poetterings rebuttal to the common complaints about systemd.
I'm too n00b to know who's right.