As said in another comment, the question is not really for still under warranty devices.
Reasons Apple might have are no concerns to the customers. Even worse with Cars? Cars company have already been fined for pulling this kind of crap (Renault Scenic with headlights bulbs that could not be changed without removing front shields of the vehicule, etc). It is surely going towards this. But that does not make it right.
Now you mention "specific" tools. You mean "non standard". I think we know enough the benefits of using standards and the reason some people avoid standards, it is common issue in computer related business. Not making it right too.
If I'm buying a Rolls Royce, I clearly think I paid enough to have the right to full ownership of the vehicule. Including specs and required info to fix it.
Years (decades) ago, if I remember well, there was in some RedHat install some comparative speech about how cars would be if they were proprietary software: no possibility to open the hood and check the engine bay. Are you suggesting that it should be that way? What about... freedom?
The question is not why would someone want to fix things by himself or by a shop he trust but why do you want to prevent people from able to do so.
If you bought a Rolls Royces Wraith, for the price you paid, dont you at least deserve to get the specs and required information to fix it, if perchance you'd like to? Should not that be a basic rule of business and acquisition?
Starting point would be to ackowledge crimes figures in the USA and admit a police officer is more likely to kill a young black person carrying a weapon in a high crime rate area refusing to follow an order than a white grandma sipping a tea at home or a white male sitting on his ass posting anonymous comments on internet.
So Justice is racist in america, that's is a fact, he?
Good that you are nice and comfy behind your internet access, not really risking your life in any way: that is probably how someone can deliver such a swift "justice".
"Also wrong. Not a single piece of major software doesn't work on non-systemd systems."
Last time I checked, upower (working without functionalities is not working). upower is not major. But KDE power management is (was ?) done by upower. So power management in KDE does not, at least without workarounds. An example among others. I wont make a catalog, just to point out that your argument is kind of flawed. (when you write "That's the problem with nasty hacks to try and make a system look like it's in control. When the system actually gets control the hacks become useless" I am under the impression you are clueless about the topic)
"Starting a system and letting it be is 80s era OS design. Continual system management is what it's about. systemd is NOT an init system, it's a system management daemon, it's right there in the name."
You cannot claim systemd is not an init and yet say that people should not complain because it is just a change of init.
I was fine with the notion of an init system. I am not interested in this continual system management why I managed to find broke in my uses cases already a few time.
"You're not allowed to shit on someone who doesn't realise one single thing while at the same time writing large parts of the fundamental parts of an OS"
Reality check: I am. Fact is I liked this OS better before he touched it. Fact is I am using now distros that does not contains the changes he made. But dont make it personal. It is not about one person. And I am perfectly untitled not to trust someone that find "rm -f/foot/." is not a problem. Because that was the point you apparently missed, the problem is not that they guy is clueless about it but the fact that, because he was clueless about it, he decided we should not care. Well, it seems I rarely share view with this guys about what matters. So I can only welcome people doing something else, like Devuan does.
systemd was adopted on technical merits? Probably. Do these technicals merits affects me? I tried and used systemd before any distribution adopted it. Then I noticed it broke stuff I relied on and wanted to switch back to another init, because why not, eh? And then I found out people around (like KDE, like provided earlier) remove code and functionalities of software because it would make a duplicate with systemd. So switching back was no longer an easy option.
And many of these functionalities are way beyond the scope of an init system. It is almost a system. So that, for me, itself, raise quertions.
The rm -rf/foo/. might be insignificant if we were talking about a guy that contributes to an init system. It is quite different when it is about one of the guy that have a say on the system that gradually all other software depends on. As you said "underpinnings of a large part of the OS". It is not about an init anymore.
Fact that a new init system is welcome does not mean that it is so great to have a new system on top of GNU/Linux, much more than an actual init system.
When considerable amount of software regress (upower, etc) because their functionalities are now handled by systemd, in an effort of rationalization, for distros, it does not make much sense not to use systemd, because it forces them to chase all these regressions that are being made day after day. Which mean working just to keep things as they were, instead of improving anything.
