Wayland Ported To DragonFlyBSD (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Wayland 1.9 and the reference Weston compositor have been ported to DragonFlyBSD. Significant changes were made to get Wayland/Weston running, and you must either already be running an X.Org Server or be using the Linux-ported Radeon and Intel kernel mode-setting drivers, plus jump through a few setup steps.

Comments

I find it amusing

[ArchieBunker]

That systemd is such a hot item because it replaces the old init system. Why is this argument not used against X11? It has a code base spanning 4 decades now but we can't go all crazy with it and start a new model...

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

because it replaces the old init system.

That's just it. It doesn't JUST replace the old init system. If it just replaced the old init system, systemd wouldn't be a 'hot item', as you say.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Yada yada, yoda yoda. Get this. There are some of us that spend their nights and weekends making free software. You don't have to use our software. Distributions don't have to package our software. But they do, and no matter how many swear words you know is not relevant. The distributions make their own decisions and if you don't like that then you can start your own distribution with just the software you want. End of discussion.

Re:I find it amusing

[bluefoxlucid]

Old init ran init scripts. New init manages complex dependencies, makes sure the system state stays proper, journals failures, and generally does a lot of system component integration. People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And systemd runs init scripts as well .

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

It also wouldn't be AWESOME!

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like systemd, make your own distro that doesn't use it. Otherwise, you have no place to complain about what some other person chose to do with their distro.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow you should really climb off the fence on this one, you'll get splinters.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And it would be far less useful to the distros that adopted it if it were only an init system. But then again, you're like not a distro developer just an entitled whiner from the peanut gallery.

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

wrong, it would be properly maintainable and debuggable Unix-type subsystem if it only did that.

but poettering and his followers have urban sprawl and scope creep, building a monolithic bloated pile that is NOT the unix way and is a nightmare to debug

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

and has an ip forwarder, and ip masqaurading and firewall....god what a bloated pile of crap

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

because people could even install both X11 and wayland and run one or the other depending on what mood they're in. no lock-in to anything.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong, it would be properly maintainable and debuggable Unix-type subsystem if it only did that.

It's not wrong. There are dozens of alternates to SysVInit and yet none of them has the critical mass of systemd.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And so the dream of the united open source community marches on!!

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix is against monolithic programs? So then how do you explain the monolithic Unix kernel and crap like X11? Also, shouldn't you also be complaining about the Linux kernel? It's far more of a "monolithic bloated pile" than systemd could ever dream to be.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

There's no "lock-in" to systemd either. If you don't like systemd switch to one of the plenty of distros without it or create your own rather than simply whining.

Re:I find it amusing

[DarkOx]

Plenty of people are asking why we want to fork lift X out for something completely different. Lots of people are arguing the handful of real and actual problems that do exist with X can by solved by adding (some of which has already happened) a few more extensions and that if you don't care about the old X protocol stuff well don't use its mostly harmless to you just sitting there. So yes people are making that argument.

SystemD raised more neck hairs though for more people because, lets face it there just are not that many Linux desktops and nobody really cares much if a desktop PC hickups once and awhile Microsoft has proven that. I'd rather my desktop be rock solid but honestly if it does do something strange fix'ed with a reboot once or twice a year so frigging what.

Severs are different. Servers don't usual get X installer and probably won't get Wayland installed. So right there you have a lot of the most nervous folks not so worried about X / Wayland. Servers it matters a lot if anything goes A) wrong, B) I can't understand it *immediately* get it back up quickly, lastly C) determine a fix I can implement on my own to make sure it does not happen again. SystemD threatens that Wayland does not.
   

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Plenty of people are asking why we want to fork lift X out for something completely different.

And how many of them are current X.org developers? Because most of the Wayland developers are long time X.org and previously FreeX86 developers.

Lots of people are arguing the handful of real and actual problems that do exist with X can by solved by adding (some of which has already happened) a few more extensions and that if you don't care about the old X protocol stuff well don't use its mostly harmless to you just sitting there.

Then those "lots of people" should put up or shut up. On the other hand, the people who actually have been trying to do that with X.org for nearly a decade say its horrendous and thus that's why they're working on Wayland.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Obviously that should be *XFree86*.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of people make that argument every day. However the main difference between Wayland and systemd is that systemd does a lot more than the thing it replaces, but Wayland does a lot less than the thing it replaces. That's why systemd has been adopted nearly everywhere, but Wayland is still in development hell.

Re:I find it amusing

[organgtool]

Why is this argument not used against X11?

Because Wayland is being written with a clean, modular design that doesn't attempt to tightly couple a bunch of unrelated nonsense into it to create a complicated mess. Because Wayland is being written primarily by former X developers who have pushed X to its limits but have no choice but to start from the ground up to get modern features such as tear-free drawing. Because Wayland is capable of running X applications thanks to a compatibility layer. I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons that escape me, but these are just a few off of the top of my head.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And guess what! Thanks to people whining about it, weyland/weston now has RDP support, so now it has network transparency too and the only ones left against it are trolls!

Meanwhile, thanks to people whining about systemd incorporating everything and the kitchen sink, Lennart added systemd-shitty-dns-resolver-vulnerable-to-shit-bind-fixed-years-ago, like the systemd-resolved cache poisoning attack last year. It's one thing to say "my way is better" and then prove it, it's another thing entirely when you are so egotistical you don't bother to learn from any of the giants who have come before you, then fail hard in an avoidable way.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

However the main difference between Wayland and systemd is that systemd does a lot more than the thing it replaces,

Only because people falsely claim that systemd is just meant to be an alternate init system.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Thanks to people whining about it, weyland/weston now has RDP support

No, it was already going to include RDP support anyway.

Re:I find it amusing

[TheRealMindChild]

X was built with a client/server architecture paradigm. These days, the X server doesn't do anything, because the local client uses the local display directly, skipping the server altogether. At this point, all we really need is a compositor. Wayland fits nicely.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

>the people who actually have been trying to do that with X.org for nearly a decade say its horrendous and thus that's why they're working on Wayland.

And meanwhile, X.org continues to work perfectly well for all the rest of us. So these devs are free to waste their time in whatever way they like. No problem of ours, at all.
If (when?) they try and pull a systemd on us, on the other hand - then there will be words, and there will be forks. So do not get your hopes up, just yet. ;)

Re:I find it amusing

[chmod a x mojo]

Simple, the Kernel does one thing, that being be a kernel. Same with X11, it is a display server. They both do the ONE thing that they were designed to do, and do it well.... in the case of X11 it is debatable, but you can usually get some form of display running even if it is horribly inefficient. The UNIX philosophy is looked at two ways:
1 - many smaller programs that can be combined to do a task.
OR
2 - do one thing and do it well.

SystemD, what started out as an init system + service manager ( see how it's doing more than one thing from the get-go? ), now does init + service manager + DHCP + NTP + login + its own fucked up form of journaling + who the fuck knows what else was thrown in recently.

