Slashdot Mirror
Debian Forked Over Systemd
jaromil writes: The so called "Veteran Unix Admin" collective has announced that the fork of Debian will proceed as a result of the recent systemd controversy. The reasons put forward are not just technical; included is a letter of endorsement by Debian Developer Roger Leigh mentioning that "people rely on Debian for their jobs and businesses, their research and their hobbies. It's not a playground for such radical experimentation." The fork is called "Devuan," pronounced "DevOne." The official website has more information.
Slight correction:
NetBSD and FreeBSD were developed independently in the 90s, and mostly in parallel.
OpenBSD forked off NetBSD.
DragonflyBSD forked off FreeBSD.
It's worse. Pottering is paid by Microsoft to destroy the Linux community. Every. Single. Thing. he touches is crap, mostly pointless, controversial, and breaks everything. I have no idea why people don't see this.
I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?
Systemd is a piece of software, modular in design, monolithic in architecture. It is, on top of being a replacement for init and the init.d scripts, replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework.
It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio and Avahi. Think a guy with enourmous ego and the GNOME attitude ("my way, or the highway").
I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.
It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).
The majority of admins (think: ex-Windows white collars) are overjoyed to have a new toy. They never knew how init worked - and now they do not have to care anymore. Because anything written in C is magically better than everything written in shell.
The minority of admins (think: *NIX guys) are royally pissed that something they were taking for granted - the total control over the system *NIX always provided - is now basically locked down and given away to some guys from interwebs about whom they never heard before. All for the sake, wait for it, that GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
systemd is, first, a new init system for Linux, to replace sysv init.
Additionally, it brings a host of companion daemons: logging (journald), a session manager (logind) and a bunch of others.
systemd and it's companions offer a host of functionality and a number of software pieces are becoming to depend on it, to the point you "can't" run a fully functional Gnome3 without using systemd as init (it needs the session management functionally of logind, for example).
The major distributions have adopted systemd as default init system: Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, Debian and Arch. Ubuntu hasn't changed yet but they have announced they will follow Debian in the future.
There is a number of people who dislike it for many reasons, which are hard to summarize because many of the people dislike it for false reasons and only some actually make valid and constructive critiques.
Eg, many people claim it's monolithic. In fact, it's made of ~100 daemons and applications and the init process isn't that big. Much much smaller than the Linux kernel itself, which a big monolithic kernel.
Many peole dislike being "forced" to use because the major distributions are adopting it and major projects like Gnome are becoming dependent (with KDE talking about it too).
I use "" in "can't" and "forced" because it's not strictly true. While a lot of people whine and hate in slashdot, a small number of people have been putting their code where their mouth is and working on alternatives.
Eg, there's a systemd-shim package in Debian which actually allows you to run Gnome3 very nicely without using systemd as init, by providing the necessary systemd features.
Then why aren't you hearing anything from the Red Hat customer base?
I am. Were I to walk into the systems suite here at work and yell "yeah centos 7!" I would probably be bombarded with nerf darts. In a mean way.
Someone had to do it.