The Debian leadership has already announced that systemd will remain a hard dependency for nearly all graphical applications, and no "systemd-lite" will be offered -- Debian has already deprecated its systemd-shim package that was meant to offer similar functionality to uselessd.
You say that as if it's a bad thing that stuff can be made to work well together if it's developed together.
The way in which systemd components "work together" is through a series of interfaces that inherit little of the Unix tradition, and a lot of people would prefer to keep that Unix tradition. Systemd's command-line arguments are weirdly phrased, documentation is not a priority for systemd developers at this time so many manuals and HOWTOs are already out of date, logging is drastically different from how it used to be, and perfectly reasonable technologies that people have long trained in such as cron are being removed from the systemd because Lennart Poettering wants his init system to cover all that functionality to. It's a mess.
I have not tested but it looks like you can swap it out for something else on at least Debian:
While Debian ostensibly offers other init systems, it is really only suitable for certain types of installations like headless servers. Installing graphical applications under Debian is now likely to require systemd. Even the GIMP now pulls in systemd because it depends on dbus, and the Debian maintainers have made systemd a dbus dependency.
Only moderately so. The only Gnome application I use knowingly is gparted and that should not be to difficult to move to a different toolkit.
But you know that you are not everyone, that there are other people with other setups even within the fairly small community of *nix fans, right?
Also, the Gnome toolkit is not Gnome with its insane dependency on systemd and its broken desktop and a lot of other foolishness from apparently inexperienced designers. The toolkit is also much more stable.
For a few years now, functionality has been moved from libgnome and related libs into GTK+ (which is an acronym for the Gimp ToolKit, by the way). Furthermore, ostensibly GTK+-only apps like GIMP have systemd (through dbus) and pulseaudio (through libgegl) dependencies on a huge number of distros now. Even if one avoids the GNOME desktop by running the window manager of your choice, one may still have to deal with issues arising from GNOME development.
GNOME is a lot more than a window manager, it's a set of applications too. I run Enlightenment as my window manager, but I use GNOME applications like Shotwell, Evince and gucharmap. Each of those individual applications has undergone changes based on goals pursued by the desktop project as a whole, and even GIMP (historically not a GNOME application) has been affected by the evolving GNOME philosophy. Lots of people who don't use the GNOME desktop use a few GNOME applications, so the direction of the project still concerns them.
Really, why do Gnome developers find it so hard to allow users to change things to their likings anyway?
Gnome's reduction of customizability began in the early millennium when it partnered with some large companies who had carried out formal UI studies and found that for the vast majority of users, options only confuse them. Yes, power users like being able to tweak everything, but there are already a number of *nix graphical interfaces for nerds, and why shouldn't ordinary people get a desktop for them too? Furthermore, a niche that GNOME was chasing was the corporate desktop, where system administrators would decide how everything would work, not end users (this goal also led to the use of gconf to hold settings and allow one to roll them out en masse).
While many Debian users dislike GNOME, Debian developers have always had a strange attraction to GNOME, and that goes beyond the little cabal that was hellbent on making systemd the only option. Maybe it is just intertia from the days when GNOME had a more palpable connection to GNU. Had the larger community of developers not been really keen on having GNOME as the desktop, that small group would not have been able to push systemd through so easily.
People fork distros all the time, it's not as dramatic as you make it sound.
Forking distros based on systemd would be dramatic. In the past, the Debian base was easily extendable to new needs, so one got a proliferation of distros like Ubuntu, Mint and Bodhi. However, someone today looking to extend Debian cannot simply remove systemd and keep everything else. Systemd is so integrated into the new Debian architecture that systemd opponents would have to start their own distro from scratch.
You also have Gentoo and other distros based on it not using systemd, like Funtoo.
While I've used Gentoo and enjoy some aspects of it, it hardly compares to Debian. Gentoo has never shaken off its reputation as at best a distro for people who want to spend a lot of time getting to know the internals of their system, and at worst as a ricer community. Debian and distros derived from, on the other hand, were able to make major inroads in the government and corporate sector.
You could also work with uselessd, whether on the project itself or work on adapting a distro to use it.
A few days ago the Debian administration ruled out any use of a systemd "substitute" (cancelling its own systemd-shim project for desktop users) and now requires systemd whole hog.
I haven't like the changes he's caused in Linux, but none of those things are the way one should deal with it. If you don't like where Linux is going, fork things and make it the way you like.