And it is not like a new thing in the libre software community, to write a blank check to some crowd (Helixcode, Eazel, etc) due to marketing and promises more than results while there was obvious warning sign to where it would, in the end, lead (and which it did - kind of joke to have GNOME, part of GNU, led by people that ultimately were releasing proprietary software).
I wont get in details about sound. In the past, it was shitty to set up but once it was set, it was working reliably. Not my feeling right now. At least, old audio system was not providing functionalities while advising not to use them (PulseAudio as a system daemon). Here there is a pattern about the development process (writing code you want people not to use? why? because you need to pretend there is no regression?).
Finally, what is the meaning of your last sentence? Is it not allowed not to enjoy systemd until you wrote yourself some systemd? I need to be president of the USA to have an opinion about president USA ? I need to be famous singer to like or not to like some famous song? WTF.
Funny, there is just before another anonymous comment, reply to Bruce Perens, that seems to think the choice of Devuan is about being a member of a community.
Ahem, but isn't it the same argument we hear about systemd: if all distros use it, so it must be good?
Funny thing, when you do not use it, things no longer work. Things that worked for decades. Because the code that was there before was removed (remember David Edmundson from KDE, concluded that "In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... ).
So, from a distro perspective, not using it mean doing the extra work to make things work as they did before. Work to get nothing more than what was before. Work for nothing, in short. Who wants to afford that? Because it is not meant as an alternative but a replacement for all.
Now, does that benefits to the end user? Well, as long as the replacement suits your needs, no problem. When it breaks, that is another story. And, then, how the Poettering and his gang manage things is quite important. When Poettering write "I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf/foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?", not only it shows lack of knowledge (annoying considering how much his decisions can affect GNU/Linux main distros), it shows lack of concern about other people priority. And, here, we can laugh about it because he is so obviously wrong (as shown in the comments, tests about rm -rf/foo/.* and rm -rf/). But what when it is not an issue with such an obvious answer? Well... Guess.
That is unfortunately a serious concern. A question I asked in 2015 here https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... and I am afraid situation is only worse now.
And sometimes people using GNU/Linux since 20 years and know what they want and are not up to some change that decreased their productivity for benefits that does not matter to deal.
What is even a Mac vs PC vs Linux since all these are PC-based nowadays? I find bad choice of words vaguely amusing.
Funny, I remember the whole httpd inside a chroot quite straightforward. And managing containers with LXC, for instance, without systemd, works just fine as well. LXC did make managing multiple systems a whole lot easier. I do not see how this topic even relates to systemd.
For the record, I started using systemd in 2012 ( https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... ), early enough for a project started in 2010, and, at that time, was baffled by bootup time. I went away in 2015 after trying systemd on many boxes : some stuff just stopped to work, or did not work as I expected it to work and I decided it required way too much extra work for me without any massive benefit, considering that I am not starting up machines that often ( https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... ). So I really do not share your feeling it made things simpler. Maybe it has many benefits, but the one I noticed were less important that the extra trouble.
It is funny to talk about this rip. Anyway, we are back to square one. Something that was working before has been removed to make room for systemd. To make room for systemd, the system is being made unusable otherwise.
I sincerely hope advocates of this change really understand what it implies in the long run.
You cannot help people being suspicious with the scope of systemd. As you put it out, there is some good in rewriting software, drop antique flaws. But if you consider the many things systemd is actually replacing, it is kind of off putting.
If you hit a problem, then you'll have to debug it. And debugging issues with systemd provided tools looked to me as annoying as handle MS Windows crash.
