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Devuan Releases Beta of Systemd-Free 'Debian Fork' Base System (devuan.org)
jaromil writes: Devuan beta is released today, following up the Debian fork declaration and progress made during the past two years. Devuan now provides an alternative upgrade path to Debian, and switching is easy from both Wheezy and Jessie. From The Register: "Devuan came into being after a rebellion by a self-described 'Veteran Unix Admin collective' argued that Debian had betrayed its roots and was becoming too desktop-oriented. The item to which they objected most vigorously was the inclusion of the systemd bootloader. The rebels therefore decided to fork Debian and 'preserve Init freedom.' The group renamed itself and its distribution 'Devuan' and got work, promising a fork that looked, felt, and quacked like Debian in all regards other than imposing systemd as the default Init option."
Seriously, who cares how fast it boots? Unless you're on some tablet type device I see no reason why boot speed should even be a thing. The old initscripts are plenty fast enough for my laptop even.
The issue that I have with Lennarts work is that it goes completely against the design philosophy of *nix that made it so great in the first place. It also broke a bunch of stuff that relied on the old behavior - a big no-no and an instant turn-off.
C|N>K
What I will say, however, is that after spending the time reading up on systemd and learning how to use it, how to write unit files and all that jazz, I really fail to understand what the furore over it is. My systemd machines are ready to go much faster than any bash-script based init system and writing a new unit file for some daemon that lacks one already is easy peasy.
The init capabilities of systemd aren't too bad. The "scripts" look pretty similar to many other init system alternatives and, for basic stuff, are fine. The problem is that systemd isn't an init system anymore. It has become a layer between the kernel and traditional userspace. *That* is why people hate it. Basically, RedHat has gained too much control over the Linux ecosystem and so has started ramming their agenda down the throats of all Linux users. If the systemd/PulseAudio/etc abominations were just confined to RedHat, no one would even vaguely care (except RedHat users). But, it's become increasingly difficult to avoid the garbage coming out of RedHat because, as I stated before, they have gained too much control and influence over Linux.
Yes, this, uh, adult, reasoned, calmly and rationally stated essay really instills confidence in the maturity and professionalism of the maintainers of this distribution.
(That son, I say that son, is a a a joke son, I say a joke.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It prevents it. The init part of systemd is just a small part of it. It has started to replace many (and a growing number) of core Linux userspace subsystems. It has gotten to the point where you may not be able to run the desktop environment you want without systemd. The generic, modular bits that systemd has consumed are now components that more and more pieces of software are depending on. In the very near future, it may not be possible to run a modern Linux desktop without systemd.
And, for what benefit? None that I've ever seen. There is nothing that I can now do with my laptop that I couldn't do before. But, there are plenty of things that I can no longer do since the introduction of systemd.
yep.
systemd's init functionality is fine, as good as (or better than) most other alternatives.
it even makes sense to have the control group manager as part of the init process (although even that should be optional if someone wants to run something else to manage control groups).
absolutely everything else that systemd does, though, (network setup, logging, crappy cron imitation, consolekit login services, etc etc etc) should be entirely separate, completely optional programs with good documentation (incl. API and protocol docs).
if systemd confined itself to just init services, nobody would bother hating it because there would be nothing to hate - it would be just one init option amongst many. probably a very popular option because, as init, it's pretty good.
There is a perception that it is a "borg" which keeps taking over more functionality and becoming a dependency for so many things that there is no choice but to use it, an example being Gnome. I don't know if this is fair or not.
This is effectively the crux of it. Everything else is just a symptom of this. People will make detailed technical analysis of the inner workings of systemd and that's cool and some of them are correct. But, bad technical decisions aren't that big of a deal until they start spreading across the system like a virus. Once systemd has infected everything (and, we are rapidly approaching that), it will be difficult or maybe impossible to cut out that cancer. We are right on the verge of being stuck with systemd and that's a very bad situation to be in.
I will note that maintainers of several unrelated distributions independently chose to adopt it, including Arch Linux. I mention Arch because A) they are famously in favour of a simple base system which you customise the way you want, B) I don't believe have anything to do with Red Hat (where the systemd creators come from), and C) they haven't been forced to switch by e.g. gnome because they don't require gnome or any other desktop.
Comments from an Arch developer on their forum: https://bbs.archlinux.org/view...
This is the second problem with systemd. It has polarized people to such an extent that it resembles a religion or US politics. You must pick a side and you must rabidly defend that side no matter what. To be fair, it's an issue worth having an opinion on but, your opinion definitely doesn't matter. You have distros with very finite resources (like Arch) and distros with effectively unlimited resources (RedHat). The smaller distros kinda have to eat whatever shit sandwich the larger distros serve up because they don't have the resources to do anything else.
We run SUSE SLES 12 with systemd on our 1020 node Cray XE6 and it works just perfectly. What a joke, "veteran unix administrators", it doesn't get much more complex than a 1020 node, 21,824 processor Cray XE6 with Nvidia Tesla on each compute node. Node management and integration with the job scheduler is significantly simpler than older versions. The older system was a mess of shell scripts, perl scripts, and who knows what else, the new system is all streamlined in a simple config file and few modules.
So you learned to do the easiest part and called good. 'grats. Now, consider my use case. I build a btrfs using RAID1 in a VM. I dettached one of the virtual drives to test things and rebooted the VM. Systemd dumped me to an emergency shell with the network down. Try as I might, even digging through the 100 or more low level config files kept under the rug I could see no way to show systemd the error of it's ways. And yes, I specified mount option degraded on the kernel command line and fstab, but systemd ignored it. All it knew is that it was prepared to wait forever for that no longer connected disk to come online and was not going to be made to see reason.
Naturally, I hit up google. Turns out many people had a similar problem with RAID1 volumes as root. No solution there, even from LP. Furthermore, the devs were stumped as to an approach to fix the problem. They considered it intractable and so WONTFIX. It never did get fixed as far as I can tell. The best solution on offer is to use SCRIPTING in the initfs to mount the RAID volume before systemd gets to run. Yes, SCRIPTING.
THAT is why I object to systemd. It's just too damned easy to find something is simply won't do as soon as you use a system in any manner that LP doesn't. I guess he doesn't do much with servers.
Now, if they would just keep their fingers out of all the pies I wouldn't care. You can use systemd and I'll stick to scripts. Alas, they insist on sticking their fingers in every pie through a pernicious knot of dependencies. For a while it seemed that the stronger the objections, the more things became dependent on it. That's why it took Devuan so long to purge it from Jessie.
Very ugly.
Oh and what do you call a text file? Strictly speaking it is a binary with a specific structure and can only be read with tools that can read that type of file.
Of which there are vastly more for plain ASCII text. In fact, Unix/Linux is famous for them. And people can read, search, and manipulate them under foreign OS's using tools common to those OS's.
Also, you don't have as much breakage with text files as you do with binary files. A binary file can become effectively unreadable very easily even on its native OS if a new OS version with a new file format comes out. A text file can be streamed straight to the hardware on virtually any printer.
It's also much, much easier to recover fragments of a broken text file than it is for a broken binary file. Something that's very valuable when a system is damaged and you need all the information you can get as fast as you can get it.