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Debian Votes Against Mandating Non-systemd Compatibility
paskie writes: Voting on a Debian General Resolution that would require packagers to maintain support even for systems not running systemd ended tonight with the resolution failing to gather enough support.
This means that some Debian packages could require users to run systemd on their systems in theory — however, in practice Debian still works fine without systemd (even with e.g. GNOME) and this will certainly stay the case at least for the next stable release Jessie.
However, the controversial general resolution proposed late in the development cycle opened many wounds in the community, prompting some prominent developers to resign or leave altogether, stirring strong emotions — not due to adoption of systemd per se, but because of the emotional burn-out and shortcomings in the decision processes apparent in the wake of the systemd controversy.
Nevertheless, work on the next stable release is well underway and some developers are already trying to mend the community and soothe the wounds.
This means that some Debian packages could require users to run systemd on their systems in theory — however, in practice Debian still works fine without systemd (even with e.g. GNOME) and this will certainly stay the case at least for the next stable release Jessie.
However, the controversial general resolution proposed late in the development cycle opened many wounds in the community, prompting some prominent developers to resign or leave altogether, stirring strong emotions — not due to adoption of systemd per se, but because of the emotional burn-out and shortcomings in the decision processes apparent in the wake of the systemd controversy.
Nevertheless, work on the next stable release is well underway and some developers are already trying to mend the community and soothe the wounds.
more insightfult news and posts from lwn. Regarding burnout and voicing concerns over systemd. lwn.net lwn.net
It's a bit more of a meta-outcome. The option that won the vote said, more or less: the General Resolution (GR) process in Debian is not the right way to resolve this dispute.
There was a proposed option which would actually have explicitly said: packages are not required to maintain non-systemd compatibility. But that option did not win.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To be fair, you'd be laughed out of town for saying that today, too, partly because the init daemon runs at PID 1 (not zero), and partly because not all of the systemd daemons run at PID 1. There are quite a few of them and only the first has PID 1. If you'd like to learn more about systemd, or at least mask your obvious unfamiliarity with init systems, you may want to start with Wikipedia.
Because:
apt-get install sysvinit-core systemd-shim
is too hard for them.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
My test installations were (almost) barebone servers, between 300-500 MB, Wheezy servers. No Gnome, no X, nothing complicated. And sysv init. The test servers were running each one a single service daemon besides ssh... one was dhcpd, the other Apache, another BIND, and the last one MySQL. Each and everyone of them, upon upgrade to Jessie, ignored the sysv installation and installed systemd without any warning or request to do it. The sysinit packages were *ignored*. And once I booted one of them, it was not trivial to get rid of systemd. Either you deinstall it before booting, and upgrade manually sys v init packages, or pin systemd to -1 BEFORE upgrading to jessie. I took the last approach, and in my Wheezy production services I already propagated a configuration to pin systemd in all of them, bidding for the time of their eventual upgrade.
How practical is this for the desktop?
This is actually a serious question. I'm not overly familiar with BSD but have been thinking about giving it a shot on the desktop. I've been a Gentoo user for many years and am reasonably comfortable diving into stuff, so I don't anticipate user friendliness being a show stopper, more likely something I can currently do on Linux won't be available or will have poor support in BSD.
The main things I'm concerned with are Minecraft/FTB, mplayer, flash, VirtualBox, OpenRA, and jack/rakarrack. I'm open to alternatives as long as they actually work.
Flash I could probably live without, but much as I hate it, browsing the web sans-flash does still pose the occasional problem. jack/rakarrack I could also probably live without. I currently use my desktop as a quick-n-dirty guitar amp/effects stack. OpenRA is the thing I anticipate having the most problems with, but I play it somewhat obsessively so very much desired.
At some point I'll probably just try it and see, but I'm curious if any other slashdotter has gone this route and has anything interesting to say about it.
I installed PC-BSD after a couple of weeks w/ Windows 8, & by & large, it's been good, for the things I do. Unfortunately, my Wi-Fi wasn't recognized, so I have to run an ethernet cable to my laptop. Other than that, the experience was generally okay, but could have been better.
The first time I tried installing it, it took a few guesses for me to go into BIOS, disable UEFI (at that time, I was installing 9; now, under 10.1, UEFI is supposedly supported, if you're installing from scratch), and then go into install. I had a few hiccups in getting the system not to go into a loop while installing, but once I got around it, the installation was a breeze - except of course, for the non-support of the Centrino
Once I logged into the first account created, I had some glitches in creating more user accounts from the GUI - had to do an adduser from the CLI (that bug has since been fixed, since more recently, I can). I created different accounts for different roles - one primary one to do all my day to day work like banking, making payments to various cards, personal emails, et al. And others for different things that I do, such as job exploring, or posting to /. here. Each of them, I try different DEs, such as Lumina, LXDE, KDE and GNOME.
This week, I upgraded the system to 10.1, and a lot of the bugs I had went away. I still haven't enabled UEFI, since that would require backing up all the data and then doing a fresh install, and there is no single utility in PC-BSD to do all that, and this is not a hot issue w/ me. So, right now, I'm happy w/ my system.
On the things you were asking, there is Virtual Box, but I haven't tried the other things. For sound players, there is VLC and a whole host of other such utilities. Talking about Flash, I've installed it in FireFox, but not in Chromium (Chrome itself is not there in FreeBSD). But I have no issues watching YouTube videos, if that's what your need for Flash is, w/o Flash and under Chromium, in HTML5. Not tried Minecraft, for me, the favorite game is FreeCiv.
One thing that PC-BSD does great is integrating things, so that any utility will work in any DE. For instance, GTK apps work great under Qt based environments like KDE, Lumina and LXDE, while Qt apps like Calligra work great under GNOME 3.14. One thing - the PC-BSD control panel is quite advanced, and does a better job of system management than trying to edit files in /etc. I tried that last week when I had to replace a router and change the default gateway address - it refused to save my changes to /etc/resolv.conf, but when I went into PC-BSD control panel's network and changed it there, it worked like a charm.
As usual, YMMV