Aside from bugs, obviously some regressions are to be expected. But they should be limited. If not, the software should not even be put in production. NetworkManager was a nightmare (cf. https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... )./etc/dhcp/dhclient-*-hooks.d/ were ignored. NetworkManager proposed it's own/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ . But to have something portable (ie working without NetworkManager), the only option was to write such hooks in/etc/network/if-up.d and/etc/network/if-down.d. But even these were not properly handled by NetworkManager calling themselves from a script in/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ What does it have to do with systemd? Well, systemd-networkd was put in production without ifup/ifdown http://xmodulo.com/switch-from... Add to that "Predictable Network Interface Names" http://www.freedesktop.org/wik... and you get the feeling that someone is toying with your system. Silently, suddenly I no longer had some eth0 and eth1. Because they felt I could have problem "it might very well happen that 'eth0' on one boot ends up being 'eth1' on the next. This can have serious security implications, for example in firewall rules which are coded for certain naming schemes, and which are hence very sensitive to unpredictable changing names.". To avoid that, I lost eth0 and eth1, as if this did not have serious implications either. They decided "the classic naming scheme for network interfaces applied by the kernel" is no good for them and changed it. They have plenty of good ideas.
That one example among other. I repeat myself , you cannot help people being suspicious with the scope of systemd. We can see they thought about a lot of stuff and have lot of good ideas. Nonetheless, the amount of changes they are implementing is overwhelming. And they change many things that are not broke in first place. There is absolutely no middle ground. Right now, it is with systemd and all it claims as it's territory or completely without. It is bound to divide.
It is strange that you talk about "non-systemd distros" as if they were defined until then by this.
What are the "non-systemd distros" that are crumbling? If anything is crumbling, it would be more "systemd distros" that get considerable amount of developers forking, founders resigning, etc, not to mention users looking toward BSDs.
Also, was it obvious since years that systemd would go in so many direction and that, wherever it goes, code would be throw away? What is then to support? Isnt it a joke in the end, to support alternative to systemd that actually have to do exactly what systemd does in order to be actually any good?
pm-utils is the example. Was it obvious that upower would throw support for pm-utils? Why was it discarded? Wasn't it discarded because, as pointed at by Edmunson "adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit"? So what is the joke about writing alternatives when it is clearly that systemd cannot be optional (meaning that alternative must really be systemd compatible, and not the contrary)
"Instead of facing realities and start working on solving stuff, the non-systemd users whine and bitch about systemd while making elaborate conspiracy explanations for why things suddenly no longer works as expected. Sure, self-victimization is easy, just accuse the bad systemd developers for everything and absolve yourself for having any share in why stuff is bit-rotting."
Who talks about victims? Who talks about whining? I'm fine, thanks you. It is not really as if we were in a situation where desktop environment on GNU/Linux mattered much. It is not desktop environment that made GNU/Linux popular. At all. There are practically inexistant, if you really loves facing realities. They have a bunch of users. Nothing else. If they can afford too loose more of this bunch in the name of "reality", why not. I'm not sure it is for their benefit. I started using KDE with KDE 1. But I also used Enlightenment, GNOME 1, WindowMaker, Fluxbox, XFCE and many other, I dont feel tied. There are parts of KDE I like and I'd enjoy being able to continue using it and continue to recommend it to other users. I'm not sure it will be actually possible because, you see, I'm facing the reality, that systemd alternative right now is another systemd. Hence today topic. I had hopes that Devuan could be enough. Now, after one year, I'm suspecting it could not. Not because of the "non-systemd distros" people, as you name it. But because if the game is rigged. "In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit": it says it all. Thrown away code, no benefit if optional. It is pretty clear what it implies.
Well, apparently even the founder of Debian felt he had to move away in this context https://lwn.net/Articles/62189... so I dont think that is a simple as you describe it.
Also, I think there is a misunderstanding about non-systemd packages. Currently, systemd take a place that no init system had. It replaces many parts and software and other software are being made to depends solely on this one. Maintaining non-systemd packages does not mean keep in order what existed before, but writting alternatives to systemd wherever it decides to go.
This powerdevil/upower is an example. There is no going back to pm-utils for upower, even though it used to support it. Now, you need either to use systemd or some ConsoleKit2 that would behave in a similar fashion.
Basically, it looks like maintaining non-systemd packages would mean making a copy of systemd. That looks neither feasible nor sensible. Why would people interested in a systemd-free system write another systemd?
