Anti-Systemd trolls doing a good job of selling systemd

Christopher Allan Webber at 2014-10-20T22:05:54Z

Whether or not you like systemd (I am mostly positive, have some mixed feelings, explained below, but am mostly uninformed enough to just trust others' decisions), nobody is doing a better job of making systemd look good than the anti-systemd crowd right now.

I trust the Debian process, and systemd looks good for a lot of things. I actually do share some worries others have, but not too strongly (I wonder: what will Guix do if applications become more systemd dependent... will the project give up on GNU dmd as an init system? And also, will this make it hard for "container'ed" applications a-la docker harder? (Answer seems to be yes)). But I will also fully say: I just don't know enough. And again, having watched the Debian process from here, for Debian, I couldn't be more sure that the process went well. And I would love to convert my init scripts over to systemd's init system, that stuff looks a lot nicer.

Nonetheless, I'm nervous to express any of the above... it's hard to not look like I'm not some kind of anti-systemd person. And given that the anti-systemd crowd seems to be about as poisonous as (and even seems to share actual overlap with) "gamergate" type poisonous people... well... who wants to be associated with those jerks?

And whether or not concerns I have are founded/unfounded, I hope systemd and friends continue to improve... it certainly seems like valuable software in most respects.

BTW, I couldn't care less about the "unix philosophy"... my favorite programs seem to be Emacs, Firefox/Iceweasel, Blender, which are all attacked for violating the Unix philosophy, and all work great, maybe even because of it.

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They aren't really trolling and not everyone can code. It is really annoying to see the equivalent of "Pull request of STFU" in these discussions.

There is a serious disagreement about the direction of most of the well-known Linux-based operating systems and one group feels their concerns are being ignored. I personally would prefer to see some kind of live and let live resolution instead of Debian-fork / Arch-fork / Fedora-fork and so on.

I understand some of the concerns of that group (as noted above), but I'm still giving systemd a third shot.

lnxwalt@microca.st at 2014-10-21T18:45:14Z

The debate sometimes seems like a battle of strawmen.

mcnalu at 2014-10-21T22:07:36Z

X11R5 likes this.

its central control, I can see it expanding to package management and a host of things. I like debian. The very simple point I saw posted , people think there should be a choice, what they use, and being american I agree, choice. from what i have seen of systemd it can control the whole box, and would seem to give an attacker, one goal.ITs far more than trolls and this is people trying to down play it or discredt, the people pointing out Its a total and complete central control for linux, and who ever controls systemd will control your box, I bet the Chinese are very happy

http://boycottsystemd.org/

I have seen a few webs sites about this. either way I wont be using it ever , I will use BSD. I dont like central control. Personally I think this goes complete against what debian believes as a distro. I also think in the end it will be terrible for linux, because already, its being made where you have to have it, it will limit people in the end

johnmont at 2014-10-22T01:31:22Z

Separation of concerns. That's the core of the issues people have with systemd and I fully agree. Systemd does cool stuff, no question. And sometimes you have to break old abstraction layers to get cohesion. But Lennart et al don't even try to excuse the stuff they are bundling together, they seem to just do whatever seemed to be a good idea at the time. Unable to discuss, busy coding. There's no design here, no philosophy, just action. It's no surprise here that BSD people are the ones reacting, this is the pinnacle of the philosophy conflict between the BSD and Linux camps. I'll have to admit, the Linux camp has definitely been more successful in gaining market share, so maybe it's no surprise that systemd has suddenly taken over the major Linux distros.

What systemd does achieve is to kick up some dust, and several other teams are trying to find what's useful and not and put things together in a more conservative and compartmentalized way. Ubuntu did the systemd-shim, but have now switched to systemd. nosh*, which I've mentioned earlier, and which I personally think looks promising, does a daemontools-like approach but with an eye toward systemd.

* http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/Softwares/nosh.html

Meanwhile, Slackware, which doesn't even use libpam because it's too bloated or whatever, will never use systemd, so you know there's always an escape route. :-)

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2014-10-22T09:06:29Z

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