Removing Libsystemd0 From a Live-running Debian System

lkcl writes The introduction of systemd has unilaterally created a polarization of the GNU/Linux community that is remarkably similar to the monopolistic power position wielded by Microsoft in the late 1990s. Choices were stark: use Windows (with SMB/CIFS Services), or use UNIX (with NFS and NIS). Only the introduction of fully-compatible reverse-engineered NT Domains services corrected the situation. Instructions on how to remove systemd include dire warnings that "all dependent packages will be removed", rendering a normal Debian Desktop system flat-out impossible to achieve. It was therefore necessary to demonstrate that it is actually possible to run a Debian Desktop GUI system (albeit an unusual one: fvwm) with libsystemd0 removed. The reason for doing so: it doesn't matter how good systemd is believed to be or in fact actually is: the reason for removing it is, apart from the alarm at how extensive systemd is becoming (including interfering with firewall rules), it's the way that it's been introduced in a blatantly cavalier fashion as a polarized all-or-nothing option, forcing people to consider abandoning the GNU/Linux of their choice and to seriously consider using FreeBSD or any other distro that properly respects the Software Freedom principle of the right to choose what software to run. We aren't all "good at coding", or paid to work on Software Libre: that means that those people who are need to be much more responsible, and to start — finally — to listen to what people are saying. Developing a thick skin is a good way to abdicate responsibility and, as a result, place people into untenable positions.

Comments

Pointless

[solidraven]

While it all sounds nice, you do realize 99.99% of the population just sort of wants their computer to work. We don't strictly care too much about your love/despise of some piece of software you didn't pay a dime for, didn't invest any time in writing, and then whine about being used/write love stories to. This sort of behaviour is exactly why projects like a Linux distro, or god forbid GNU/Hurd, never make it to mainstream software. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. If you want the Linux eco-system to be accepted start by getting rid of Stallman, write some damned drivers, make an easy to use system that doesn't require 5 hours of Googling on how to get a laptop soundcard to work. If you invested half the energy you folks use for whining about systemd into actually making an alternative available you might actually get something done.

Re:Pointless

[steak]

the problem is that for many, if not most, an alternative to init was neither needed nor desired. if anything systemd is taking talent away from developing your precious drivers in order to develop a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Pointless

[RightwingNutjob]

This post is the prime example of the way people on opposite sides of the debate are talking past each other. Given Linux's historical roots as a hobbyist OS, with almost all of the mid-late 90's spent as an academic OS that gradually worked its way into the enterprise environment by displaying commercial Unix distributions, a very large part of the folks who use Linux use it because it is "harder" to work with which is to say "easier" to tailor to their particular applications away from the desktop.

I use it on my desktop because I like it, but I learned to like it because I used it in scientific applications where I needed something I could customize and go deep on without being forced to follow Microsoft's or Apple's design decisions or having to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for VxWorks or QNX or HPUX or whatever and some more for ports of software that just happen to already exist in the GNU/Linux/FOSS ecosystem.

Did it take me a good couple of hours of googling to figure out how something worked? Sure. Lots of times. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me days to get the same result with Windows or Mac, if it was at all possible, becaues those were commercial OS's geared toward nontechnical consumers, with all the ambiguity and flexibility taken out. The most famous example is Steve Jobs deciding that the average luser was too stupid for more than one button on their mouse. But that's cosmetic. There are deep technical places where that sort of limitation does matter.

So why the bitching about systemd? Well, that core of people, few of whom really cared about widespread desktop adoption to begin with because their attention was spent on backend or niche scientific and technical applications, are seeing the push for Linux On The Desktop take the predictable direction of removing flexibilty from the system and, here's the important bit, forcing other software in the echosystem to remove flexibility to conform to The SystemD Way. Speaking for myself as a decade-long user of Linux, this came out of left field and looks like trying to solve a problem that never really existed for the Linux userbase by removing the very characteristics of the system that attracted folks like myself to use it for scientific and technical applications where Windows and Mac don't cut it and Big Blue and its equivalents are too damned expensive to be worth it.

So here's how we're talking past each other: you're trying to solve a problem I don't think needs solving, and you don't understand why people who use Linux now use it at all.

Re:Pointless

[grcumb]

The systemd complainers are just a vocal minority. If they were representative of a large fraction of Linux users, then we would see several prominent distros not using systemd or making non-systemd versions.

You need to explain your reasoning here. You seem to think that minorities don't determine the outcome when it comes to designing FOSS. But the Freedom of FOSS is not populism. It never has been. It has always been the case that a vanishingly small minority of developers have decided the fate of thousands—and more recently, millions—of users.

