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View Poll Results: Are you for or against systemd?
I am against systemd. In my opinion whats done with Gnome and the dependencies is unnecessary. More, systemd not replacing anything broken or even dysfunctional. I am not an expert only a user, but what I see with Win 8 and Unity - it was a bad idea. What I see with CMS, Templates on the Web - cookie-cutter boring and many times insufficient. The end result was, is, and always going to be decided not by arguments but by common sense and usability.
Common sense says anything monolithic is fragile, it was fragile back then when the HURD was attempted and it is fragile still, it is a fact. systemd is still small and focused, but I have a bad feeling it is not going to stay so for much longer.
As ideologically, absolutely nothing systemd can or [will] be able to do [in the future] is ever going to impress me. This is what impressed the heck out of me: https://devuan.org/
Forking is impressive!
I am against systemd. In my opinion whats done with Gnome and the dependencies is unnecessary. More, systemd not replacing anything broken or even dysfunctional. I am not an expert only a user, but what I see with Win 8 and Unity - it was a bad idea. What I see with CMS, Templates on the Web - cookie-cutter boring and many times insufficient. The end result was, is, and always going to be decided not by arguments but by common sense and usability.
Common sense says anything monolithic is fragile, it was fragile back then when the HURD was attempted and it is fragile still, it is a fact. systemd is still small and focused, but I have a bad feeling it is not going to stay so for much longer.
As ideologically, absolutely nothing systemd can or [will] be able to do [in the future] is ever going to impress me. This is what impressed the heck out of me: https://devuan.org/
Forking is impressive!
If you run super recent development versions (not that there's anything that's not a development version), it's not so small and focused. They've taken over networking now also, and something else that escapes me.
Yes, DNS, keyring, authentication.. this might also be show of aging already. The framework of the one-for all platform that is not happening. A lot of things have changed since, more of the infrastructure is moving off the client closer to the gateway, sand-boxed VMs behind firewalls that never touch physical wire and have no need for authentication, etc..
If thinking that newer is better is a mistake, trusting the outdated as the newest must be a bigger mistake then...
That leads to an observation about the open source assertion. An interesting comment I saw elsewhere addresses the complexity of the systemd code. It's so complex, non-modular, and interconnected that although it can be argued that it might fulfill the letter of the concept of OSS, it fails the spirit of the concept. For something to be OSS, the code must be made available. In the case of systemd, it is not possible for someone of either meager C skills or without the possibility and, more importantly, a willingness to invest an unreasonably enormous amount of time to get going at changing the code. So in practice the code is not available.
anyhow, the linked article does not back your statement. it's just a shallow review of a company.
Yes, the article is shallow marketing, except for that juicy quote. See past the marketing, which is of course only going to say wonderful things. The actual quote there does unambiguously back the statement that Red Hat thrives on complexity, especially since it comes from high up in the company. The quote is actually from a blog, but the blog is unavailable to many so I had to link to the low-quality article.
As time passes it is harder and harder to fork a clean distro based on Debian. Devuan has a good shot at it, but since the first release will be based on Jessie, there is still a lot of work to be done and on a moving target no less. Here's a random example:
If you run super recent development versions (not that there's anything that's not a development version), it's not so small and focused. They've taken over networking now also, and something else that escapes me.
It is interesting what you wrote.
turbocapitalist pointed out some part of the real problem, actually.
If I understand well, this would means, that with Systemd, the Systemd+Kernel of Linus+Pckges (Linux distro) is likely non longer according to GNU, and it could even fall into OSS.
Quote:
GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix!",[8][11] chosen because GNU's design is Unix-like, but differs from Unix by being free software and containing no Unix code.[8][12][13] The GNU project includes an operating system kernel, GNU HURD, which was the original focus of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).[8][14][15][16] However, non-GNU kernels, most famously Linux, can also be used with GNU software; and since the kernel is the least[citation needed] mature part of GNU, this is how it is usually used.[17][18] The combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel is commonly known as Linux (or less frequently GNU/Linux; see GNU/Linux naming controversy).

Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project
Richard Stallman, the founder of the project,
(Src: wikipedia)
The founder may have opinion about Systemd?
Edit [Pic]: This first project was awesome, and led later to numerous distributions.
Man, it looks today completely difference to me. Since Hurdle, have changed many things in Linux.
Thus, it wasn’t a surprise that, when asked whether he had an opinion on the systemd controversy, he replied with a flat “no, I don’t.”
“I’ve never seen it, I’ve never used a system that had it; I know it’s free software, so ethically speaking, it’s not an issue – it’s just a convenience question.”
Will be interesting to see if his viewpoint changes when Trisquel 8 comes out and is using systemd, since its based on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and Lubuntu 16.04
PS: The irony of posting from Ubuntu Mate in VM.
Last edited by ChuangTzu; 04-20-2017 at 08:21 PM.
Reason: forgot I was in VM...lol
Will be interesting to see if his viewpoint changes when Trisquel 8 comes out and is using systemd, since its based on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and Lubuntu 16.04
PS: The irony of posting from Ubuntu Mate in VM.
I believe that he did not meet Systemd yet, because it will be not according to GNU philosophy, although there is "some" source code.
I believe that he did not meet Systemd yet, because it will be not according to GNU philosophy, although there is "some" source code.
Oops, I accidentally approved the above post instead of hitting the quote button. Serves me right for using the computer straight after waking up. Seems no way to revert my thumbs-up. :-)
Anyway, you perhaps missed the bit in the quotation I cited, Xeratul, where Richard Stallman said that he considered systemd to be free software. All source code is available. Why are you intent on ignoring the facts in this case?
Oops, I accidentally approved the above post instead of hitting the quote button. Serves me right for using the computer straight after waking up. Seems no way to revert my thumbs-up. :-)
Anyway, you perhaps missed the bit in the quotation I cited, Xeratul, where Richard Stallman said that he considered systemd to be free software. All source code is available. Why are you intent on ignoring the facts in this case?
Because of the very interesting post of turbocapitalist regarding code source of systemd.
As a user I did not have a clue until I started kicking the tires on bitnami images, and came across systemctl, and the fact that making things work often required copying from /usr/local/bin to usr/bin. It was kinda odd then, and even today I do not know what to make of this change. I would guess in a "cloud" environment this change makes sense, otherwise bitnami would not be depending on systemd. But what about /usr/local? I would also guess in the cloud where your scripts can re-purpose clusters of boxes from file-servers to web-host to database-servers in an instance, /usr/local/bin should make more sense than /usr/bin. I never found any reading on the reasoning why systemd is using /usr/bin, but I would like to know.
[My latest assumption is that bitnami do not like the fact either, but being an images provider they took the road of least resistance, and the simplified install and configuration systemd offers over SysV].
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