It's one thing to fork a single tool, but it's quite another thing to fork an entire distribution, one which already has complex organization like a legal registration and funds in the bank, and which has slowly gained hard-won recognition in government and business circles. Debian, all of the Debian-derived distros, OpenSuse and Arch have adopted systemd, and those who oppose systemd can't just create a distro of such maturity and respect overnight. Sure, Slackware and the *BSDs are left, but losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.
Perhaps you have got lost in this thread with its series of replies and misunderstand the topic. My argument is solely that Columbus is remembered and talked about more than the Norsemen because his journeys ultimately had a much greater impact on world history through the Spanish military and political power he brought to the New World. That's all, and I think that's a reasonable explanation for his continued prominence in accounts of history and in popular culture.
Discrimination in hiring based on an employee's discharge status is illegal in some states. I hope you wouldn't run afoul of that. In any event, I (whose DD214, it bears mentioning, specifies honourable discharge) and others who left after DLI mainly moved on to university and spent a few years pursuing degree(s), and by the time we finished that long process, the 24 months or less of our lives spent in the military might not even have had to be explained to a employer. Plus, I left the United States right after I was discharged and in my adopted home employers would have no access to any records mentioning me in military service at all.
So, leaving the military early isn't the barrier to a career that some might expect. I suspect a lot of people, even the ones who had messy psych discharges that were the talk of the detachment, are making more money than I am. The sort of people drawn to DLI also tend to be crafty and resourceful, well, at least some of them.
How did you simply decide to leave the military after they paid for boot camp and a year+ of intense language training? I had a friend who declared himself a conscientious objector after DLI and got out. He was viewed as an oath breaker by his peers and not remembered fondly.
I left as a CO. Perhaps some didn't remember me fondly, but I still keep in touch with and get on well with many people from my DLI days, I can't complain.
In any event, so many people left after language training that my own case would hardly seem unusual: the discharge rate for DLI graduates seemed through the roof, fully half of the people I arrived with from boot camp left right after language training. Some declared that they were gay (instant discharge in 2001). Others faked or deliberately incurred a psychological breakdown, or deliberately failed a drug test. Considering that a CO in those days had to go through a year-long bureaucratic process with formal hearings, show active support from church and NGOs, and spend all this time waiting in the drudgery of standing watch or cleaning every day, I'd like to think I was given some credit as a sincere person who took the hard way out.
Increasing power efficiency in individual devices comes up against the fact that one has more devices now than in years past. People today have a television and a computer and a phone. While smartwatches haven't caught on yet, they may, and wearable electronics in general looks to explode. Not only do those devices require power, but even low-power devices generate a great deal of carbon at the manufacturing stage.
I served in the Navy and trained as a cryptolinguist (Mandarin Chinese), though after my language training I decided military life wasn't for me and left for academia. I've kept in touch with a lot of my former service members who stayed in for their whole 4-year or 6-year enlistment, and it amazed me to see how almost none of them were able to transition to similar employment in the civilian world. On the language side, the sort of texts they were working with were limited and not at all like the business communications and government forms that drive the civilian translation market. On the technology-using side, they may have been whizbang operators of specialist military software, but they didn't get more experience in e.g. Office than anyone else out there. Consequently, my peers either entered whole different fields (one Chinese linguist became a marriage counselor) or entered IT only after doing a whole 4-year university degree in the civilian world to make up for what they lacked.
The military might train you to do things, but they might not compare to what the civilian market wants. And sure, military people have a reputation for working under pressure and learning new skills, but in this day and age ever fewer civilian employers have the patience to keep paying you while they wait for you to learn new tricks.
Indeed, I have had a look. And as large as those were, they pale next to the territory that the Spanish were able to seize with a few decades from Columbus.
It's extremely disingenuous of you not to cite alongside these the immense controversy over Columbus's claim. It's far from settled that Columbus actually visited Iceland.
Icelandic Norse still had that knowledge for example, and Icelandic sources dated to the late 1400's mention him visiting there and talking to local sailors and traders
It's important to note that Marco Polo wasn't writing a book about his experience. He casually narrated his experiences to da Pisa, and da Pisa published this account with a boatload of poetic license and interpolation of other, more sensational claims about the Orient.
To summarize, people who have visited other places *do* talk about those differences, no matter how long they have spent in those places.
Again, I disagree. Having lived in Eastern Europe for many years, what I tend to include in any account of life here to people elsewhere can differ markedly from what foreigners consider important. If I describe Romania to someone who has never been, I usually wouldn't mention the Roma people, because they simply don't strike me as such a prominent aspect of the country that they wouldn't have to compete for space in my account with numerous other aspects of the country. And yet, for so many foreigners, gypsies are something they would well-nigh demand in any account of the Balkans.