It's a fact that Poeterring, Sievers and co. represent a tiny minority of Linux developers. Over 90% of the systemd code base has been written by 10 or so people. The groups that decided to include systemd in Debian and RedHat are also very small, and while Debian's is nominally consultative, they declined to send this particular decision to a popular vote.

So why do you think that numbers suddenly matter?

That's why the anti-systemd people are so pissed off: everyone else is just ignoring them.

It's not that people are being ignored. It's that 20+ years of historical evidence is being cast aside.

Make no mistake: What we're talking about here is a fundamental change in our approach to systems software. The distros have been dragged along for numerous reasons, some of them technical, some of them ideological. But to pretend that the demographic that is being left behind is of no consequence is disingenuous arrogance at best.

This is Linux: if they don't like it, they can just fork an existing distro, but do you see any of them doing that? Nope.

You know, I've done that before. I've worked for a company that developed a Linux distro purpose-built for people who couldn't manage systems for themselves. I still write the bits and pieces that I need, when I need to.

I'm not philosophically opposed to what you're suggesting here. I am incensed, though, that it should be necessary. As someone who so clearly doesn't understand the first thing about how the FOSS ecosystem works, you should have a care before you begin discarding the viewpoints of those who have gone before you, and you should think twice before presuming to suggest what's good for us.

HTH HAND

Re:Pointless

[Kremmy]

If you invested half the energy you folks use for whining about systemd into actually making an alternative available you might actually get something done.
The flaw in this statement is the fact that systemd is replacing alternatives in such a way that it breaks everything if you try to use an alternative. It makes it so being able to use the same alternatives that have existed since long before systemd came about, is no longer an option. It removes the alternatives. Every major piece of software for Linux that decides to become dependent on systemd removes the ability to consider alternatives.
What I see is projects like GNOME, with a growing dependence on SystemD, becoming unsuitable alternatives because they no longer support alternatives. I see this idea that other systems should be expected to conform to systemd architecture if they want to continue to benefit from said software.
I personally prefer to use cross-platform software. I prefer software that runs about the same regardless of the platform I'm using it on, and I prefer to have the option to use any supported platform to run the software. Now I'm afraid that software I've come to rely on is going to take that possibility away. I'm afraid that I won't be able to use my preferred cross-platform applications on OS X and Windows in the future because they gained some strange dependence on SystemD.
If we reach a point where a full featured Linux desktop cannot be run without SystemD, the entire idea of working on alternatives becomes moot.

Re: Pointless

[Billly Gates]

You mean how Sun, Apple, and Ubuntu did not leave init behind years ago

Re:Pointless

[davydagger]

If you want the Linux eco-system to be accepted start by getting rid of Stallman

cold day in hell. To be honest, while I would like linux to be accepted. I'm not getting rid of Stallman, because if we start getting rid of people like him, the GNU/Linux community will just become more like the people we joined this community to get away from.

More imporant than getting everyone to use Linux, is getting everyone to change how they view the world. Stallman is a smart man, hes actually well spoken, and he digs in and sticks by his ethics, instead of taking a half-assed sleazy way out. He inspires confedence as a voice I can trust to be consistant and ethical, even when no one else is, and doesn't bow to pressure, or sell out core principles.

If we want to be more like everyone else, and start rejecting people for being ugly, and start accepting people who will sell us a bill of goods, and then find someway to fuck us over first possible chance, its not worth the added user base.

Also, Free software survives on community effort. Bringing in a bunch of hipsters, will simply bring in hoardes of people who do not contribute, but make demands, sometimes unreasonable, and might try and cause divisions, making work harder. Again, you'll talk about kicking contributers out, to make room for non-contributors.

write some damned drivers, make an easy to use system that doesn't require 5 hours of Googling on how to get a laptop soundcard to work.

OK, now you're trolling, linux has had better driver availability than basicly anyone else for the last 5 years. Your simply repeating problems people had pre-kernel 3, which are virtually unheard of.

I started running Linux because all my drivers just worked, as opposed to running XP at the time, where finding the right drivers was a fucking pain. Also, installing extra drivers on Ubuntu is easy, installing them on windows is hard, and installing them on Macs doesn't happen, at all.

Oh yeah, and all the codecs "just worked" too, I just clicked a box saying I didn't give fuck all about licensing. Now try doing that in windows, or even mac.

Or mabey that Ubuntu was the first desktop that had an App store on the desktop, even before apple. Oh, and it worked.

Or try installing windows on box vs mint/ubuntu/trisquel. Tell me what is easier.

Are your initials ESR?

Re:Pointless

[sjames]

Yes, since the systemd supporters didn't like sysvinit, they certainly should have forked a distro and put systemd in it. I wonder why they didn't just do that?