There is "no best way of both worlds". Edmunson wrote it "allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit". There is no throwing away of code and non optional dependancy that allows such a happy ending.
(slang meaning "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves", what words are you referring to?)
As you like grammar, you know that you could take apart pieces of the sentences between commas. Is really "bricks that worked for years without now just get ruined" so hard to understand. At all.
Note that your proposed sentence does not have the exact same meaning. I'm not talking about "systems" and I'm not saying they no longer works. I'm talking about parts, bricks somehow ("n 1: rectangular block of clay baked by the sun or in a kiln; used as a building or paving material"), that are getting ruined ("damage irreparably"). It is much more subtle. It is not a whole that is break down, just a crumbling wall.
We could suggest, if it helps, to write "bricks that worked for years without systemd now just get ruined".
Funny thing is the question is not about getting new stuff, that stuff. Just keeping running what is there up. But what is there is removed because it is easier to have done by systemd people, which in turn are quite happy to be able to remodel everything according to their feeling.
And now, according to you, people should devote time or money not even to implement new stuff, but to write a systemd alternative that would do everything systemd does, in a similar and compatible way (because otherwise there would be no benefits for the desktop environments).
Should I pay to get suspend/hibernate? Should it be rewritten once again?
I'm not expecting grand developments for KDE in 2016. Just keeping the same set of features say of KDE 3, from 2002, would be good.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, since we are doing benchmarks on the fly.
Two runs:
real 0m4,547s
real 0m4,505s
Not even the latest Firefox. Addons included. Not even SSD (well, some hybrid drive). And aging AMD FX-6300.
Somehow I really wonder what do you do to get Firefox to start in 24 seconds. Ask Intel for a refund. Or ask the NSA/FSB to unhook your rig!
As said in another comment, the question is not really for still under warranty devices.
Reasons Apple might have are no concerns to the customers. Even worse with Cars? Cars company have already been fined for pulling this kind of crap (Renault Scenic with headlights bulbs that could not be changed without removing front shields of the vehicule, etc). It is surely going towards this. But that does not make it right.
Now you mention "specific" tools. You mean "non standard". I think we know enough the benefits of using standards and the reason some people avoid standards, it is common issue in computer related business. Not making it right too.
If I'm buying a Rolls Royce, I clearly think I paid enough to have the right to full ownership of the vehicule. Including specs and required info to fix it.
Years (decades) ago, if I remember well, there was in some RedHat install some comparative speech about how cars would be if they were proprietary software: no possibility to open the hood and check the engine bay. Are you suggesting that it should be that way? What about ... freedom?
The question is not why would someone want to fix things by himself or by a shop he trust but why do you want to prevent people from able to do so.
If you bought a Rolls Royces Wraith, for the price you paid, dont you at least deserve to get the specs and required information to fix it, if perchance you'd like to? Should not that be a basic rule of business and acquisition?
You are calling bullshit on a thread dedicated to God mode. Are you even reading before posting?
Note that running KDE or PulseAudio without systemd God daemon is not supported.
Starting point would be to ackowledge crimes figures in the USA and admit a police officer is more likely to kill a young black person carrying a weapon in a high crime rate area refusing to follow an order than a white grandma sipping a tea at home or a white male sitting on his ass posting anonymous comments on internet.
Swift justice thanks to "anonymous coward"!
So Justice is racist in america, that's is a fact, he?
Good that you are nice and comfy behind your internet access, not really risking your life in any way: that is probably how someone can deliver such a swift "justice".
"Also wrong. Not a single piece of major software doesn't work on non-systemd systems."
Last time I checked, upower (working without functionalities is not working). upower is not major. But KDE power management is (was ?) done by upower. So power management in KDE does not, at least without workarounds. An example among others. I wont make a catalog, just to point out that your argument is kind of flawed.
(when you write "That's the problem with nasty hacks to try and make a system look like it's in control. When the system actually gets control the hacks become useless" I am under the impression you are clueless about the topic)
"Starting a system and letting it be is 80s era OS design. Continual system management is what it's about. systemd is NOT an init system, it's a system management daemon, it's right there in the name."