If you look at the 15th-17th century exploration texts, almost sll of them mention special drinks that the natives have.
And a distinctive quality of those texts is that they were written as works of scholarship by people involved in exploration of the New World. Marco Polo's account, however, was published by da Pisa along with other Europeans' claims about China.
None in Polo, but he does have tales of lizard people.
And most scholars believe such a fantastical claim to have come from da Pisa, not Marco Polo.
As already pointed out here by myself and others, that's hardly a convincing argument on its own. Every country has a food or drink it consumes regularly, but expatriates may not necessarily mention it in their accounts of live abroad to people back home, whether for lack of space in their tale or simply because they have simply become so used to the matter that it no longer feels worth mentioning. It is unreasonable to expect Marco Polo to have mentioned (or da Pisa to have included in his manuscript) every single thing about China that inexperienced foreigners -- some of whom have dedicated time and effort to cataloguing omissions -- think important.
Yep, life in the Americas was a Bunny Life. The next tribe over the hill enslaved your women
You might think yourself clever, but your retort only confirms my point above. Violence and political domination before Columbus was only "the next tribe over the hill" (or at least another tribe a limited geographic area). Lacking ships, horse, and steel, no one indigenous tribe could have had such a wide impact and held so much territory as the Spaniards starting from 1492.
I figure they must have been actively denying Eratosthenes for being a pagan or something. Some people were like that back then.
Byzantine scholars did not deny pre-Christian figures simply for being pagans. The canon of Byzantine schools relied to a great extent on pre-Christian writers; Aristotle, Plato and the Neoplatonists were cornerstones, and works by many less famous Greek figures have survived to our time in large part because of Byzantine transmission. The learned, in a tradition going back to Justin Martyr, did not sense any conflict between most pre-Christian literature and Christianity.
He (essentially) wrote a book about China, and didn't mention chopsticks, foot-binding, or tea?
And those minutiae of fashion or dining are exactly the sort of details that today expatriates may well leave out if they were asked to recount life abroad.
But does mention a race of men who had dog-heads instead of human-heads?
Marco Polo's account was set down not by Marco Polo himself, but by Rustichello da Pisa, who is known to have also added other European stories of the East. At this particular point in history, belief in races of people somewhere out there with e.g. dog's heads, with faces in their chests, or with a single leg was common in Europe, and this may well be da Pisa's own interpolation.
He also claimed to be governor of Yangzhou
In the new book by Vogel that I cited, Elvin (who wrote the preface), notes a longstanding controversy about whether Polo held some kind of office in Yangzhou, or whether he simply stayed there, the Italian words for these two activities being similar enough that an error in transmission is understandable.
While the Vikings were in North America first and had a few tangles with the Skrælings, Columbus was the first to enslave the indigenous inhabitants, forcibly convert them and use them to extract precious metals. Because Columbus was serving the centralized Spanish state with its missionary zeal and interest in mining, not a small group of Norse freeholders who just wanted to be left alone and farm, his visit marks the start of catastrophic social upheaval in the Americas, and so it's understandable that he remains so prominent a figure.
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The Debian leadership has already announced that systemd will remain a hard dependency for nearly all graphical applications, and no "systemd-lite" will be offered -- Debian has already deprecated its systemd-shim package that was meant to offer similar functionality to uselessd.
Sorry, that should have read "are being removed from the system".
The way in which systemd components "work together" is through a series of interfaces that inherit little of the Unix tradition, and a lot of people would prefer to keep that Unix tradition. Systemd's command-line arguments are weirdly phrased, documentation is not a priority for systemd developers at this time so many manuals and HOWTOs are already out of date, logging is drastically different from how it used to be, and perfectly reasonable technologies that people have long trained in such as cron are being removed from the systemd because Lennart Poettering wants his init system to cover all that functionality to. It's a mess.
While Debian ostensibly offers other init systems, it is really only suitable for certain types of installations like headless servers. Installing graphical applications under Debian is now likely to require systemd. Even the GIMP now pulls in systemd because it depends on dbus, and the Debian maintainers have made systemd a dbus dependency.
But you know that you are not everyone, that there are other people with other setups even within the fairly small community of *nix fans, right?
For a few years now, functionality has been moved from libgnome and related libs into GTK+ (which is an acronym for the Gimp ToolKit, by the way). Furthermore, ostensibly GTK+-only apps like GIMP have systemd (through dbus) and pulseaudio (through libgegl) dependencies on a huge number of distros now. Even if one avoids the GNOME desktop by running the window manager of your choice, one may still have to deal with issues arising from GNOME development.
