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

meanwhile...

[steak]

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

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: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...

[hairyfeet]

Call me a tinfoil hatter if you want (just as anybody who said "they are monitoring our calls!" before Manning) but am I the only one that finds it funny that after Snowden lets out all the 3 letter agencies best spy tricks out of the blue a guy employed by Red Hat, who makes more than 85% of their money from 3 letter agencies, suddenly decides out of the blue "This crucial part MUST be replaced by this big creeping mess that will touch more and more systems!" and just as suddenly every.single.major.distro. just instantly jumps on this bandwagon even if it means telling their own users to fuck off? Even distros that are normally positively glacial about major changes like Debian? Doesn't that strike anybody else as odd?

Re:meanwhile...

[gweihir]

Same here. As I posted in the last systemd-related story (slightly edited):

At this time I see:
- No technical merits of systemd that are important or critical, just some convenience issues
- Systemd is in hurried development, a stable feature set is nowhere in sight
- The development leads are known incompetents with inflated egos and no communication skills
- There are a number of design decisions that are very, very bad for security and stability

At the same time I see:
- Systemd is pushed strongly with emotional (not factual) arguments
    This is a coordinated and targeted propaganda campaign. A campaign focused on technical merits is not even attempted seriously.
- Systemd opponents are ridiculed, insulted and their arguments are not taken seriously
- Systemd is getting very hard to avoid

I can only deduce that there _must_ be one of or a combination of the following going on:
- Linux was getting too hard to hack and the intelligence community is pushing for systemd to fix that
- Linux did not generate enough support revenue Red Hat and this is intended to fix that by decreasing reliability
- Red Hat wants total control over Linux and systemd is their attempt to establish that

So if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, the most probable explanation is that it is a duck and hence I conclude that something nefarious is going on and the last three items are the most likely candidates IMO. I cannot believe that two known incompetent hacks with bad personalities can screw over a whole large tech-savvy community all by themselves. They must have significant, coordinated help, with significant propaganda and manipulation experience. Whether it is military PsyOps or just commercial PR, the effects are the same. And they are massively negative and destructive for Linux and its community if not repelled decisively.

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:meanwhile...

[gnupun]

Red Hat, who makes more than 85% of their money from 3 letter agencies, suddenly decides out of the blue "This crucial part MUST be replaced by this big creeping mess that will touch more and more systems!"

This systemd pdf article is pretty unremarkable except for what is written in big font in the 2nd page:

Another aspect of systemd is that it collects all output from processes that it starts.

Since systemd launches all processes, it can easily spy on all the process outputs and transmit that to whichever TLA it wants. This is a major spying attack.

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

[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

[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

[grcumb]

I'm not philosophically opposed to what you're suggesting here. I am incensed, though, that it should be necessary.

So you think that you're entitled to getting software, free of cost, which is exactly the way you want it to be. The people who actually invest their time and effort into making these distros should, instead of doing what *they* think is the best course of action, do what *you* think is right, even though you don't feel like investing your time and effort into the project.

No, I think that people should follow my fucking example and listen to others, perhaps learning a little humility in the process.

I already told you I write FOSS; I scratch that itch when I need to. I have a fucking right to talk about this because I've walked the fucking walk. And I won't do you the indignity of asking whether you have as well.

I am trying to suggest that writing code is not the only useful role to be played in FOSS development. I am trying to suggest that we can't write all the code, all the time, so it behooves all developers to listen to their peers, if only to learn from their mistakes.

And now, you can perhaps go back and respond to the main question, which is why you think numbers matter in FOSS development?

All the people who maintain distros have considered and discarded your arguments. So why should I value your opinion over theirs?

Well, given that I told you that I've been a distro maintainer, your assertion is incorrect. Not all of us have discarded these arguments. Your assertion is a textbook case of No True Scotsman. But don't take my opinion in isolation; why not go ask Ian what his reservations are?

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.

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

[Billly Gates]

Sun and Ubuntu did replace init, but that's all their replacement did. It didn't creep into other areas and try to take over all of system management.

How is upstartd, SMF, launchd, different than SystemD?

From brief overview the arguments it does everything is fud. No it does not route packets. It launches a process which communicates to the networking daemon inet for this. No it does manage kernel level threads. It is not a mini operating system at all and is just 300k lines of code.

SystemD is no different than the other event driven alternatives. It just requires relearning which people set in their ways get infuriated about.

With startupd, launchd, SMF, and SystemD you set the triggers for each event. No long scripts loaded with nested if/else statements galore or expensive proprietary software to mask this lack of functionality in init.

That is my answer to the grandparents argument there was no need for change. Kind of reminds me of XP users angry at MS for merely just 13 years of support and do not see the obvious need for security via ASLR ram scrambling & DEP, better process handling, better driver models, USB storage frameworks, and so on.

Things progress

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.

fvwm is what I use, anyway

[TheGratefulNet]

every so often, I try out the various 'desktops' that linux distros offer.

every time, I give up, dislike all the procs running, mem wasted, cpu cycles wasted and all the crap that comes with the desktop. feels like bloat that should not be there, not for a 'simple' linux install.

I always laugh when people look at my display. I use a red/orange color to highlight the active window and grey for the inactive ones. there is no trash icon, no iconbox, no drag/drop. a short menu appears when you click into space (no clients under) and then pick which foreground rxvt opens up (all with black bg's).