You cannot claim systemd is not an init and yet say that people should not complain because it is just a change of init.
I was fine with the notion of an init system. I am not interested in this continual system management why I managed to find broke in my uses cases already a few time.
"You're not allowed to shit on someone who doesn't realise one single thing while at the same time writing large parts of the fundamental parts of an OS"
Reality check: I am. Fact is I liked this OS better before he touched it. Fact is I am using now distros that does not contains the changes he made. But dont make it personal. It is not about one person. /foot/." is not a problem. Because that was the point you apparently missed, the problem is not that they guy is clueless about it but the fact that, because he was clueless about it, he decided we should not care.
And I am perfectly untitled not to trust someone that find "rm -f
Well, it seems I rarely share view with this guys about what matters. So I can only welcome people doing something else, like Devuan does.
systemd was adopted on technical merits? Probably. Do these technicals merits affects me? I tried and used systemd before any distribution adopted it. Then I noticed it broke stuff I relied on and wanted to switch back to another init, because why not, eh? And then I found out people around (like KDE, like provided earlier) remove code and functionalities of software because it would make a duplicate with systemd. So switching back was no longer an easy option.
And many of these functionalities are way beyond the scope of an init system. It is almost a system. So that, for me, itself, raise quertions.
The rm -rf /foo/. might be insignificant if we were talking about a guy that contributes to an init system. It is quite different when it is about one of the guy that have a say on the system that gradually all other software depends on.
As you said "underpinnings of a large part of the OS". It is not about an init anymore.
Fact that a new init system is welcome does not mean that it is so great to have a new system on top of GNU/Linux, much more than an actual init system.
When considerable amount of software regress (upower, etc) because their functionalities are now handled by systemd, in an effort of rationalization, for distros, it does not make much sense not to use systemd, because it forces them to chase all these regressions that are being made day after day. Which mean working just to keep things as they were, instead of improving anything.
And it is not like a new thing in the libre software community, to write a blank check to some crowd (Helixcode, Eazel, etc) due to marketing and promises more than results while there was obvious warning sign to where it would, in the end, lead (and which it did - kind of joke to have GNOME, part of GNU, led by people that ultimately were releasing proprietary software).
I wont get in details about sound. In the past, it was shitty to set up but once it was set, it was working reliably. Not my feeling right now. At least, old audio system was not providing functionalities while advising not to use them (PulseAudio as a system daemon). Here there is a pattern about the development process (writing code you want people not to use? why? because you need to pretend there is no regression?).
Finally, what is the meaning of your last sentence? Is it not allowed not to enjoy systemd until you wrote yourself some systemd? I need to be president of the USA to have an opinion about president USA ? I need to be famous singer to like or not to like some famous song? WTF.
Funny, there is just before another anonymous comment, reply to Bruce Perens, that seems to think the choice of Devuan is about being a member of a community.
Cannot it be about picking a set of software?
Read carefully "On a mildly related note, of feature creep". It does not mean "on a ultimately related note, about systemd".
Ahem, but isn't it the same argument we hear about systemd: if all distros use it, so it must be good?
Funny thing, when you do not use it, things no longer work. Things that worked for decades. Because the code that was there before was removed (remember David Edmundson from KDE, concluded that "In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... ).
So, from a distro perspective, not using it mean doing the extra work to make things work as they did before. Work to get nothing more than what was before. Work for nothing, in short. Who wants to afford that? Because it is not meant as an alternative but a replacement for all.
Now, does that benefits to the end user? Well, as long as the replacement suits your needs, no problem. When it breaks, that is another story. /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?", not only it shows lack of knowledge (annoying considering how much his decisions can affect GNU/Linux main distros), it shows lack of concern about other people priority. /foo/.* and rm -rf /). But what when it is not an issue with such an obvious answer? Well... Guess.