GNOME is a lot more than a window manager, it's a set of applications too. I run Enlightenment as my window manager, but I use GNOME applications like Shotwell, Evince and gucharmap. Each of those individual applications has undergone changes based on goals pursued by the desktop project as a whole, and even GIMP (historically not a GNOME application) has been affected by the evolving GNOME philosophy. Lots of people who don't use the GNOME desktop use a few GNOME applications, so the direction of the project still concerns them.
Gnome's reduction of customizability began in the early millennium when it partnered with some large companies who had carried out formal UI studies and found that for the vast majority of users, options only confuse them. Yes, power users like being able to tweak everything, but there are already a number of *nix graphical interfaces for nerds, and why shouldn't ordinary people get a desktop for them too? Furthermore, a niche that GNOME was chasing was the corporate desktop, where system administrators would decide how everything would work, not end users (this goal also led to the use of gconf to hold settings and allow one to roll them out en masse).
While many Debian users dislike GNOME, Debian developers have always had a strange attraction to GNOME, and that goes beyond the little cabal that was hellbent on making systemd the only option. Maybe it is just intertia from the days when GNOME had a more palpable connection to GNU. Had the larger community of developers not been really keen on having GNOME as the desktop, that small group would not have been able to push systemd through so easily.
Forking distros based on systemd would be dramatic. In the past, the Debian base was easily extendable to new needs, so one got a proliferation of distros like Ubuntu, Mint and Bodhi. However, someone today looking to extend Debian cannot simply remove systemd and keep everything else. Systemd is so integrated into the new Debian architecture that systemd opponents would have to start their own distro from scratch.
While I've used Gentoo and enjoy some aspects of it, it hardly compares to Debian. Gentoo has never shaken off its reputation as at best a distro for people who want to spend a lot of time getting to know the internals of their system, and at worst as a ricer community. Debian and distros derived from, on the other hand, were able to make major inroads in the government and corporate sector.
A few days ago the Debian administration ruled out any use of a systemd "substitute" (cancelling its own systemd-shim project for desktop users) and now requires systemd whole hog.
It's one thing to fork a single tool, but it's quite another thing to fork an entire distribution, one which already has complex organization like a legal registration and funds in the bank, and which has slowly gained hard-won recognition in government and business circles. Debian, all of the Debian-derived distros, OpenSuse and Arch have adopted systemd, and those who oppose systemd can't just create a distro of such maturity and respect overnight. Sure, Slackware and the *BSDs are left, but losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.
Perhaps you have got lost in this thread with its series of replies and misunderstand the topic. My argument is solely that Columbus is remembered and talked about more than the Norsemen because his journeys ultimately had a much greater impact on world history through the Spanish military and political power he brought to the New World. That's all, and I think that's a reasonable explanation for his continued prominence in accounts of history and in popular culture.
Discrimination in hiring based on an employee's discharge status is illegal in some states. I hope you wouldn't run afoul of that. In any event, I (whose DD214, it bears mentioning, specifies honourable discharge) and others who left after DLI mainly moved on to university and spent a few years pursuing degree(s), and by the time we finished that long process, the 24 months or less of our lives spent in the military might not even have had to be explained to a employer. Plus, I left the United States right after I was discharged and in my adopted home employers would have no access to any records mentioning me in military service at all.
So, leaving the military early isn't the barrier to a career that some might expect. I suspect a lot of people, even the ones who had messy psych discharges that were the talk of the detachment, are making more money than I am. The sort of people drawn to DLI also tend to be crafty and resourceful, well, at least some of them.
I left as a CO. Perhaps some didn't remember me fondly, but I still keep in touch with and get on well with many people from my DLI days, I can't complain.
In any event, so many people left after language training that my own case would hardly seem unusual: the discharge rate for DLI graduates seemed through the roof, fully half of the people I arrived with from boot camp left right after language training. Some declared that they were gay (instant discharge in 2001). Others faked or deliberately incurred a psychological breakdown, or deliberately failed a drug test. Considering that a CO in those days had to go through a year-long bureaucratic process with formal hearings, show active support from church and NGOs, and spend all this time waiting in the drudgery of standing watch or cleaning every day, I'd like to think I was given some credit as a sincere person who took the hard way out.
Increasing power efficiency in individual devices comes up against the fact that one has more devices now than in years past. People today have a television and a computer and a phone. While smartwatches haven't caught on yet, they may, and wearable electronics in general looks to explode. Not only do those devices require power, but even low-power devices generate a great deal of carbon at the manufacturing stage.