Bit of a difference there, no? And it's not like you can easily ( as far as I know anyways* ) pick and choose what "modular" parts you use without recompiling the whole damn thing. That also means any vulnerability in say NTP would require a full on recompile of the whole source instead of the "modular" NTP portion only.

*If it's not true, I would appreciate getting pointed in the right direction to see where I may be wrong...

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

X was built with a client/server architecture paradigm.

So is Wayland.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

If you weren't a fucking moron and a childish pussy, you would make ShitstemD opt in and get people to use it by not fucking shit up

Or instead of being a manchild you can just chose one of the other alternate distros without systemd?

Re: I find it amusing

[Ahnahmoley]

You must be new here. And to open source. "Whining" is everywhere and continuous. What sheltered life you have.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, the Kernel does one thing, that being be a kernel.

Which has nothing to do with it being monolithic or not.

Same with X11, it is a display server.

Maybe 20 years ago. It's far more than that these days.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

And meanwhile, X.org continues to work perfectly well for all the rest of us. So these devs are free to waste their time in whatever way they like. No problem of ours, at all.

That's because people like Keith Packard still bother to do X.org development alongside their Wayland work. Good luck when Wayland gets to a point that all the people like him jump ship en masse. You whiners will finally have to put up or shut up.

If (when?) they try and pull a systemd on us, on the other hand - then there will be words, and there will be forks. So do not get your hopes up, just yet. ;)

Uh huh. I seriously doubt anyone like yourself will be able to maintain X.Org to any decent degree like its current maintainers. If so, you whiners would already be current developers not just peanut gallery members.

Re: I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Yeah I must be new here. Hence why I've been posting here for far longer than your account has existed.

Re:I find it amusing

[PPH]

These days, the X server doesn't do anything,

What about receive connections from remote x clients and put them on the display.

Linux/*NIX is used for more than gaming. Shocking, I know. But you'll get over it.

Re:I find it amusing

[hairyfeet]

Wow its actually been a bit since I seen somebody go straight to the memes, thx.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

And yet even outside of gaming, only a tiny minority of people would use that feature since the vast majority of Linux applications don't support network transparency to begin with. Unless you truly think the mainstream Linux user is doing nothing but using XTerm all day (and they're not).

Re: I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Oh and, no, I'm not new here. This is New Here.

Re:I find it amusing

[PPH]

install both X11 and wayland and run one or the other

And what happens when some major app switches to the Wayland libs, leaving X networking behind? Sure, there's an X compatibility layer. But given the attitude of Wayland supporters ("nobody networks clients anymore, so lets throw this stuff out") I don't anticipate support for that feature to be long lived.

There are too many people running around, both in the systemd and Wayland camps who think that, because they don't do something or understand it, it just doesn't need to be done. Why don't we all take up a collection to buy them GameBoys or XBoxes and keep them away from important systems stuff?

Re:I find it amusing

[organgtool]

The problem is that systemd's functionality spans way beyond an init system or even a daemon management system. Sooner or later, Linux apps are going to be built on top of systemd functionality. Therefore you will be stuck switching over to systemd if you want to use those apps or hope that someone maintains init compatibility within those apps. And then projects based off of that software will start to depend on the systemd functionality, creating multiple layers of mess.

It all boils down to the fact that you can't stop devs from using systemd features despite the fact that they're poorly designed and maintaining forks that are compatible with non-systemd init systems will only work for so long before the task is too overwhelming. That's why there was such a battle against it being adopted by distros but that battle has been lost and resistance is now futile.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that systemd's functionality spans way beyond an init system or even a daemon management system. Sooner or later, Linux apps are going to be built on top of systemd functionality. Therefore you will be stuck switching over to systemd if you want to use those apps or hope that someone maintains init compatibility within those apps. And then projects based off of that software will start to depend on the systemd functionality, creating multiple layers of mess.

Boohoo. If you don't like it, create your own patchset to allow configuring the option. Developers are not obligated to care about your feelings.

It all boils down to the fact that you can't stop devs from using systemd features despite the fact that they're poorly designed and maintaining forks that are compatible with non-systemd init systems will only work for so long before the task is too overwhelming. That's why there was such a battle against it being adopted by distros but that battle has been lost and resistance is now futile.

Oh no! Shall I call the waaahmbulance?

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

But given the attitude of Wayland supporters ("nobody networks clients anymore, so lets throw this stuff out")

Then use the RDP feature that they implemented something like 2 years ago.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

There are too many people running around, both in the systemd and Wayland camps who think that, because they don't do something or understand it, it just doesn't need to be done. Why don't we all take up a collection to buy them GameBoys or XBoxes and keep them away from important systems stuff?

There are also too many people in the peanut gallery who feel that they are entitled to tell the developers of software what they should do while doing no work of their own.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

"systemd? In MY ass?"

It's more likely than you think.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why y'all retards be blamin' LP? He did not vote in Archlinux committee to switch to systemd. He did not vote in Debian committee to switch to systemd. He did not single handedly replace the whole init in Fedora, nor in RHEL for that matter. He did not force CentOS devs to blindly follow RHEL and implement systemd too. He did not coerce Novell to switch OpenSuSE to systemd. HE sure as hell did not coax Canonical into doing it...

So y'all who hate systemd should get those pitch forks and torches y'all be wavin' about and bring them to YOUR distros' committees, boards, beneficial dictators or whatever the government model that distro has.

But you know you can't. You can't do shit because you're not devs yourselves and can't do squat against what your distro gods do. So you cowardly direct your hate at LP, who just co-wrote the crap.

Re:I find it amusing

[Kjella]

Because Wayland is being written primarily by former X developers who have pushed X to its limits but have no choice but to start from the ground up to get modern features such as tear-free drawing.

Strictly speaking that's not true, from the Wayland FAQ (emphasis mine):

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that. It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. However, we have an option here of pushing X out of the hotpath between clients and the hardware and making it a compatibility option.

I guess the main reason Wayland doesn't take so much flak is that it's obvious the mission scope has vastly changed from the 1980s display server to the 2015 display server. And it's main deficiencies are most visible in the markets where it's barely present (desktop) or has been replaced wholesale (Android), while the init system seems like you're changing a winning team, honestly when was the last time init scripts was a deal breaker for anything? It has a much more "nice-to-have" feel to it or at least fixing corner cases most people never noticed.

Re:I find it amusing

[serviscope_minor]

The trouble with Wayland, or rather why I'm deeply suspicious of it is that some of the claims from the devs about wayland and X11---and bear in mind they're X11 devs too---are flat out wrong at best and deeply deveptive at worst. Why the need for a FUD attack? If Wayland is better it ought to win on merit, not FUD.

Tahe for example this article: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]

Going through one at a time.

1. Extensions are what X11 calls API updates. Wayland will get API updates too, so this is not an advantage of wayland beyond version 1.0.

1. A, B, C: Almost all extension version updates add new API calls and keep the old ones. Sending Foo 2.0 calls to Foo 2.2 works just fine. Not to say that versioning isn't a problem, but then fixing the API is apparently bad for X but nothing else.

