Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu To Officially Switch To systemd Next Monday
jones_supa writes: Ubuntu is going live with systemd, reports Martin Pitt in the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list. Next Monday, Vivid (15.04) will be switched to boot with systemd instead of UpStart. The change concerns desktop, server, and all other current flavors. Technically, this will flip around the preferred dependency of init to systemd-sysv | upstart in package management, which will affect new installs, but not upgrades. Upgrades will be switched by adding systemd-sysv to ubuntu-standard's dependencies. If you want, you can manually do the change already, but it's advisable to do an one-time boot first. Right now it is important that if you run into any trouble, file a proper bug report in Launchpad (ubuntu-bug systemd). If after some weeks it is found that there are too many or too big regressions, Ubuntu can still revert back to UpStart.
Now time for me to switch to Windows!
It still doesn't have a decent architecture for scheme plugins and a robust text editor.
Enjoy
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Can someone explain to us Windows and OS X users, without using acronyms and Linux-only mumbo-jumbo, what exactly is systemd and why do we keep hearing so much about it?
Telling us to go read a wikipedia page probably won't help because it will be either too long to read, too complex or require knowledge about other topics to understand.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I never really understood either side, far above my head. But I have used Ubuntu a few times and followed their major changes over the last decade. If there is one thing I do understand is that if Ubuntu is switching to it it must be a trendy piece of crap, far from ready for prime time.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I just installed Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon (Rebecca release) on the machine I'm typing from this week. While it does have some things I don't like (some weird config location choices, /var/run, /etc/bash.bashrc, bash_completiond,WTF is up with dnsmasq?, some weird sound behavior, semi-broken bash tab completion, won't mount my cellphone no matter what, etc - aka issues I've never had with CentOS).
I also still have 2 several years old but up to date CentOS boxes I use every day and prefer them but I picked Mint because it's supposed to be better for day to day regular desktop use, has far more up to date packages, and I was tired of fighting dependency hell with extra packages from 2008 (my own fault, admittedly) for things like VLC.
My understanding, and I can't find where I read it before I went and downloaded/installed it, is that Mint is in wait-and-see mode and will be waiting until their next LTS release in a few years and then re-evaluating whether to switch to systemd. Looking at the system I have installed right now, it looks like there are a few pieces installed for compatibility (although none of them are running) but the init system is still old school init.d and runlevels.
I haven't looked at systemd in depth but my gut feeling is it throws away the UNIX mindset of, do one thing and do it well, output/input everything in text in favor of aping Apple (paritcularly)/Microsoft and the politics behind it seem dirty. I have watched a few Poettering videos and he comes off as a massively arrogant douche bag (but I am a fan of Linus and RMS so *shrug*).
$.02
Linux has become an utterly chaotic mess that isn't fun anymore because most of my time is spent relearning the bullshit that comes with software designed by consensus
Actually Linux always was an utterly chaotic mess and that's precisely what made it so fun. It's the waves of Windows envy followed by waves of Mac envy which have sucked the fun out of it.
Still it's all relative and I'd rather use Linux than one of the more commercial offerings by a very long way.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I won't use systemd until it is themeable, or at least skinnable.
Also, where are all the good screenshots showing cool systemd setups?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The SystemD crowd are windows devs who hate 8 so much, they finally decided to get into linux. Sadly, they want linux to work like windows, so they foist their shit into it. It does make boot times faster: something sysadmins usually don't give a shit about since you don't reboot servers. Red Hat wants systemD because it will let them abstract linux (the kernel) away to the point where they can control it instead of "the community". In addition, several genuinely nice tools, UUID for disks, are being folded into SystemD so, in order to get those tools, you *must* also use SystemD. Essentially it's being bundle in with other services.
Sadly, SystemD is not well tested enough for most people running linux on a server to trust it especially since the guy who wrote it wrote PulseAudio and people are still having issues related to that piece of shit.
Pros:
* Boots fast
Cons:
* When it breaks, you're fucked
* Obsoletes 20-30 years of accepted best practices and knowledge of how to use linux tools
* No real new features
* Is network connected and running as superuser
* Is unaudited
* Is virtually untested
* Was written by a raging moron
* Is completely unneeded by a large section of people who have run linux for a long time
Essentially, it's the Windows 8 of the *nix world
Ubuntu is geared more toward people who don't care much about managing the boot details. So I think it might make sense for them. I chose my distro based on how much control it gave me. And luckily, they still seem committed to OpenRC. When it comes to booting, keep it simple!