And, then, how the Poettering and his gang manage things is quite important. When Poettering write "I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf
And, here, we can laugh about it because he is so obviously wrong (as shown in the comments, tests about rm -rf
"poettering locked and limited conversation to collaborators on 17 Apr"
Ah yeah, smart move.
That is unfortunately a serious concern. A question I asked in 2015 here https://linux.slashdot.org/sto... and I am afraid situation is only worse now.
And sometimes people using GNU/Linux since 20 years and know what they want and are not up to some change that decreased their productivity for benefits that does not matter to deal.
What is even a Mac vs PC vs Linux since all these are PC-based nowadays? I find bad choice of words vaguely amusing.
Funny, I remember the whole httpd inside a chroot quite straightforward.
And managing containers with LXC, for instance, without systemd, works just fine as well. LXC did make managing multiple systems a whole lot easier. I do not see how this topic even relates to systemd.
For the record, I started using systemd in 2012 ( https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... ), early enough for a project started in 2010, and, at that time, was baffled by bootup time.
I went away in 2015 after trying systemd on many boxes : some stuff just stopped to work, or did not work as I expected it to work and I decided it required way too much extra work for me without any massive benefit, considering that I am not starting up machines that often ( https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... ). So I really do not share your feeling it made things simpler. Maybe it has many benefits, but the one I noticed were less important that the extra trouble.
Since it's obvious that there was no conviction of 3 years in jail for 12 €, why not updating the article?
=> http://urlhosted.graphicore.de...
Though, Thunderbird support for CalDav and CardDav is still missing. Most other mail client support these.
It is funny to talk about this rip. Anyway, we are back to square one. Something that was working before has been removed to make room for systemd.
To make room for systemd, the system is being made unusable otherwise.
I sincerely hope advocates of this change really understand what it implies in the long run.
You cannot help people being suspicious with the scope of systemd. As you put it out, there is some good in rewriting software, drop antique flaws. But if you consider the many things systemd is actually replacing, it is kind of off putting.
If you hit a problem, then you'll have to debug it. And debugging issues with systemd provided tools looked to me as annoying as handle MS Windows crash.
Aside from bugs, obviously some regressions are to be expected. But they should be limited. If not, the software should not even be put in production. NetworkManager was a nightmare (cf. https://yeupou.wordpress.com/2... ). /etc/dhcp/dhclient-*-hooks.d/ were ignored. NetworkManager proposed it's own /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/ . But to have something portable (ie working without NetworkManager), the only option was to write such hooks in /etc/network/if-up.d and /etc/network/if-down.d. But even these were not properly handled by NetworkManager calling themselves from a script in /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/
What does it have to do with systemd? Well, systemd-networkd was put in production without ifup/ifdown http://xmodulo.com/switch-from...
Add to that "Predictable Network Interface Names" http://www.freedesktop.org/wik... and you get the feeling that someone is toying with your system. Silently, suddenly I no longer had some eth0 and eth1. Because they felt I could have problem "it might very well happen that 'eth0' on one boot ends up being 'eth1' on the next. This can have serious security implications, for example in firewall rules which are coded for certain naming schemes, and which are hence very sensitive to unpredictable changing names.". To avoid that, I lost eth0 and eth1, as if this did not have serious implications either. They decided "the classic naming scheme for network interfaces applied by the kernel" is no good for them and changed it. They have plenty of good ideas.
That one example among other. I repeat myself , you cannot help people being suspicious with the scope of systemd. We can see they thought about a lot of stuff and have lot of good ideas. Nonetheless, the amount of changes they are implementing is overwhelming. And they change many things that are not broke in first place.
There is absolutely no middle ground. Right now, it is with systemd and all it claims as it's territory or completely without. It is bound to divide.
It is strange that you talk about "non-systemd distros" as if they were defined until then by this.
What are the "non-systemd distros" that are crumbling? If anything is crumbling, it would be more "systemd distros" that get considerable amount of developers forking, founders resigning, etc, not to mention users looking toward BSDs.