2. Well core X11 is super simple and a tiny setup of Xinput 2. This leaves essentially 2 input systems left of any complexity, 2.2 and 2.0, and as far as I can tell 2.0 isn't actually separate from 2.2. So, basically X has one major input system which actually looks kinda similar to the Wayland one.

3. That's a misunderstanding of "mechanism not policy"

4. So Xorg and Xfree86 got a bit crazy and then got refactored. Apparently historical cleanups are a bad thing? This happens in any project of any age.

5. Apparently it's impossible to add a new API call for synchronisation because from (1) that X11 isn't allowed api updates unlike every other system.

6. Yeah OK, fonts are not great.

7A A badly designed chunk of Xorg is apparently a problem with X11 now. Oh and it's been fixed so it's not a problem at all. But apparently every misstep in one implementation of an X server fixed 5 years ago is a reson it's bad now.

7B That was pure fud in 2013 when it was written. Xrandr and monitor hotplugging has worked flawlessly for years.

7C Huh? There's been xrandr front ends for years which remember certain layouts. Hell, Arandr, the nice GUI point and click one in all the repos remembers layouts just fine.

7D That smells like bullshit to me. Unless the second monitor is a separate screen (X11 term for something little used now) they it'd be impossible for one to have compositing and one not. I've not heard of anyone using screens in years.

8 Yeah and real toolkits are poorer for it. The window tree is a really nice thing when you have latency. Because with tree'd systems the server remembers which sub-sub-sub window a mouse click went to, and you could ignore the absolute position. With a treeless system all you have to go on is the position.

With latency, if you click, then the display updates then it processes the click, your click goes not where you want, but where the GUI is now. This I find happens more often than I'd like in web "apps". With tree based systems, sure the widget moved, but the assignment of the click to the window was latency free, so your click ends up correctly on the now-moved widged.

IOW tree based systems are superior. Many toolkits abandoned it for compatibility with non tree based systems. What we have now is actually fundementally worse in high latency environments.

9 Yes this is finally a genuine, no-nuance flaw.

10 C this is not correct if you have a compositing window manager, because it can do whatever it likes with the final display.

10 D their solution is to make the compositor do all this shit in Wayland. That could be done equally well in X. Sure, the current convention has a small flaw, but X11 now supports the Wayland way too.

10 E just use the features of the compositing window manager. It intercepts all key presses and windows anyway.

So without getting into the merits or demerits of Wayland, it's disappointing to see the devs engaging in a colossal FUDstorm.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

The trouble with Wayland, or rather why I'm deeply suspicious of it is that some of the claims from the devs about wayland and X11---and bear in mind they're X11 devs too---are flat out wrong at best and deeply deveptive at worst. Why the need for a FUD attack? If Wayland is better it ought to win on merit, not FUD.

Great. So you're going to take over the maintenance burden then, right? Or are you just going to whine and complain and expect that they should care?

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot! You don't switch to another distro to install both X11 and Wayland.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Cool story, bro.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Even if this weren't about "free software", the point still stands. Just because Random Tard #349834 dislike systemd that doesn't obligate any distro or individual developer to actually care. Nor does it obligate them to support this random tard's tantrum.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the main reason Wayland doesn't take so much flak is that it's obvious the mission scope has vastly changed from the 1980s display server to the 2015 display server. And it's main deficiencies are most visible in the markets where it's barely present (desktop) or has been replaced wholesale (Android), while the init system seems like you're changing a winning team, honestly when was the last time init scripts was a deal breaker for anything? It has a much more "nice-to-have" feel to it or at least fixing corner cases most people never noticed.

SYSV-style init scripts still work fine if your needs are limited to starting up a set of daemons in a specified order at boot and shutting them down on power-off or reboot, on a server with fixed hardware. The problem is that I (and people like me) expect to be able to suspend my laptop, and on resume:

• The power status might have changed, requiring configuration changes
• The set of attached USB devices might have changed
• Other hardware may decide to re-enumerate itself in a different order
• The wired network might be unplugged but the laptop may be in range of various WIFI APs
• Significant clock time may have passed (triggering requirements such as backups etc)

It's hard to accommodate these sorts of complex state changes in an init system based around a small, strictly ordered set of runlevels. What you end up with by trying to support modern requirements is init scripts from hell: full of complex conditionals, invocations of 'sleep' that slow everything down but don't manage to fully eliminate race conditions and strange failure modes. Even that is not enough and then you get additional daemons polling for hardware / state changes and making changes to the system that aren't co-ordinated properly with each other or with init. People creating distros also need to try to ensure that everything works with different configurations, different packages installed and during upgrades.

Systemd is more complex than SYSV init because it is a more general approach to the problem of making a system respond to changes in its environment. This is why many distros have moved over to it - if a distro is trying to support more than the 1980s typical case of a 'static server that rarely needs to be rebooted', it is a huge improvement.

Re:I find it amusing

[serviscope_minor]

Pointing out disengenuous arguments is whining now? Is that the bes rebuttal you've got?

Now the amusing thing you miss is that you don't understand is that most of the "oh it's so bad" complaints are about the Xorg server architecture not so much the X protocol itself. You're promoting the people who made it a colossal mess (as they're Xorg developers) as the best way to not make a mess doing something similar. Interesting...

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you tell us how you really feel?

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Oh I understood everything. My point is, since you've definitely proven the Wayland developers as liars and incompetents then you're going to take over the maintenance, right? Why would you allow these incompetent liars to continue being the people running X.Org?

Re:I find it amusing

[CRCulver]

Care to name those "plenty of distros"? Gentoo and Slackware are the only two longtime distros that have resisted systemd, and beyond those, one can only name little-known flavours of Debian or Arch that are already facing problems trying to maintain a systemd-free port, and don't seem promising in the long term?

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

Sure.

Free/Open Source Operating systems without systemd in the default installation

GNU/Linux distributions

4MLinux (BusyBox)
Absolute Linux
Alpine Linux
Amazon Linux AMI
antiX
AUSTRUMI (Slackware based bootable live CD, to be run from RAM)
Calculate Linux
ConnochaetOS
Crux
DeLi(cate) Linux (legacy hardware)
Devuan
Dragora GNU/Linux Libre
Exe GNU/Linux
Funtoo Linux (Using OpenRC)
Gentoo Linux
While an option is provided to install systemd for those that want it, the default init system in Gentoo Linux as of May 2015 is OpenRC. If Portage is pulling in systemd, please read this Gentoo wiki article before removing Gentoo from this list. Other suggested reading, [1]
gNewSense GNU/Linux
GNU Guix
Linux from Scratch
Manjaro OpenRC Forum Wiki
Obarun (Arch/Runit)
Openwall GNU/*/Linux (Owl)
PCLinuxOS
Pisi Linux
Porteus
Puppy Linux
Refracta
RLSD
Sabotage Linux
Salix
Slackel
Slax
Slackware
Sorcerer Linux
Source Mage GNU/Linux (beta site)
SystemRescueCd (Gentoo/OpenRC based system rescue disk)
TLD Linux
TRIOS (Serbian)
Tiny Core Linux
TTYLinux
Vector Linux
Void Linux
Zenwalk

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool story bro

Re:I find it amusing

[thegarbz]

Sooner or later, Linux apps are going to be built on top of systemd functionality.