There are several main reason why systemd has overrun some of the best known distros. On of the biggest is simple. Gnome depends on it, and soon KDE will too. Distro maintainers either bend over for systemd, or will spend a lot of time patching and trying to get these two desktops working on GNU/Linux.
Then, you have two types of distro maintainers. Volunteers, and paid developers. Volunteers are guys like you and me, with limited time to help, doing things on spare time. Paid developers usually are RedHat or Canonical employees (we also had novell employees when they destroyed SuSE), and the first seem to be more and with more money to spend on pushing RedHat technologies. Unpaid volunteers can't even compete with the deluge of code and the sponsored conferences and presentations. Any alternative or dissenting voice is either bought or pressured to give up.
Finally, some claim that systemd solves a lot of things that didn't work, and that if you don't know what these are then you are an idiot, as obviously Linux has never worked well in the last 20 years.
But what do I know, I've been told enough times that I am heretic (hater in doubleplusgood newspeak) for daring to criticise systemd.
The first half was a very good science-fiction movie ... The second half was a bad horror movie.
So, just like systemd then.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If everyone hates systemd so much, why is it being incorporating into all these Linux distributions? Have all the major ones incorporated it? Does this "evil" Poettering guy really have that much clout in all the disparate distros?
The systemd haters are actually a tiny but vocal minority. They tend to flash-mob systemd threads, so you can often see here on slashdot, how a little handful of systemd-haters post 10-20 anti-systemd posts in anything remotely related to systemd. They seem like they are many, but when counting they are quite few.
No distro have lost users because of switching to systemd, in fact, systemd is part of the whole OS container wave that are fuelling the Linux engine at the moment. Not a single non-systemd commercial Linux distro have emerged since all the major Linux distro announced their shift to systemd, so the server market seems firmly behind systemd.
One reason why Canonical is changing to systemd as fast as it can, is because their OS container costumers are impatiently tapping their feet, waiting for systemd integration.
People have started to ignore this small, sometimes very toxic minority for quite some time, since the anti-systemd people are basically uninformed about any technical aspects of systemd, because they rely on hearsay and random hate blogs for their information about systemd instead of actually reading the systemd documentation.
Init is still good for many applications (and completely satisfactory for server use). If somebody tries to prevent me from using it or to make that hard, then these people become an enemy. The systemd crowd qualifies.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No, systemd detractors really is a tiny minority; some ways this really shows is how there are almost no developers working to maintain even critical needed infra structure for non-systemd distros; ConsoleKit has been abandoned for years now, eudev is just a shadow fork of udev with no independent development going on, and several key components like systemd-shim and cgmanager are only kept alive by paid Canonical developers and a few Debian devs; once Ubuntu and Debian shifts to systemd, those projects will languish too. SysVinit will properly also deteriorate completely; Red Hat/Suse was the defacto upstream before, and now it is only Debian as long as it last. So the non-systemd infrastructure will probably deteriorate further as the commercial distros stops to maintain it.
In short, almost no developers are working on maintaining non-systemd infrastructure, this reflects how few the systemd-detractors really are.
The recent Debian debate also show how few the systemd detractors really are when the numbers are shown: The system-detractors made a lot of noise on the Debian mailing list, but after the technical committee had decided that systemd should be the new Debian Linux init system, the detractors were unable to even gather 5 (like in five) Debian developers out of around 1000 to sponsor a vote on this subject.
Even the GR bill trying to keep other init-systems equally supported was clobbered at the GR vote.
So going by the noise on the mailing lists, the systemd-detractors seemed like a force, but when voting they where nowhere to be seen.
Same with Linux distros; you would think that the non-systemd distro ranks would be swelling with the numbers of systemd-refugees. This certainly doesn't seem to be the case. A couple of rather obscure distros like Funtoo and Void are among the few distros that don't want to support systemd. Slackware is undecided on the issue, and Gentoo etc. support systemd, with a growing number of its users that prefer it to OpenRC.
Also no medium/major commercial non-systemd Linux distro have emerged this last couple of years, this is a strong indication that the paying costumers wants systemd, and doesn't care at all for the alleged superiority of SysVinit. Several companies made it clear during the Debian debate that they favoured systemd, none spoke for SysVinit or Upstart.
No wonder; systemd is great and it solves real world problems like daemon management and security much better than any other alternative.