I keep things simple. but I've been using this layout for literally over 25 yrs (starting with twm and using mwm for a short while, when motif was still popular).

not having a desktop is great. in all that time, I just have not been limited (at all) in what I can do, and things seem to be fast when I just run a term window, type what I want and it instantly runs.

unix was supposed to be simple. systemd is an abortion and one that most of us do not want.

good to see this protest post with a hand-tweaked system; but the fact is, we should NOT have to flip over backwards to remove a stupid should-not-be-there-anyway daemon and its evil libs.

Re:fvwm is what I use, anyway

[geoskd]

systemd is an abortion and one that most of us do not want.

That is simply not true. A VERY vocal minority do not want Systemd on ideological grounds (although I suspect it is more a matter of the new and different scares them, no matter what advantages it may offer)

The simple fact of the matter is that Systemd does everything, that other init systems do, at least as well, and it does some things that other init systems simply cannot do. If all the popular init systems today had been introduced at the same time, we would all being using Systemd, and no one would have given the others a second thought. The various technical committees have chosen Systemd because on the technical merits Systemd is simply better. There is no argument in favor of the former init systems that cant also be made against all technological progress.

Devuan and uselessd

[tepples]

Can't someone fork a version without systemd?

There's a fork of Debian without systemd, and there's a project to strip systemd down to the essential parts.

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.

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

[resfilter]

debian uses simple release engineering like unstable -> testing -> release. there are other projects that work in a similar way, freebsd is fairly similar. they have commonly done gigantic system-wide break everything for months type changes in freebsd current.

they don't need to fork to test experiental things, they just do it in unstable first. then when they can't find problems, it goes into testing. eventually testing becomes a release.

considering systemd has been in debian in an experimental capacity for nearly 3 years, i think they've done enough testing to consider it stable.

it's nothing like debian/kfreebsd, because changing to a completely different kernel is nothing like changing an init system. not to mention that debian/kfreebsd was expected to have a very long steep development curve with a very small audience, whereas systemd is something that is already proven to be a fairly stable thing. redhat has been using it by default for half a decade.

i'll never use systemd, though. not because i don't trust its stability. the way it works and is configured reminds me of DJB software. makes sense, works well enough, but is wrong on a level that is difficult to explain.

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

[Barsteward]

"Because Lennart Poettering managed to make his friends doing GNOME development make GNOME depend on systemd, " - if you do some research, you'll find he actually enabled the software remain compatible with Consolekit but Gnome chose not to use it. read this for more info http://www.linuxvoice.com/inte...

its quite amazing (and disappointing) just how much mis-information is out there and that people do no research before jumping on the bandwagon

Re:Pulseaudio misconceptions

[statusbar]

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.

... Because I need less than 125 microseconds mixing processing latency (12 samples at 96 kHz) so that in-ear monitor mixing for live performance can be useful - requires a total latency from microphone to wireless receiver to CPU to processing to wireless transmitter to in-ear monitor of less than 5 ms. Until Linux user tasks can be scheduled with this kind of hard real time timing accuracy, mixing real time audio in user tasks doesn't cut it for live audio. So I myself am required to do my mixing and processing for real time audio either in the kernel driver, in a RTLinux task (in kernel space), or in a Xenomai task (see xenomai.org ) running at a higher priority than Linux.

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

[statusbar]

Try the settings - standard kernel options for linux don't work for this.

The only options that work today are using driver level code for audio processing or a real time Xenomai task.

Please support Thomas Gleixner via the Linux Foundation to help to fix this limitation of Linux: http://lwn.net/Articles/572740...

Until then, all high performance low latency audio processing in linux needs to not use any user level tasks.

Jeff

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.

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.

Re:Choice is good.

[lkcl]

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.

that's precisely why i actually worked hard and risked destroying my business by losing access to all data on a critical business laptop, documented the process of removing libsystemd0 from it, and *then* wrote the article.

unlike the people you refer to, i actually *did something*.

then, i contacted the devuan team and informed them about what i had done, so that they may consider properly replicating what i'd done as maintainable debian packages. so they now have a way forward where previously they would have been worried that their efforts would result in many people still having to remove huge numbers of packages - desktop GUIs, sane-utils, cups-daemon, pulseaudio and anything that depends on it, clamav and many many more. i've demonstrated that you *don't* have to remove all those packages and that you *can* still have a functioning debian desktop... without libsystemd0 even being on it.

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

[walterbyrd]

Love the parroting of corporate propaganda, right out of Microsoft's playbook: "anybody who doesn't like vista/win8/ribbon/ooxml is just an old fuddy-duddy luddite, all the cool kids love our latest super-cool technology."

> As far as this "UNIX Philosphy", fuck that shit.

If you hate it so much, use ms-windows. I mean it. If you want a proprietary system that controls everything with one big super-complex blob, then use ms-windows and be happy, and leave everything UNIX-like alone.

BTW: the UNIX philosophy is not just dogma, it has a practical purpose and has worked very well.

JACK is better for you.

[DrYak]

... Because I need less than 125 microseconds mixing processing latency (12 samples at 96 kHz) so that in-ear monitor mixing for live performance can be useful - requires a total latency from microphone to wireless receiver to CPU to processing to wireless transmitter to in-ear monitor of less than 5 ms.

If low latency in professionnal audio setting is your target, then there's already specialized software for that: JACK.
It's specially designed for what you want, and as widespread usage in the field.

Or might as well go for a hardware solution.

Use the right tool for the right job. Otherwise you end up trying to cram extra requirement into a tool which wasn't designed for it.

There are even special distribution which are geared toward pro needs and are tuned with this kind of tools.
(Dynebolic as an example)

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.