Then fund or start projects to build alternative libraries. Project's don't just lock into something for shits and giggles. They lock into something that provides functionality, i.e. cgroups. All that is needed is an alternative interface to cgroups and you're sweet again.

That's the beauty of open source, the ability to port applications as well as create multiple competing libraries.

Also systemd is neither and init system nor a daemon management system. It's a system management daemon. It's right there in the name "system" "d"

Re:I find it amusing

[serviscope_minor]

Why would you allow these incompetent liars to continue being the people running X.Org?

How precisely would I eject them? You do realise I don't own the site, right?

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

And since I know you'll complain about the list I posted above, simply make your own distro then. Or just leave Linux entirely. None of the distro makers have any obligation to care about your feelings about systemd when you aren't someone who puts in any work into maintaining the distro or financial supports it. You're just a whiner in the peanut gallery.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

But your suggestion requires actually doing work rather than whining about work that someone else is doing. That's why none of the distros listen to these whiners since they aren't actual contributors.

Re:I find it amusing

[thegarbz]

Actually it wasn't. They always said remote desktop was not within the protocol scope and entirely up to the client to support.
People said that won't work. They wrote a bit of test code that proves it did, and that's where it ended. RDP is not part of Wayland, but it is possible to implement with Wayland.

Re:I find it amusing

[Lunix Nutcase]

How precisely would I eject them? You do realise I don't own the site, right?

Fork it and maintain it yourself and make the current X.Org people irrelevant like they did to XFree86. Or you can sit back and criticize them while putting in no work of your own which means they can continue to write off your opinion.

Re:I find it amusing

[CRCulver]

I don't complain so much about your list above as your disingenuous posting style. Your point is valid that, if people don't like a Free Software option, they should try to contribute their own effort instead of complaining of what other devs are doing. But you know perfectly well that there are not "plenty of distros" that are successfully resisting systemd, you know perfectly well that most items in the list you posted are dodgy ports that have no longterm prospectives, and by posting such rubbish you only undermine the other points you are making.

Re:I find it amusing

[serviscope_minor]

Well, I take it by the way you have not addressed my comments that you do not disagree that they're spreading FUD.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

However the main difference between Wayland and systemd is that systemd does a lot more than the thing it replaces,

Only because people falsely claim that systemd is just meant to be an alternate init system.

Only because it was originally pitched as an alternate init system.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd does nothing but run other components by 'binding' them together with a new kind of language that describes dependencies and such. But systemd needs components to run with the systemd philosophy. It can still run the old init scripts, but they just run as one component. Because old tools that required init weren't updated by anyone to run on systemd, the tools were made by the systemd maintainers and were called with the 'd' attached to it as some kind of trademark, like the 'i' on Apple devices.

You can still make your own replacements for the 'd' components, you can even rewrite the old tools to follow the new systemd philosophy. You could even rewrite those old tools in such a way that they would support old school init and systemd with a recompile to give the option for a full blown old school init system with the latest software.

Nobody does it, because all those tools just do one thing and one thing only and there isn't really anything to improve. For the ignorant this looks as if systemd is one piece of binary blob that does everything, but in reality it is just a 'one tool does one job' bunch of components that are now bound together with a new way to describe dependencies and allows parallel loading because there is no longer a reliance on an out dated script single thread interpretor.

Re:I find it amusing

[PPH]

since the vast majority of Linux applications

UNIX applications in corporate environments. Linux being the desktop. At least Cygwin/X will still support TCP while you clowns gut Linux. The desktop was a neat dream while it lasted.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

That was done and all the whiners were happy that they had a distribution without PulseAudio, without Wayland, without Gnome 3 and without systemd!

But than they started whining because they had to work to make that distribution a success. So after a lot of whining they forked the distribution again and they have now a distribution without all those new software they whined about and with no work to do!

But now they are whining on Slashdot instead, because the fork without work to do didn't really do anything, they didn't even have a support forum because it was too much work.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

among the few apps that take advantage of net transparency we have ssh, which means available-by-default access to remote graphical apps in your current workspace. This has pluses and minuses over remote desktops, but it's a neat option to have.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Not many Linux desktops? When you look at the percentages in the market share, yes there aren't many Linux desktops. But when you look at the actual numbers, there are plenty of desktops.

It's like saying that Tesla or Ferrari is a failure because less than 1% of the car owners drive a Tesla/Ferrari. Success is not only about market share, but about being profitable and have growing user base. Open Source doesn't have to care about profits, only the companies that work with open source, and as long there are enough users and hackers, the software stack will keep on growing and improving.

Last week I was amazed about Windows. I had to install a Windows laptop and it couldn't do anything after the installation. I had to use another computer to download a thing called 'drivers', and had to go to different websites with all kinds of annoying adverts and lots of license agreements to download installation packages that were sometimes several hundreds MB, just to make the system work correctly.

Install the same laptop with Linux and everything works out of the box. That's how much Linux has changed. And that's not because nobody is using Linux, but because many people with the knowledge to write drivers use it as a workstation/hobby station/whatever station.

And with the declining desktop sales it will be more likely the professionals who keep on using desktop and laptop. And those professional are more likely to want total control over a system and use open source software. So while the amount of MS Windows computers might drop, the amount of Linux computers remains more stable. It's like the desktop that replaced the mainframe. But in reality there haven't been as many mainframes in use as today. The market share is probably below 0,01% in the total computing market, but the profits are still high.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

It is in fact the ONLY rebuttal he's got. See for yourself on Lunix's profile:

That's why none of the distros listen to these whiners since they aren't actual contributors.

You're just a whiner in the peanut gallery.

Or are you just going to whine and complain and expect that they should care?

There are also too many people in the peanut gallery who feel that they are entitled to tell the developers of software what they should do [...]

[...] You gonna go hang yourself over it? You gonna go overdose on some barbiturate pills and listen to Linkin' Park while you cry?

you whiners would already be current developers not just peanut gallery members.

Or instead of being a manchild you can just chose one of the other alternate distros without systemd?

Oh no. Are you gonna go slice your wrists and cry some more?

"If you disagree with me, you're just a whining manchild who should just kill themselves!"

This is the level of discourse on Slashdot.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it wasn't.

Actually it was. That's fairly important functionality that you're claiming the X11 developers, of all people, didn't consider despite them always talking about it.

They always said remote desktop was not within the protocol scope and entirely up to the client to support.

And they still say that, because it's true. It's not within the scope of the display protocol.

People said that won't work. They wrote a bit of test code that proves it did, and that's where it ended. RDP is not part of Wayland, but it is possible to implement with Wayland.

So they were right and "people" were wrong. The question is whether they were going to add RDP to the reference implementation anyway, and you're begging it.