Also, was it obvious since years that systemd would go in so many direction and that, wherever it goes, code would be throw away? What is then to support? Isnt it a joke in the end, to support alternative to systemd that actually have to do exactly what systemd does in order to be actually any good?
pm-utils is the example. Was it obvious that upower would throw support for pm-utils? Why was it discarded? Wasn't it discarded because, as pointed at by Edmunson "adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit"? So what is the joke about writing alternatives when it is clearly that systemd cannot be optional (meaning that alternative must really be systemd compatible, and not the contrary)
"Instead of facing realities and start working on solving stuff, the non-systemd users whine and bitch about systemd while making elaborate conspiracy explanations for why things suddenly no longer works as expected. Sure, self-victimization is easy, just accuse the bad systemd developers for everything and absolve yourself for having any share in why stuff is bit-rotting."
Who talks about victims? Who talks about whining? I'm fine, thanks you.
It is not really as if we were in a situation where desktop environment on GNU/Linux mattered much. It is not desktop environment that made GNU/Linux popular. At all. There are practically inexistant, if you really loves facing realities. They have a bunch of users. Nothing else. If they can afford too loose more of this bunch in the name of "reality", why not. I'm not sure it is for their benefit.
I started using KDE with KDE 1. But I also used Enlightenment, GNOME 1, WindowMaker, Fluxbox, XFCE and many other, I dont feel tied. There are parts of KDE I like and I'd enjoy being able to continue using it and continue to recommend it to other users.
I'm not sure it will be actually possible because, you see, I'm facing the reality, that systemd alternative right now is another systemd. Hence today topic.
I had hopes that Devuan could be enough. Now, after one year, I'm suspecting it could not. Not because of the "non-systemd distros" people, as you name it. But because if the game is rigged. "In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit": it says it all. Thrown away code, no benefit if optional. It is pretty clear what it implies.
Well, apparently even the founder of Debian felt he had to move away in this context https://lwn.net/Articles/62189... so I dont think that is a simple as you describe it.
Also, I think there is a misunderstanding about non-systemd packages. Currently, systemd take a place that no init system had. It replaces many parts and software and other software are being made to depends solely on this one. Maintaining non-systemd packages does not mean keep in order what existed before, but writting alternatives to systemd wherever it decides to go.
This powerdevil/upower is an example. There is no going back to pm-utils for upower, even though it used to support it. Now, you need either to use systemd or some ConsoleKit2 that would behave in a similar fashion.
Basically, it looks like maintaining non-systemd packages would mean making a copy of systemd. That looks neither feasible nor sensible. Why would people interested in a systemd-free system write another systemd?
There is "no best way of both worlds". Edmunson wrote it "allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit". There is no throwing away of code and non optional dependancy that allows such a happy ending.
(slang meaning "special vocabulary of tramps or thieves", what words are you referring to?)
As you like grammar, you know that you could take apart pieces of the sentences between commas. Is really "bricks that worked for years without now just get ruined" so hard to understand. At all.
Note that your proposed sentence does not have the exact same meaning. I'm not talking about "systems" and I'm not saying they no longer works.
I'm talking about parts, bricks somehow ("n 1: rectangular block of clay baked by the sun or in a kiln; used as a building or paving material"), that are getting ruined ("damage irreparably"). It is much more subtle. It is not a whole that is break down, just a crumbling wall.
We could suggest, if it helps, to write "bricks that worked for years without systemd now just get ruined".
"If you want that stuff"
Funny thing is the question is not about getting new stuff, that stuff. Just keeping running what is there up. But what is there is removed because it is easier to have done by systemd people, which in turn are quite happy to be able to remodel everything according to their feeling.
And now, according to you, people should devote time or money not even to implement new stuff, but to write a systemd alternative that would do everything systemd does, in a similar and compatible way (because otherwise there would be no benefits for the desktop environments).
Should I pay to get suspend/hibernate? Should it be rewritten once again?
I'm not expecting grand developments for KDE in 2016. Just keeping the same set of features say of KDE 3, from 2002, would be good.