Re:Pointless

[sjames]

Pretty much the systemd advocates are running around pissing on everything in the store all the while yelling about how if you don't like piss you should buy simething that hasn't been pissed on. Of course if they see you head for a shelf, they'll do their best to run and piss on it before you get there.

Re:Pointless

[lkcl]

See, this is pretty much precisely my point. It's not that people's opinions are getting ignored. That happens all the time. It's that people aren't listening at all. And more to the point, that really critically important lessons of the past are being set aside merely because a small number of people have become convinced that they know a better way.

Again: in and of itself, that's not necessarily a problem. The problem here is that these particular people are wrong.

no, i disagree: i feel you pretty much nailed it but didn't realise it. the problem i feel really *is* that they're not listening... in combination with there being no alternative. if there was an alternative - a less disruptive one - then the fact that these key high-impact decisions were being made would *not matter*. why? because we would be able to use the alternatives and the people who were not listening could go screw themselves, and nobody would care.

it really *is* the fact that these people have such disproportionate influence and effect, and that they really *are* ramming "Their Way" down everyone's throats in such a cavalier way.

they may well perfectly be technically right (i have seen multiple analyses of systemd which indicate that they are not), but that *doesn't matter*, because it's the fact that they gave us no choice that is of far greater priority.

of all the arguments that i've seen, i have never seen one presented to the systemd team that gets this across to them clearly. the majority of arguments are either technical or abusive. it's only when you take a step back and think "what's really going on here"..

Re:Pointless

[medlefsen]

That article you linked is just awful. "Dear Leader Lennart Poettering"? I've been using systemd on Arch for years now, and very happy with the switched as it has a lot of nice features. I've been trying to follow the controversy (which completely surprised me when I first encountered it) but I still can't figure out what the big deal is.

Many of the arguments seem just flat out wrong. Systemd doesn't pull everything into pid 0, and it isn't being "forced" down anybody's throat. All of the various distributions are choosing to use it or not via their normal decision making processes. People keep talking about politics, and maybe I'm just missing it, but the only politics I'm seeing are from people like you who use highly charged, emotional language (and liken "opponents" to mass murderers) when talking about what init system to use.

The rest of the arguments I'm seeing, like the one in the link you posted, just seem like the most inane things to fly into such a rage about. So the systemd author thinks it's good to have a collection of systems libraries and tools that are uniform and high quality. That makes him a fascist liar? Somehow systemd is supposed to be anti-Unix or anti-Linux or something. I'm not sure how that makes sense. All of the other UNIX's I can think of do essentially the same thing (and more) and the idea that Linux is about small independent projects is odd given that Linux itself is a gigantic (and still growing) monolithic kernel, as opposed to Windows and Mac which are both hybrid Micro-kernels. Even more, most of the base userland for most Linux distributions is GNU, which is also a top-down managed project that aims for uniformity and high quality.

Literally the only argument I've seen that is even close to reasonable is that some people like text logs and journald is a binary log format, and fixing that requires adding one line to a config file.

Please, someone explain this to me.

Re:Choice is good.

[Grishnakh]

Can't someone fork a version without systemd?

I agree, choice IS good. However, what I'm seeing so far is a bunch of vocal whiners on Slashdot bitching about systemd, and no one actually stepping up to make a distro that doesn't use it. So what it amounts to is a few loudmouths telling distro maintainers they're wrong, even though the loudmouths don't want to actually do any work on distros themselves.

Re:Jeezus, give it a rest..

[lkcl]

Man, can we just give this a rest? My gawd, I can't believe people have the energy for this. Just go back to an earlier distro before all this stuff and enjoy.

we can't. the reason is simple: security updates and software updates will be incompatible. i actually maintain a hell-on-earth system for a client. the choice to do so is entirely mine, i have to point out. it's hell because i disagreed with putting KDE 4 in front of clients who are used to the simplicity of KDE 3.5, and i disagreed with moving them over to Gnome because, well Gnome is a different kind of hell (for me), involving being completely unable to remotely ssh in and hand-edit config files in a pinch. with KDE 3.5 it is still possible to do that.

so i ended up upgrading to Trinity Desktop, but this is after leaving the system running debian 6 for as long as possible. the upgrade was... fraught. then i had (in December 2014 - so only a couple of months ago) to buy and install a new printer (because we couldn't get the old one). that new HP printer wasn't recognised by the version of hplip that was on the system (3.12).

so i did an "apt-get upgrade hplip" - and what do you think happened? it said "to satisfy your request we require to remove Trinity Desktop and install KDE 4".

the reason was because the Trinity Desktop Team do *not have the manpower* to keep such a large old software base completely up-to-date with debian/testing. ... so i was forced to compile hplip from scratch, from source code! *fortunately* HP saw fit to include an extremely well-written and well-thought-out script that detected the OS, installed the build dependencies and generally got on with the job. i was really impressed.

now, the only reason i could contemplate this was because i am an experienced GNU/Linux systems administrator, but do you *really* think that the average person will be satisfied to "use older software" as you suggest?

this is the crux of the situation: that we *are* forced to such extreme polarising choices. and that's why i did what i've done - demonstrate that it's possible to remove libsystemd0 which is being shoved down our throats. i *don't care* if libsystemd0 is good or not: i object to it being forced onto people.