Re:I find it amusing

[phantomfive]

I have the X11 book on my shelf, and it's about 300 pages long. Most people don't understand it. Nonetheless, there are a lot of criticisms. Generally when someone re-writes a project from scratch, it deserves to be criticized. But X wasn't particularly great to begin with. There were a lot of criticism even when it was written, calling it bloated, etc. The "Unix Haters" handbook has a whole chapter on the topic. So if it gets replaced, meh........hopefully it's with something better (which doesn't seem to be the case but whatever).

Systemd on the other hand, replaces an init that was so simple everyone could understand. Furthermore, systemd only has ~300k lines of code, so it's not too hard to navigate and find dislikeable things, either. People have been reading through the code and finding things to dislike.

Re:I find it amusing

[phantomfive]

That's a nice post.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

not not end of discussion

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

> And guess what! Thanks to people whining about it, weyland/weston now has RDP support

Bull fucking shit. Thanks to the people (or mainly one guy) who wrote the RDP support. The whiners had exactly zero effect.

Re:I find it amusing

[KGIII]

WTF? United? No, son, no... The dream has never been about unity (unless you mean the silly Unity from Cannonical). The dream has been about the exact opposite of unity. It has been about freedom of choice. There's no unity in FOSS. There are groups of united people but no universal thing - not even EFF or The Linux Foundation is the final authority. In fact, you - the user, are the final authority.

I'm not sure why you'd have that notion. It's exactly not that. You can, and should, find what works for you and are encouraged to work off code that's already been started so that you need less effort to make something that suits your individual needs. If express individuality and an atmosphere of independence is unity then I'm not sure where I need to go to buy a new dictionary.

Now there are united groups but there's no whole - there's no universal - there's no sense of unity other than a sense of community and that only goes so far. in fact, I'm an aficionado and an oddball to some extent. I'm not an open source zealot (even though I use and prefer it) but one who suggests you use what you want to use and what works best for you. Hell, I flit between distros and even code bases with nary a thought. There's no unity - there's freedom of choice and an encouragement to make what you need.

Re:I find it amusing

[KGIII]

Umm... It is opt-in? You opt to use a distro with or without it. You opt to not make your own. You opt to not take the time to learn to use it. You opt to not support those who do offer a distro without it. It, like everything else, is quite clearly an optional thing. You don't have to use SystemD. You have choices. You can even put your money where your mouth is and financially support a distro without it or help with the code or help with their adoption rates. You could even create and propose an alternative.

Or you could rant on /. if you want. Whichever's easiest, I suppose.

Anyhow, I'm really starting to enjoy GhostBSD. Anyone know if this will make its way to GhostBSD or if it's worth actually investigating? I'm not sure that I have much need for change - it just works for me. I'd kind of like to take GhostBSD out of the VM and onto the metal but I'm still learning and still finding things missing that I prefer to use and am unable to port on my own. For example, I may have to *settle* for Firefox instead of Opera. I understand there's an interpretation layer but I've not done any more looking than that. I've yet to try all that hard - I should probably just go with a bare metal install and force myself to use it exclusively for a few months.

Re:I find it amusing

[Trogre]

I support Wayland, but RDP is not network transparency.

Not even close.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, the Kernel does one thing, that being be a kernel.

But it doesnt adhere to the UNIX philosophy in doing that, it is monolithic in nature. By contrast systemd is a bunch of small programs and utilities that together form a management system, and it too does one thing, that being be a management system.

1 - many smaller programs that can be combined to do a task.

Managing the system is the task accomplished by the many programs that make up systemd.

2 - do one thing and do it well.

Well yes the kernel is a management of hardware systems and systemd is a management of software systems.

Re:I find it amusing

[KGIII]

A quick count and, and I'm not sure that this is either supporting or whatnot, I've used 11 of the distros in that list. Albeit in a VM, sure but some have made it to bare metal. The kicker is, I'm an OS whore. Sad but true... I jump between distros and often don't even install an OS but just run from a live disk. (I've got enough RAM and compute power to do that. Comfortably, too.)

So, I'm not sure if this supports your statement or detracts from it. However, some of them are fairly robust, have some history, and will likely be around for a while to come. Now, I'm not sure that they're all that popular (Ubuntu really seems to rule the popularity contest between it and its official flavors - not counting forks.) But there are options and some of them are viable. I don't prefer them - I'm actually in the Cannonical camp with Lubuntu as of late. Though, again, I'm just as likely to be using CentOS tomorrow.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix is against monolithic programs? So then how do you explain the monolithic Unix kernel and crap like X11? Also, shouldn't you also be complaining about the Linux kernel? It's far more of a "monolithic bloated pile" than systemd could ever dream to be.

Linux is modular, and open source. BSD as well. Windows is the monolith, and closed source.

Windows is a piece of shit by design, even before it became global spyware.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/lkmpg/2.6/html/
http://www.unix.com/man-page/linux/8/modprobe/
http://www.unix.com/man-page/linux/8/lsmod/
etc. modules. modular.

Anybody who wants to, at any time, can add/remove kernel modules and re-compile the kernel locally, specifically for any given machine(s). Remove any feature, add any feature. You can choose to only use code for actual hardware that actually exists in that machine. Removing any and all bloat was always a motivation to re-compile, especially when hardware wasn't nearly as fast as these days. The performance could be pretty much perfectly optimized. It was always fun to see how fast your machine would run with a stripped down kernel. A local compile of FreeBSD on a 486 33Mhz FSB one time took one of my machines almost 3 days (2 straight nights). When it was done? Sweet use of an old computer. Zippier than you would expect. Useful. Windows 3.1 on that same 486 was like a snail riding a tortoise.

Re-compile Windows? haha. Nope. Monolithic and closed source is just saying fuck you in a lot of ways.

Also, I see people in this thread talking about systemd. It is garbage by design. Avoid Redhat/Fedora/Ubuntu too. They are the Microsoft wannabe's. Lennart's code belongs in it's own fork only. It is a (currently reversible) mistake to become reliant on systemd code. It's cancer.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

But you know perfectly well that there are not "plenty of distros" that are successfully resisting systemd, you know perfectly well that most items in the list you posted are dodgy ports that have no longterm prospectives, and by posting such rubbish you only undermine the other points you are making.

If that is your metric then there are also not "plenty of distros" that are implementing systemd, most of them are equally dodgy ports that have no long term prospects. So I'm not sure what you're complaining about.

Re:I find it amusing

[KGIII]

Are you new? That's not only typical but considered highbrow around here. Usually we just screech and throw fecal matter at each other. At least this time we're using words.

Re:I find it amusing

[KGIII]

Am I mistaken or are you suggesting a return to the dumb terminal?

Actually, with so much computing being done in "the cloud" it really has started to look like a return to those days. Hmm... That which is old is new again. I am not, honestly, sure what side I am on assuming that I own and control the remote resources as well as the 'terminal' that is attached to it. It does seem like we're sort of returning to those days just with more local resources to work with the remote data, load more content, and cycle it faster.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And what happens when some major app switches to the Wayland libs, leaving X networking behind?