I served in the Navy and trained as a cryptolinguist (Mandarin Chinese), though after my language training I decided military life wasn't for me and left for academia. I've kept in touch with a lot of my former service members who stayed in for their whole 4-year or 6-year enlistment, and it amazed me to see how almost none of them were able to transition to similar employment in the civilian world. On the language side, the sort of texts they were working with were limited and not at all like the business communications and government forms that drive the civilian translation market. On the technology-using side, they may have been whizbang operators of specialist military software, but they didn't get more experience in e.g. Office than anyone else out there. Consequently, my peers either entered whole different fields (one Chinese linguist became a marriage counselor) or entered IT only after doing a whole 4-year university degree in the civilian world to make up for what they lacked.
The military might train you to do things, but they might not compare to what the civilian market wants. And sure, military people have a reputation for working under pressure and learning new skills, but in this day and age ever fewer civilian employers have the patience to keep paying you while they wait for you to learn new tricks.
Indeed, I have had a look. And as large as those were, they pale next to the territory that the Spanish were able to seize with a few decades from Columbus.
It's extremely disingenuous of you not to cite alongside these the immense controversy over Columbus's claim. It's far from settled that Columbus actually visited Iceland.
Cite this, please.
It's important to note that Marco Polo wasn't writing a book about his experience. He casually narrated his experiences to da Pisa, and da Pisa published this account with a boatload of poetic license and interpolation of other, more sensational claims about the Orient.
Again, I disagree. Having lived in Eastern Europe for many years, what I tend to include in any account of life here to people elsewhere can differ markedly from what foreigners consider important. If I describe Romania to someone who has never been, I usually wouldn't mention the Roma people, because they simply don't strike me as such a prominent aspect of the country that they wouldn't have to compete for space in my account with numerous other aspects of the country. And yet, for so many foreigners, gypsies are something they would well-nigh demand in any account of the Balkans.
And a distinctive quality of those texts is that they were written as works of scholarship by people involved in exploration of the New World. Marco Polo's account, however, was published by da Pisa along with other Europeans' claims about China.
And most scholars believe such a fantastical claim to have come from da Pisa, not Marco Polo.
That should have read "it wasn't a creative writing exercise".
As already pointed out here by myself and others, that's hardly a convincing argument on its own. Every country has a food or drink it consumes regularly, but expatriates may not necessarily mention it in their accounts of live abroad to people back home, whether for lack of space in their tale or simply because they have simply become so used to the matter that it no longer feels worth mentioning. It is unreasonable to expect Marco Polo to have mentioned (or da Pisa to have included in his manuscript) every single thing about China that inexperienced foreigners -- some of whom have dedicated time and effort to cataloguing omissions -- think important.
You might think yourself clever, but your retort only confirms my point above. Violence and political domination before Columbus was only "the next tribe over the hill" (or at least another tribe a limited geographic area). Lacking ships, horse, and steel, no one indigenous tribe could have had such a wide impact and held so much territory as the Spaniards starting from 1492.
Byzantine scholars did not deny pre-Christian figures simply for being pagans. The canon of Byzantine schools relied to a great extent on pre-Christian writers; Aristotle, Plato and the Neoplatonists were cornerstones, and works by many less famous Greek figures have survived to our time in large part because of Byzantine transmission. The learned, in a tradition going back to Justin Martyr, did not sense any conflict between most pre-Christian literature and Christianity.
And those minutiae of fashion or dining are exactly the sort of details that today expatriates may well leave out if they were asked to recount life abroad.
Marco Polo's account was set down not by Marco Polo himself, but by Rustichello da Pisa, who is known to have also added other European stories of the East. At this particular point in history, belief in races of people somewhere out there with e.g. dog's heads, with faces in their chests, or with a single leg was common in Europe, and this may well be da Pisa's own interpolation.
In the new book by Vogel that I cited, Elvin (who wrote the preface), notes a longstanding controversy about whether Polo held some kind of office in Yangzhou, or whether he simply stayed there, the Italian words for these two activities being similar enough that an error in transmission is understandable.
While the Vikings were in North America first and had a few tangles with the Skrælings, Columbus was the first to enslave the indigenous inhabitants, forcibly convert them and use them to extract precious metals. Because Columbus was serving the centralized Spanish state with its missionary zeal and interest in mining, not a small group of Norse freeholders who just wanted to be left alone and farm, his visit marks the start of catastrophic social upheaval in the Americas, and so it's understandable that he remains so prominent a figure.