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

slackware users are saying "what's all this then?"

So are Gentoo users who chose OpenRC. Even if systemd was the best init system ever, and that's quite debatable, I still don't like the way it's being rammed down our throats. I for one reject Poettering.

I didn't like (and never used) Pulseaudio either. If I wanted to play sound over a network I'd share my media directory. Then I enjoy the ability to also share all of my media (videos, ebooks, etc) in a completely transparent application-agnostic manner. What I wouldn't do is run an unnecessary audio layer requiring application support - and that can do nothing else - in the form of a sound daemon I never wanted and didn't ask for. Software mixing you say? It's called dmix.

I moved away from Windows and towards open source years ago in order to have choice. I will have that choice whether or not most major distributions gargle the Poettering cock. If Gentoo ever caves in (unlikely but possible), I plan to move to OpenBSD to replace my Gentoo Hardened server and maybe FreeBSD to replace my workstation. The Unix Philosophy has withstood the test of time and I believe in it. I'm sure the kool-aid is quite tasty, but no thanks, I'll pass.

Re:Choice is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, if *all* you see are "a bunch of vocal whiners on Slashdot bitching about systemd", then you have a severe problem.

However, the fact that systemd comes with the "USE US OR FAIL!" dire warning (cf "if you don't use Windows, you can't use our ISP") and appears entirely engineered to intefere with everything on a Linux system, no matter how divorced from SETTING UP THE OS it is indicates that the proponents of systemd have one of two aims:

Give up on a sustainable Free Software OS.

Make systemd a required choice and silence all other options.

Given you only want to see complains as "whining" this indicates you do not want a free system. Pretending any discord against systemd must be illogic and panic is just your childish method for not having to argue against the problems highlighted. cf "you can't understand women's issues because you're a man".

Choice is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but I am having a hell of a time getting over the initd martyrs. Everything I see about this is written like some kind of revolutionary maniphesto.

And this is the IMPROVEMENT, before it was just endless vitriol towards Lennart Poettering whose crime was "writing a software package for free", even though he's not the one with the end-say on what packages go in the distribution.

If they all move to devaun the debian community is going to be getting rid of some of its most vitriolic and insufferable members. I imagine concentrating all those people in one place is going to be disaster down the line but at least they're going to be gone from the forums of the systemd-based distros

Contrary to opinion...

[Junta]

All the criticism of systemd is not strictly from a luddite perspective. There is a population that appreciates meaningful advances (Wayland, btrfs, even some facets of systemd), but doesn't like some of the compromises systemd has employed to achieve their goals. Getting stuck in a point of time before systemd is not a desirable result, and in fact systemd might be able to win over some detractors if they recognize criticism and make sensible technical solutions to those rather than continuing to say 'oh everyone loves it except some impossible to please luddites'. For example, journald could embrace native text logging with external binary metadata and deliver all the goodies they provide and quell all the (justified) bitching that human readable logging is a second class citizen in their model.

They may not be able to accommodate all the objections (e.g. the amount of complexity they *must* do in pid 1 to have guaranteed comprehensive service management without blindly applying namespace isolation everywhere that would make a system look even weirder/risk breaking some services), but they could come a long way.

The issue for many of us is that things are being implemented that go beyond what systems administrators can follow along without understanding how to be a more robust software developer (and even then, there's some loss of convenience in analyzing things compared to an interpreted language). Systemd design shifts focus on specialized tools that are better at their specific task, but less reusable in similar contexts. If I started with syslog and learned 'tail -f' will let me watch logs, then I have acquired knowledge that can be used the next time I encounter logging output. If I learn 'journalctl -f', then that knowledge does not transfer to the huge number of other applications that do logging. It's a small example of things that in aggregate pose a significant challenge.

An administrator faced with a 'classic' design won't know everything about the system, but can get far with 'set -x', 'find', and 'grep' because the configuration, logging, and much of the 'glue' code is in clear text, and communication between programs usually hits the filesystem in fairly specific ways. Now with things like systemd and dbus, 'invisible' things happen (well, overly generic communication channels and compiled code). When the kernel implements new awesome stuff, it frequently manifests in sysfs, which is nice and discoverable. Advanced functionality that adheres to the 'everything is a file' and generally presents and accepts simple utf-8/ascii data. Not everything in the kernel does that, sometimes it creates obscure devnodes with ioctls instead, but it's a common and good practice in kernel land.