What do you mean "what happens"? That is up to you to decide: you use the Wayland libs or you pay the developer to support X networking, or (if it is open source) you implement X networking in it yourself or you dont use that app or whine about them not doing what you want. Obviously that last one isnt particularly productive.

But you know your question isnt a genuine one anyway because otherwise you wouldnt be using any applications for fear that "what happens if the developer stops supporting it altogether". So just STFU.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking garbage like you are putting huge headwinds to progress. Fuck you for breaking shit that works to make it "better" and leaving it a bullshit undocumented half broken or mostly broken state. Fuck you. And FUCK YOU for never testing your stupid broken shit.

And you know your disgusting buggy negligence you are injecting into once far more functioning FOSS software has at times lead to the deaths of others. Your garbage shit software and your horrible bugs are murderous. No warranty, express or implied. But YOU did it.

Re:I find it amusing

[phantomfive]

People prefer cobbled together over complex architecture.

That's an interesting point.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it was the massive FUD attacks from you and the other anti-Wayland zealots that has been the biggest problem in this whole debate.

"B-b-but it's not network transparent."

"It's reinventing a solved problem."

"B-b-but X forwarding is *way* better than RDP or anything else."

etc.

The graphics drivers were all moving to the kernel, and the rendering was all moving to the client, and clients were being programmed to toolkits, and X and went along with it and became mostly obsolete in the process.

Of course a rewrite is not good for the sake of being a rewrite, but in order to remove obsolete and unused code, and to close security problems, is absolutely acceptable.

Really anybody who lauds X's network transparency prowess cannot be taken seriously because its inability to run untrusted applications.

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

sounds like someone has forgotten to take their meds this week

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet where I work most people opt for using VNC instead of X forwarding. Shocking, but it actually works better!

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

X and kernel each do one thing?

all those systemd functions you mentioned are separate and replaceable binaries so you need to update your scant knowledge of systemd and work out the difference between systemd the binary and systemd the project (definitely unfortunate naming).

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

sounds like a way to build in job security

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet even outside of gaming, only a tiny minority of people would use that feature since the vast majority of Linux applications don't support network transparency to begin with.

Wait, what? How come I never noticed in all the years I have been using that feature?

To me it seems more likely that only a tiny minority of applications fails to work. At least I had never had issues with KDE related programs, Gnome on the other hand would go out of its way to break features that did not follow its branding so those programs not working could be purely out of spite.

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

"People have been reading through the code [slashdot.org] and finding things to dislike." - well, thats a surprise. people have differing opinions on coding styles. i'm shocked

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

you really need to get out of your moms' basement and get a life. you seem really wound up about nothing

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

From the Wayland FAQ

Is Wayland network transparent / does it support remote rendering?

No, that is outside the scope of Wayland. To support remote rendering you need to define a rendering API, which is something I've been very careful to avoid doing. The reason Wayland is so simple and feasible at all is that I'm sidestepping this big task and pushing it to the clients. It's an interesting challenge, a very big task and it's hard to get right, but essentially orthogonal to what Wayland tries to achieve.

This doesn't mean that remote rendering won't be possible with Wayland, it just means that you will have to put a remote rendering server on top of Wayland. One such server could be the X.org server, but other options include an RDP server, a VNC server or somebody could even invent their own new remote rendering model. Which is a feature when you think about it; layering X.org on top of Wayland has very little overhead, but the other types of remote rendering servers no longer requires X.org, and experimenting with new protocols is easier.

It is also possible to put a remoting protocol into a wayland compositor, either a standalone remoting compositor or as a part of a full desktop compositor. This will let us forward native Wayland applications. The standalone compositor could let you log into a server and run an application back on your desktop. Building the forwarding into the desktop compositor could let you export or share a window on the fly with a remote wayland compositor, for example, a friend's desktop.

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

"For the ignorant this looks as if systemd is one piece of binary blob that does everything, but in reality it is just a 'one tool does one job' bunch of components that are now bound together with a new way to describe dependencies and allows parallel loading because there is no longer a reliance on an out dated script single thread interpretor."

Unfortunately you could beat them over the head indefinite times with that explanation and they still won't understand it because they don't want to get it, they have painted themselves into a corner of ignorance that they cannot get out of without eating tons of humble pie.

Re:I find it amusing

[hairyfeet]

So you are admitting your software is actually WORSE than proprietary, since users can actually vote with their wallets and affect the outcome of proprietary whereas with FOSS all they get is the classic "its free you can't complain" meme and the finger? Good to know, thx.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be the wrong way to take it, though you're doing it intentionally. Linux Nutcase's point was to show that FUD spreading trolls like you are quick to complain, but the last to actually contribute, if at all. Anyone who's followed stories about Wayland on Slashdot has seen this from you before.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot comments have really gone downhill recently =P

Re:I find it amusing

[sjames]

So if I dump toxic waste in the park next to your house and point out all you need to do is clean it up if you don't like the stench, you're cool with that?

Re:I find it amusing

[PPH]

Because not many application hosts support it. They run Xlib xclients. So as long as the X compatibility feature continues to be supported, fine.

But I'm not holding my breath. Because the prevalent attitude seems to be if they don't understand how something works or why, throw it out.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

> Simple, the Kernel does one thing, that being be a kernel.

1. process management
2. memory management
3. security
4. syscalls
5. filesystem support
7. network support
8. misc. driver support

Yep. One thing, done well.

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

Yes there is, non-systemd distros have shim packages with systemd calls so the normal wares that now depend on systemd

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

You are holding it wrong. :-)

SystemD solves a lot of problems on a Desktop Linux, indeed. But it does it on a cumbersome way while (re)creating a lot of problems that was already solved, far from the Unix philosophy that was the very exact reason Linux and FreeBSD got through. We are now getting near the philosophy that dragged Microsoft (and us) into problems since de Win95 era.

Since some time ago, the distros are being pushed into cost reducing decisions. No one wants to take the burden to maintain complex packages - this demands specialized work-force that will cost more for someone (or would be took from profitable projects). That good, old times when a third world company could push could create and keep its own solutions are over, or near it.

The end-users, us, are the ones that will pay for this price, as usual. What, I admit, is somewhat deserved in the same sense Windows users deserve what they got - we delegate technicals decisions to be made by non (or incompetent) technicians.

In UNIX, there was always more of one way to do something. But nowadays, we decided to go on the Microsoft way

Re:I find it amusing

[sjames]

Be careful with that claim. Many people routinely run GUI probrams on remote machines that don't even have their own display. Most commonly, they use ssh's x11 forwarding.

Re:I find it amusing

[sjames]

WRONG! I have never seen an X application that won't run over a network connection to the X server on another machine.

There's that FUD thing again.

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

and there are also contributors who moreover have sys admin experience over hundreds of systems, whose common sense and experience is being ignored due to political methods employed by those with no engineering sense but who have large megaphones

Re:I find it amusing

[Ketorin]

You mean it needs to be separately enabled and or installed?

You know, for the past 20 years, all major X-distributions have come networking disabled by default. Yeah, its there, you may be able to (I've always been) enable it, but for sure it's not ideal. Lack of any model of sessions or the huge round trip delay of modern applications makes using it over the public internet pretty miserable. Plus one needs to set up an SSH tunnel for it separately, because X doesn't do real security either. ...Or they could just use Xvnc, like folks have been doing about equally long.

Also, DRI2 and various other common extensions don't work over network.

Re:I find it amusing

[Ketorin]

And it used to do a lot more, like load executables, and be a print server.

On the other hand, it does not do much of what its original strong points were: graphic primitives, no one uses those any more, only raw bitmaps prepared by various external libraries; fonts, people use Pango, device drivers, they are now in the kernel; remoting, now done by RDP and VNC and the list goes on, hence why Wayland is now actually viable.

Re:I find it amusing

[phantomfive]

Most people who like systemd like it because of the features it provides.
Most people who dislike systemd, dislike it because of the code quality.

You seem to like it, so I'm going to guess you have no understanding of the code quality, and only like the features.

Re:I find it amusing

[Ketorin]

Wow, what a good round-up and start collecting karma. You should sign up and I'd mod this message up if I had points.

Re: I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, your whole post contradicts itself. You say there is no lock in, but in order to not use it I have to either fork it, or use a distro that doesn't use systemd. That pretty much sounds like lock in to me. I really doubt you know what lock in means at this point.

If I have to switch my OS in order to avoid it, guess what? That's lock in.

Re:I find it amusing

[obscuro]

Can I have a legible process tree with that magic, please? I like to actually know what's going on. I guess I can call systemd-analyze with whatever options look fun, ps with "matching options(?)" and then pipe those through a filter/formatter that gives me a static look.... Then run that on a loop to see a near real-time update.

And then there's doing something about it.... because if I find something that's not working for me I get to find something to replace that part of systemD, replace it (with whatever labor that takes) and recompile!!!

That's a fair amount of work for a system administrator to do compared to looking at their processes, finding what's causing a problem and replacing it with a better solution. It adds a layer of complexity.

AND, the dependencies of various applications will still be looking for systemD and expecting everything it does. So when I replace that thing, instead of knowing it's on a list of possible dependencies for a given app, I'm on my own.

SystemD adds opacity and what it gives back in exchange requires a sea-change in every corner of the *NIX ecosystem or the net benefit is negative.

And it makes it feel like your diddling a registry key whenever you touch it. It has that dirty, built broken, fuck you if you don't like it, we'll surprise you wherever the fuck we want signal built into using it. You feel like committing to learning it's intricacies is a boat ride with a psycho whose just going to change every time you think things will calm down. You can just tell by the releases it will NEVER settle into being one predictable, reliable thing. It's built to keep surprising us all. I used to work for a Microsoft Gold Partner and I know that feeling.

Re:I find it amusing

[armanox]

If you didn't notice, Poettering works for Red Hat. And who wrote and maintains more Linux software then anyone else? Red Hat.

Re:I find it amusing

[armanox]

And plenty of us aren't using DRI2 or XVNC. There's a lot of legacy requirements out there you know, and being able to use X on my laptop to connect to IRIX or HPUX is quite nice, and very fast.

Re:I find it amusing

[Trogre]

What? No!

RDP is for full desktop sessions. X allows individual windows/programs/whatever to run on another client (ahem, sorry, server in X11 terms), without needing a separate desktop session. These are usually tunnelled through an SSH connection and for persistence started within an xpra session.

Re:I find it amusing

[Barsteward]

code quality style opinions have been a dung heap of nonsense for years, its always the last resort of trying to trash something or someone.

Re:I find it amusing

[phantomfive]

Uh.....no, some code is good, and some code is bad, and you know it.

If you've read the code and you like it, then say it. If you haven't then sit down while the grown ups talk, please.

Re:I find it amusing

[Ketorin]

Hum. That's true.

I wonder if it could be circumvented by setting something like Gnome terminal or krusader as the login shell instead of desktop environment's session manager. Maybe then a new program would be opened in its own window and not inside that hideous box. Or, it won't open at all. I think Xrdp doesn't do rootles.

How have you configured Xpra, do you run it all in the server or tunnel Xpra session over the tunnel? I tried to do it all in the server end when it was all new and flimsy (because the receiving end was a windows machine with Xwin server), but didn't get it running.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

There's more things that the AC missed. Not just about how the systems have changed, but also fundamental features of the system.

Init does a couple things, and does them badly. It is supposed to change the system from state A to state B, and it does this by starting or stopping processes. SysV init has very little information about...well, anything. It has a script to call, that may or may not respond to start/stop/restart/reload/etc and a PID file, which is a terrible terrible hack, but theoretically it's cross-platform. Hopefully it matches up with the process that wrote it, but there is no guarantee.

So on the one hand, you had flexibility. You can write whatever the hell you want in your scripts, and they will be executed in-order and no one will care much about how long this takes. On the other hand, you had deep issues with tracking processes and changing the system state, which is why init was only ever used for changing runlevels.

The (most recent) solution to this was cgroups, which provide process tracking and management features that, in a sane world, would have been written into the kernel in the first place. Suddenly we have the ability to manage processes, guaranteed by the kernel. So writing a service manager to do so is an obvious choice. A service manager should ideally have dependency management, and there's no reason in particular not to parallelize operations. At this point you have most of the functionality required by the system startup as well; this is because startup is merely a special case of changing the system state.

Changing from a random set of poorly-maintained scripts to an a more descriptive format with the information needed to resolve dependencies was an obvious choice: UNIX is about scripting, but also about rewriting scripts into more powerful C libraries. This is such an obvious benefit that OpenRC did it as well. However, since systemd was reliant on a Linux-only feature, cross-platform compatibility was a moot point, and so they abstracted the contents of the init scripts to whatever degree was possible.

These are all sensible decisions, starting from a fundamental new ability and following all the logical consequences of this. Systemd is the init system that would have been written if cgroups had been part of the kernel 20 years ago, and unsurprisingly it resembles the service managers found in other UNIXes. It does continue the trend of pounding nails into the coffin of POSIX and interoperability, but that's hardly a new trend, and systemd will happily run any POSIX-compliant init script that you choose to maintain. The Linux community however has mostly decided not to be held back by the lowest common denominator of UNIX compatibility. Linux is its own OS and there is nothing particularly wrong with it having its own service manager. In addition, the consolidation of scripts into libraries means that the 'plumbing layer' has more information about how the system is changing (as the AC mentioned) and can either react sensibly or provide better tools to the user to be able to do so.

Unfortunately, this is a big change. All kinds of cruft have been built around the old way of doing things, in many cases predating the Linux kernel. "Shell scripts were good enough for my Granddaddy (except for the Great Crash of '81), and they're good enough for me!" Thousands of UNIX administrators have traded for years on their ability to write scripts, and the thought that scripts are not the best way to boot a system is anathema. For now, OpenRC seems to be treading a fine line between the new requirements and functionality, and cross-platform compatibility. Frankly, I don't see the point, but I'm not going to tell the developers what to do with their time. From my knowledge of the alternatives and my experiences as a programmer, I think that systemd is making correct decisions. I definitely think that anyone who doesn't know init from their elbow should be using systemd.