In general, we already have a system that embraces many of the design principles observed in systemd and actually does a decent job of making the concepts work: Windows. Even with a great deal of talented investment over the course of decades, when a Windows system goes off the reservation in certain ways, no one will be able to bring it back because of how complicated the integration of the various components. While certain concepts can be specifically be done better (e.g. journald does better than windows event framework), the emergent behavior of Windows that becomes impossible to overcome by administrators isn't really due to those specific things.

Re:Choice is good.

[kthreadd]

However, the fact that systemd comes with the "USE US OR FAIL!" dire warning (cf "if you don't use Windows, you can't use our ISP") and appears entirely engineered to intefere with everything on a Linux system, no matter how divorced from SETTING UP THE OS it is indicates that the proponents of systemd have one of two aims:

This article isn't even about systemd. You can fairly easily use Debian without systemd. This is about libsystemd which is a small library for interfacing with systemd if it is installed. It doesn't depend on systemd so you can have it installed without having systemd itself installed.

Re:Why wasn't there a systemd fork of Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Normally when there are experimental changes made to a software system, a branch of some sort is created, the experimental work is done in isolation there, and if the changes are working well then the branch is folded back into the mainline version of the software.

I'm confused as to why this was not done when integrating systemd into Debian.

Why did something as experimental and potentially disruptive as systemd go into mainline Debian so quickly?

Because the sudden almost-universal rise of systemd is about politics, not robust system design. That should be obvious to you and anyone else who notices the strange hurry to adopt systemd. Poettering and his circle-jerk fanboys are simply very good salesmen. If Debian went with your suggestion (that is, treating systemd like they generally treat any other major changes), that would mean lots of time to think about it. Time to think about it vastly increases the chances that people will realize that systemd offers few real-world advantages to make up for its tremendous complexity and abandonment of the Unix philosophy. That's a win for sound system design, but no good for politics.

Red Hat and its cronies (like Poettering) simply has far too much influence over the development of Linux distributions, much more than any single corporation deserves to have. Large parts of the core system aren't community-developed and haven't been for a long time now. Politics is hard when there are many distributed developers and you must convince most of them. Politics is easy when there are a few top-down managers and you know what they want to hear.

Re:Choice is good.

[thaylin]

Ah, another systemd complainer, who of course can't be bothered to have a real Slashdot account.

However, the fact that systemd comes with the "USE US OR FAIL!" dire warning

There's no such thing in systemd. Slackware (always the last to just on new trends) seems to be getting along fine without it.

There are CONSTANT statements that if you do not use systemd you will not be able to use primary Linux distros in the future, because all software will supposedly be gobbled up by it as a dependency... To try and now make out like those dont exist is pretty silly.

Given you only want to see complains as "whining" this indicates you do not want a free system.

systemd is LGPL FOSS, so it's just as Free as anything else. You seem to be using the appeal to emotion fallacy.

Again you are using half truths, or atleast feigning half understanding, or it may be possible that you dont understand the linux culture. It is pretty clear that he is talking about free in the sense of free beer, not free as in not paying for it.

Pretending any discord against systemd must be illogic and panic is just your childish method for not having to argue against the problems highlighted.

Because all the "problems" you cite are generally overblown or not problems at all. Please, show me where prominent distro maintainers are criticizing systemd and refusing to integrate it into their distros. The ramblings of some disgruntled random people on Slashdot are not equivalent to the opinions of experts in the field.

Now you are A) doing exactly what the quoted person stated ,pretending the problems are overblown or not problems at all, when there have clearly been (debug fiasco) and are issues. You then make it seem like the only person who can show a problem are distro maintainers. Maintainers are typically not the mass admins who have to support it, possibly trying to move the goal posts. There is no doubt that system d helps the maintainers, but it also harms the admins.

Pulseaudio misconceptions

[DrYak]

I didn't like (and never used) Pulseaudio either. If I wanted to play sound over a network I'd share my media directory.

Networked sound playing is just an incident of pulseaudio being a sound router. It's a nice feature, but that's not what pulseaudio was basically written for.

There are lots of situations where sound is routed to something which isn't the usual ALSA driver:
- lots of headphones/microphones now are USB. They are not another channel on the same soundcard, they are a completely different sound driver. Switching when pluging a headset is not something which is trivially done in ALSA without special support of software.
- bluetooth, which is VERY common on portable devices (but also might be usefull on dekstops) isn't even a kernel driver. Sound is handled by a deamon communicating with the bluetooth stack. It has much more in common with networked sound than with ALSA.
- recording the output of another program becomes much more trivial if there's a sound router handling the redirection, instead of needing some special support in software.

What I wouldn't do is run an unnecessary audio layer requiring application support - and that can do nothing else - in the form of a sound daemon I never wanted and didn't ask for.

Pulseaudio doesn't require any special support. It can present an ALSA target to any ALSA-enabled software. Most current software don't even have a pulseaudio plugin, they just open the default ALSA device which happens to be one pulseaudio listends to and that just works.

Software mixing you say? It's called dmix.

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?! Do you run your video decoder and webbrowser there too ?
I prefer to run unnecessary things like sound as daemons in userspace. Thank you very much.

I moved away from Windows and towards open source years ago in order to have choice.

And you're still free to disable pulseaudio and use dmix instead, if you want.
Now indeed, for an init system, it's a bit more complicated to leave complete choice to the end user. Some specialist distro like Gentoo are able to offer you to switch between their default OpenRC and whatever you want.
But the amount of work and risk of bugs in untested paths is rather high. So don't expect other distros to offer instant switch between systemd and upstart.

I will have that choice whether or not most major distributions gargle the Poettering cock.

Instead of being vulgar, maybe you should ask yourself why so many distributions are switching to systemd.
Maybe, part of the reason would be that systemd solves actual real world problems that these distributions need fixed.
Maybe that's because systemd people and Lennart Poettering actually ship code, instead of just sitting the whole day bitching and cursing on internet forums.
Maybe if you didn't spent all your energy on whinning about systemd, and actually tried to *DO* something, to *FIX* the problems, and write an actual good solution, maybe your solution would be the one picked up by distros.

Also please try to avoid making confusion between the actual piece of code that runs as PID 1 (which is indeed confusingly called "systemd") and all the other pieces of code that add the functionnality mentionned in all systemd articles (these pieces of code are all members of a project which is also called by the same name "systemd", but all pieces of code are completely different deamons like "networkd", "journald", etc.). In other words, it's not the PID 1 that get stuffed with innapropriate functionnality. It's the people who wrote the PID1 that are also writing other daemons for extra functionnality, all different parts of the same project.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space* ?!

Because it is real time process with hard guarantees. It's ridiculous that my home media PC from 1995 desktop running SLS could play audio without studdering unlike my new Dell laptop from 2015 with an i7 running Ubuntu. The CPU clock speed alone is 33 times faster (3 GHz vs 90 MHz). Playing audio is something we need to do well. Getting rid of low quality userspace code written by inexperienced people and moving it into well written and better maintained kernel code could would be a win for users. pulseaudio is an embarrassment.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[drinkypoo]

Networked sound playing is just an incident of pulseaudio being a sound router. It's a nice feature, but that's not what pulseaudio was basically written for.

That's unfortunate, because that's the only thing it actually provides that we didn't have before.

lots of headphones/microphones now are USB. They are not another channel on the same soundcard, they are a completely different sound driver. Switching when pluging a headset is not something which is trivially done in ALSA without special support of software.

Another thing which can be done with a small shell script.

bluetooth, which is VERY common on portable devices (but also might be usefull on dekstops) isn't even a kernel driver.

But BlueZ does provide an ALSA driver.

It has much more in common with networked sound than with ALSA.

Except, you know, that the sound comes through an ALSA driver.

recording the output of another program becomes much more trivial if there's a sound router handling the redirection, instead of needing some special support in software.

Special support in software? what do you think pulseaudio is?

Pulseaudio doesn't require any special support. It can present an ALSA target to any ALSA-enabled software.

When that works.

Why the fuck do you want to round a *sound mixer* inside your *kernel space*

That's OK, there is userspace dmix for the paranoid. But you avoid a context switch by having your sound mixer inside your kernel space. However, if you want to use a floating point mixer, it has to be userspace anyway because politics.

And you're still free to disable pulseaudio and use dmix instead, if you want.

Some applications are just using pulseaudio directly for audio now.

Instead of being vulgar, maybe you should ask yourself why so many distributions are switching to systemd.

Because upstream software requires it, for poor reasons.

Also please try to avoid making confusion between the actual piece of code that runs as PID 1 (which is indeed confusingly called "systemd") and all the other pieces of code that add the functionnality mentionned in all systemd articles (these pieces of code are all members of a project which is also called by the same name "systemd", but all pieces of code are completely different deamons like "networkd", "journald", etc.).

No. I can't ignore the various pieces which are required. I can ignore the non-required bits, though.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[thegarbz]

Another thing which can be done with a small shell script.

Oh please stop. I can't read much further than this. There were many use cases for linux audio which were either completely absent or plainly broken before Pulseaudio matured (I won't say before it came out, because frankly it was broken when Pulseaudio came out too).