Re:I find it amusing

[Ketorin]

All true. But to be fair, what really ticks some people (bit me included) is how the systemd folks decided to piggypack all the other things, what they later have started to call "coreOS" with the original "systemd". Sure, they are all somehow related to the process of bringing the system up and maintaining daemons and almost all can be left out if decided. Given it's essentially a Redhad backed project, it will come with it all and I suspect Debian leaves most of it out.

Which all good the either way. The Linux ecosystem have survived from worse misteps if mistep this be.

Re:I find it amusing

[thegarbz]

Yeah that's totally the same thing.

idiot.

Re:I find it amusing

[Anonymous Coward]

> There are too many people running around, both in the systemd and Wayland camps who think that, because they don't do something or understand it, it just doesn't need to be done. Why don't we all take up a collection to buy them GameBoys or XBoxes and keep them away from important systems stuff?

You realise that the people behind the Wayland project are the people that have been working on X11 for 2 decades right?

If you want networked client support then YOU make it. The power of open source! because NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THAT FEATURE SO STOP WHINING OMG...

Re:I find it amusing

[unixisc]

Thanks to people whining about it, weyland/weston now has RDP support

No, it was already going to include RDP support anyway.

How about VNC?

Re:I find it amusing

[unixisc]

Speaking of which, does Wayland flip the meanings of client and server the way X always did?

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

No, I'm going to use technically superior modular solutions engineered for each of those cases, the Unix way

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

systemd does nothing but run what should be unrelated modular functions from a badly designed bloated monolithic blob. The ignorant such as yourself do not understand this, but instead spew words imagining that the mere conferring of a description somehow magically makes a poorly engineered non-unix pile of constructs a proper subsystem

Re:I find it amusing

[rubycodez]

Amusing when people having experience adminning toy / PC /hobbyist systems imagine themselves in a place to proclaim what point of view is "igornant" when arguing against those that administer hundreds of systems and have decades of experience in Unix and the Unix philosophy. Serious admins think systemd is bloated pile of rubbish that interferes with debugging of problems

Yah!

[Galactic Dominator]

GNUBSD now with more GNU!

Re:Yah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god none of this stuff has any GNU / GPL crap in it. Stay away garbage.

Wayland is for luddites

[Anonymous Coward]

Modern BSD users use windowing systems with apps.

All this talk of Wayland.

[truck_soccer]

What of Yutani?

RDP is NOT a replacement for network transparency

[billstewart]

RDP is simply not an adequate substitute for a network-transparent window system. Yes, it'll let you do some things badly, and other things mediocrely, but that's about it. And I haven't seen any evidence that the Wayland folks understood that early on, so I haven't kept up with Wayland when there's working X.Org.

My condolences

[morgauxo]

My condolences to any DragonFly users that cared about good features like network transparency that this current generation of coders think are archaic. It would seem the infection is spreading.

Re:My condolences

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS, if I had a nickle every time somebody does the "blabla network transparency blabla" crap.

Is there anybody in this discussion who can tell me exactly what program they're using that will be keeping them on X, why they think this program will be rewritten for Wayland, and why RDP or an X11 compositor for Wayland falls short of the moving "network transparency" goalposts?

I admin my servers over SSH. Another person I know insists on webmin for reasons I don't comprehend, but hey. The only time I have ever used X's "network transparency" was just to learn about it and go "gee, that's neat." On the other hand, I don't want or need network transparency sitting between windows that are rending on the same fucking system they're running on, namely, my workstation.

Why do you need network transparency for locally running programs?

Let me put it another way. It's neat that network transparency is built into X. However, as modern widget sets have evolved it's pretty much gone disused. Sure, you can run a modern KDE or GTK program over the network, but you're still schlepping bitmaps around the same as RDP! Did you know RDP can be used to view a single window?

As I see it, "network transparency" should not be part of whatever's involved in making my terminal window appear on my monitor. I'm not exactly running a thin client. And I like my eye candy, thankyouverymuch. Network transparency is an independent concern to the "whatever's involved" in a world that is no longer mostly thin clients. I want a display system that does one thing and one thing well: combining a bunch of buffers from different sources and showing them on my screen. I don't want a display system with loads of cruft, most of which isn't even used by modern widget sets.

Let me make a comparison: as far as I can tell, this "network transparency" you apparently can't live without being baked into the protocol sounds a lot like pulseaudio, a craptastic sound server written by a completely incompetent ass. If they've solved the latency problem of introducing at least 1 second of lag for local audio sources, more power to them, and that would make the comparison even more apt. The X11/Xorg folks have done a lot to enable my shiny eye candy, but it's a giant fucking kludge.

Now, if somebody wants to display a buffer from a program running on another computer, that's fine by me even if I don't understand why one would want to do that. There's even no reason that other computer need graphics hardware or needs to be running a logged-in desktop, just like X. I am having trouble imagining what these nebulous scenarios that you folks who supposedly use X's network transparency on a day-to-day basis could possibly be, and I am having even more difficulty imagining why Wayland won't be able to fulfill that need better than X11.

Please, tell me what program and scenario you need this "network transparency" for. It had better be a program that uses something like TK or Motif. Otherwise, the bad news is that your "network transparency" is just RDP done poorly and inefficiently.

tl;dr When I think of using a GUI application over the network, I think of the Windows world and shudder.

Re:My condolences

[morgauxo]

What RDP?

So some Wayland developer hacked some sort of RDP support into Weston a couple years ago and posted that all the remote X users should shut up now because he has solved their problem.

Go ahead. Try to actually use it. Google it. You get one lousy Howto which isn't even about remote Wayland desktops, it's about Wayland on Tizen. It's how to do RDP on a smartphone OS that nobody actually uses!

But... anyway. Yup! I've even tried to use Wayland RDP. No luck.

"I admin my servers over SSH."
me too
" Another person I know insists on webmin"
interesting anecdote although I don't know how it's applicable. I haven't seen that in years! I assumed it was dead by now.

I would never use X (or Wayland) to admin a server. I don't think any knowlegable person would. If servers are all Linux is to you then why do you even care about Wayland vs X? Are you installing GUIs on your servers?

  I use an X terminal to give my workstation a second head in a different room. I see no indication that I can do that on Wayland or will ever be able to.

"tl;dr When I think of using a GUI application over the network, I think of the Windows world and shudder."

Funny. When I started using Linux the only way to remote Windows GUI was to spend a whole bunch of money on a third party product called PC Anywhere. The fact that Linux/X supplied that function for free was part of why I switched! Windows remote desktop came out a year or so later.

Wonder when the other BSDs will follow

[unixisc]

So far, haven't seen FreeBSD come up w/ any plans. Actually, this should be more of a PC-BSD project as far as FreeBSD goes. Dunno whether either NetBSD or OpenBSD will be interested. But good work, DragonFly!!!