If you think supporting the range of various event driven realtime changes to the sound destination (i.e. I did something as mind bogglingly complicated as plugging in my headphones while watching a movie) then I'm sure there wouldn't have been an endless list of complaints about the state of linux sound. As far as a general user was concerned, sound was effectively broken. But it's good to know you could write a shell script to fix everything. (I won't draw a comparison to sysvinit here, woopse too late).

If the problems were as easily solved as you claim the distros would have done it years ago. Except they didn't and were so very keen to migrate to something which did have this functionality that they released Pulseaudio waaaaay before it was ready for primetime (happy to draw a systemd comparison here).

But feel free to keep wearing your rose coloured glasses as you lament about why we have the things we do know.

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[drinkypoo]

Oh please stop. I can't read much further than this.

You want me to stop, while you're being the fanboy. Why don't you stop riding Poettering's dick?

There were many use cases for linux audio which were either completely absent or plainly broken before Pulseaudio matured

Wrong. There was just one, hardware mixing was broken at the time. But now it works, and there is no reason for pulseaudio to exist.

If you think supporting the range of various event driven realtime changes to the sound destination (i.e. I did something as mind bogglingly complicated as plugging in my headphones while watching a movie) then I'm sure there wouldn't have been an endless list of complaints about the state of linux sound.

You accidentally the whole thing, there.

Plugging in headphones while watching a movie is something that worked fine under ALSA, if your hardware was worth one tenth of one shit. I know, because I used to do that before pulseaudio was a thing.

Most of the complaints about Linux sound were "hardware mixing doesn't work", then we got dmix, and then there was no real reason to have pulseaudio. But we still have it.

If the problems were as easily solved as you claim the distros would have done it years ago.

They did, but everyone and their mom started using pulseaudio, and then it had momentum.

Except they didn't and were so very keen to migrate to something which did have this functionality that they released Pulseaudio waaaaay before it was ready for primetime

Yes, some people acted lazy. Now you want to follow that up with more lazy, and damn the expense!.

Let's give this some relevance.

[HBI]

I was in a meeting last week with some representatives of a large defense contractor and Microsoft. The two of them don't get along well. The defense contractor people (not the MS people) brought up the whole systemd thing as an equalizer between Windows and Linux, and not in a positive way.

The bottom line is that I have a hard time believing it, but Microsoft is actually making inroads in the server market again. Linux adoption where I work is pretty much stalled, and the things it is used for are mostly virtualization hosts, rather than stuff that actually performs a function. While the systemd thing is just a tiny blip compared to the other reasons this is happening, this shit does not help.

I'm also not going to waste my own capital evangelizing the OS if significant engineering effort is going into something that is, at least in the short term, reducing the reliability of the operating system. That's a stupid idea and pissing off your evangelists is, too. Everyone forgets where the market share came from...and figures that it is fungible with whatever stupid follow-on idea they have, once they have said share.

Red Hat is about to learn this the hard way.

Why are distros moving to systemd?

[Anonymous Coward]

RedHat.

And the design of systemd which means systemic and wideranging changes in many packages making "not systemd" a large change in programming. If systemd were not being pushed by RedHat but by, for example, a bit player like Gentoo, then the widespread changes would stop it working. See upstart for another example of a wideranging change that wasn't pushed by a big enough player. But once it starts being done, either others have to backport or fork or conditionally code in systemd use or they have to use systemd.

And at that point, it's not "choose systemd", it's "choose not to maintain a fork".

A very different kettle of mackerel.

Re:Why are distros moving to systemd?

[thegarbz]

Ubuntu wasn't a big enough player? That's news to me.

The reality is that upstart solved problems that systemd did too, then Ubuntu not being of the NIH RedHat type said hey, no need to continue to pour effort into our own init system, we could just switch to another.

The thing about forks is they are often created as a need to address something which does not exist. This is why I am watching this entire debacle with a very keen eye. Base on the talk on online forums one of the following 3 will happen:

1. Linux user base will decimate in favour of BSD.
2. Devuan will become a leading distribution and will quickly find it's way onto every server in the world as admins refuse to work with systemd.
3. Life will go on because people don't put their money where their mouth is, and systemd isn't quite bad enough for people to actually start supporting alternatives instead dedicating all their energy to complaining on the internet.

To anyone who hates systemd, donate to an alternative or dedicate some programming time, or package management, or any one of the other many things that go into maintaining a fork.

Re:Choice is good.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you risked your business in order to write this article?

Excuse me, but knowing this I would never hire you or do business with you. If you put your work machine at risk for such petty reasons, I can't tell how many times you are going to put your work in jeopardy again for ideological reasons. You are a loose cannon.

And here you are almost boasting about it so your comment sounds more important than it is. What would your employer or customers think if they read that? Are you really putting such a stain on your credibility just to win an internet argument? That's on you, pal. Use a less critical machine or a virtual one if you want to experiment, don't use your damn work machine. That's incredibly unprofessional.

That's for starters. Next is, why should Debian care? That library is probably there for a reason and they aren't going to backpedal just because a careless user gambled a bit. Seeing your tone I can already imagine the issue you filed, and honestly, don't be surprised if they dismiss it.

Doing something doesn't give you license for anything. Putting effort is not always rewarded. You are pretty much telling others how to do their job, and seeing that you are willing to put your own work at risk for ideological reasons, you are in no position to tell others what to do.

Anyway, good job keeping the systemd debate warm. I don't know what we would have done without your "sacrifice". Now get lost and get some working ethics. Someone who does this kind of risky process on a critical machine doesn't deserve respect.
Even less someone who uses that factoid as something to be proud of. That's just shameful.

Re:meanwhile...

[jbolden]

The funny thing is the people working on OpenRC threw in the towel over a year ago. They can't keep up. OpenRC was a good idea, it truly was init.d version 3.0. But in practice it is non-viable as a replacement for all systemd is doing today as the developers on it admit. Gentoo will be able to hold out a long time because of the nature of the distribution but I suspect that within 2-3 years Gentoo will be overwhelmingly systemd.

Give it a rest

[MSG]

We aren't all "good at coding," but we know what init system we want.

We aren't all "doctors," but we know we don't want vaccines.

We aren't all "scientists," but we know global warming is a hoax.

I cannot be the only one sick of seeing this crap posted over and over. systemd is being implemented in distributions because a) it is good and b) the people making that decision are the ones qualified to do so.

Re:Do people who post on lkml actually know englis

[lkcl]

Really, someone should get a dictionary for their birthday and read the definition for "unilateral" lol.

that's in.... *counts on fingers*... 9? days? :)

ok so let's look it up... a random google search shows these:

1. Of, on, relating to, involving, or affecting only one side: "a unilateral advantage in defense" (New Republic).
2. Performed or undertaken by only one side: unilateral disarmament.
3. Obligating only one of two or more parties, nations, or persons, as a contract or an agreement.
4. Emphasizing or recognizing only one side of a subject.
5. Having only one side.
6. Tracing the lineage of one parent only: a unilateral genealogy.
7. Botany Having leaves, flowers, or other parts on one side only.

yep. definitions 1 through 5 are perfectly relevant. unilateral. meaning that pottering made the decision and (2) did not consult any of us. he claims to be "listening to users" yet (4) in fact ignores everything they tell him and carries on regardless. he has therefore violated the implicit software freedom contract (3) between users and developers who choose to be of service to others.

so yeah. it would appear that yes i really do know english, if only by accident.

Re:meanwhile...

[drinkypoo]

But in practice it is non-viable as a replacement for all systemd is doing today as the developers on it admit

There's no need for it to do all that systemd is doing today. That in fact is much of what is wrong with systemd.

Re:meanwhile...

[UberLord]

You're right, OpenRC cannot keep up because it's not a DHCP client, nor a binary system logger, nor any of the other things systemd has now assimilated.
It's just an piece of software which starts the system in a deterministic fashion using existing software that's been very well tested, such as sysvinit on Linux the respective BSD init on the BSDs.

OpenRC is just an init system, it will never be anything more than that. And why should it be? There are much better system loggers and network management tools out there than what systemd offers.

Re:So is SystemD or the old ways moar secure then?

[gweihir]

Systemd is decidedly far less secure against a competent attacker. It has its fingers in so many places, local privilege elevation will be easy. It has network connectivity, which is about the most stupid thing security-wise you can do for an init-system. It has excessive feature-creep, and that means it is in active development all the time, with new vulnerabilities added constantly.

You are right, SYSV-init does not actually have any real security problems, and that is due to its simplicity and age.

My personal take at this time is that this is possibly intentional. Linux may have gotten to hard to break into for the surveillance-creeps and systemd may be an attempt to fix that. Sure, it will take a few months, or maybe even years for the catastrophe to become obvious.

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is the people working on OpenRC threw in the towel over a year ago.

I don't see any references either on Wikipedia or the official OpenRC web page that the people working on it threw in the towel over a year ago. Got any reference for this news?

But in practice it is non-viable as a replacement for all systemd is doing today

Of course a lean and transparent project is not doing everything that the kitchen sink blob is doing. If it was, it would not be hailed as the future of non-Redhat-derivative distrtibutions, but just another kitchen sink like upstart, launchd and whatever the Windows boot thing is called.

Re:meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

When they stop adding new, unneeded, and unwanted features?