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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
Because people here accuse Poettering of being an asshole: I've read some of his blogposts and seen some talks of his and him doing Q&A: He answered professionally, did his best to answer truthfully, did acknowledge when he didn't know something. No rants, no opining on things he didn't know about, no taking questions in bad faith.
As far as I can tell all the people declaring him some kind of asshole are full of shit.
He answered professionally
Until you ask him about security and CVEs advisories...
He is not that bad, the issue is that, as all foss devs, he is not interested in solving problems he does not feel like are important.
The problem is, he disapproves when resources are allocated in his project to those problems and one main area he is not a fan of is support for legacy stuff.
It just happens that legacy stuff is the majority of the industry, as production environment of half the globe needs to run legacy software and a lot of it on legacy hardware
Unrelated but how do people feel about the ai images when used for something like this.
The font is very telling for being DallE
Absolutely hate it, I just close tabs I'm interested in reading if it has AI generated images.
i’m downvoting ai slop every chance i get. i’m sure it’s just as futile as downvoting every post that used the acronym ‘FAFO’. i hated that one because i think the people who used it thought they sounded sooo cool.
if you’ll excuse me, i’ve got some clouds outside i need to go shake my fist at.
I think it strongly detracts from the post. I basically skipped right to the comments without clicking the link because I'm assuming it's AI slop, and I'm hoping the comments are interesting.
AI should be able to do a really good systemd debate by now, the available training material is immensely huge.
I strong hate these imagines with a piss tint. I can't stand them. And the text has these tiny AI-flavoured imperfections too.
I don't appreciate the attitude and arrogance of the guy behind systemd because he actually believes what he produces can replace everything that already "just works". He wants to push out systemd-homed because "why not". He wants to replace grub. He wants to replace a myriad of things that just flat out don't need to get replaced. autofs, cron, you name it! That kind of thinking and one-size-fits-all mentality is backwards and does not benefit the community in any way. All it does is stuff everything into one bin and so long as influencers like this guy continue to restrict what works or doesn't work according to their own work, the community and its users will not be able to freely develop FOSS. Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency on systemd and so when you're trying to use something like Gentoo, it becomes very difficult to get that done and hacks have to made in order to get it working. FOSS shouldn't work like that. He'll keep stripping away legit projects from major distros until IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good. Sorry if I can't rejoice in the woah whiplash.
The is the first time I’ve ever heard someone accusing grub of „just working“
lmao
Grub is working perfectly fine.
If it breaks it is, in my experience as a grub user for over 20 years and as a guy working in server hosting for 15 years, either because of failing HDD/SSD or because of user error. People don't read when the updater tells them that running "grub-install" is needed (or they perform it on the wrong drive/partition) and then blame grub when it fails on the next boot.
The crappy bootloader that comes with systemd very often, in my experience, fails to register that a new Kernel was installed and boots the old one (or fails to boot if the package manager removed the old Kernel).
Oh and GRUB has so many useful features, like booting a ISO image. GRUB is a piece of programmer art!
All it does is stuff everything into one bin
Well, it is not one bin. There is no monolithic systemd bin that does everything. There are a lot of separate bin files for all the different tasks. Well and if you don't want to use timers, then don't and just use cron instead. If you don't want to use journald, then just don't and use rsyslog or whatever you want. Don't need systemd-homed? Well, then don't use it. You want to configure your network with something else then systemd-networkd? Great, do it if you want.
The Poettering Army will not come and force you to enable all the options 😜
He wants to replace grub.
I hope so!
Grub is shit
Aye lmao
So, I don't like the guy either, but for a little devil's advocacy:
The stuff that already "just works" was developed during a very different era in terms of computing power, tasking of the computers which were running the systems, etc. Nobody (serious, and he is serious) develops something different because "why not?" they, at least from their perspective, feel that they are improving on the status quo, at least for the use cases they are considering.
one-size-fits-all mentality is
being decided by the distro maintainers, not the developers. Sure, developers promote their product, but if a distro thinks that multiple flavors are a better path, they distribute multiple flavors. It's not like the systemd developers are filling billion dollar war chests with profit because they're using strong-arm tactics to coerce distro maintainers to adopt their products.
stuff everything into one bin
When one bin serves the purpose, it's a lot easier to maintain, modernize, security harden, etc. than ten bins.
the community and its users will ~~not~~ always be able to freely develop FOSS.
Fork it and your loyal users will follow.
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That's the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
FOSS shouldn’t work like that.
FOSS, by its very nature, should be expected to work all the ways. If a particular way can't get enough developer traction, it stagnates but never really dies, not until the ecosystem it is dependent upon can no longer find hardware to run on and users willing to run it.
IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good.
I am very glad that I walked away from CentOS about 8 years back, its proximity to Red Hat never made me happy. I have been trying to walk away from Canonical (toward Debian) for about 3 years now, but it still has some hooks that keep our professional team happier than Debian. If the unhappy ever outweighs the happy, we'll execute the move.
Sorry if I can’t rejoice
Never asked you to. End of devil's advocacy. I still don't like the guy, but I never really interact with him. I do interact with his products and the alternatives, and in my use cases the products speak for themselves. There's nothing about systemd that makes me dig around for systemd free alternatives - they are out there, but for my use cases I don't care. YMMV.
Why did you quote me but leave out where I mention systemd explicitly with Gnome? lol
So you agree Gnome has too much of a dependency on systemd. Let's not beat around the bush. Let's call a spade a spade.
Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?
Absolutely. If you don't mind using Gnome exactly as Gnome wants you to - this year - then it's usually a pretty refined desktop experience, but if I wanted to be told what to like, how to like it, and to shut up and be happy, I'd use a Mac.
I prefer XFCE for its modularity... don't want a launcher bar? Don't run the launcher; nothing else misses it when it's gone.
Mess around with Gnome too much and it becomes a nightmare mess of dependencies.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/systemd/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd Linux.
I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.
Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.
Linux audio has been a cluster^$%< of epic proportions since the mid 1990s. At least you can make single application systems work well these days, but Windows has really whipped the llamas ass on the audio front for 30+ years now, in terms of "it just works" user experience - without being hyper-draconian on the application ecosystem.
I had (and still have) way more issues with Audio on Windows then I ever had on Linux.
And I have seen it all, OSS, ALSA, aRts, EsounD, pulseaudio, pipewire and most likely some more that I have forgotten.
It definitely depends on what you are trying to get out of it.
I'll grant: low lag audio performance in Windows is... dismal. Which is why everyone had conference call lag adjustment issues in 2020, "go ahead", "no you go ahead", "ok" - both start talking simultaneously again... It seems better these days, I'm sure that's at least in part due to training of the conference participants, but maybe they have been working on getting the lag down without too many dropout / stutters.
We have a bespoke low lag audio system that was specifically implemented in Linux even though we put the GUI in Windows because of those lag / stutter issues, years back the audio was done on a dedicated DSP chip, but a Core i7 is more than up to the task on Linux these days.
The Linux audio pains I refer to were: A) audio just doesn't work at all, and B) audio works, until you start to try to use two audio applications simultaneously - then they start to mess each other up. Both of those were better in Windows long before Linux came up to speed. But a lot of how Windows audio gets acceptable performance is big laggy buffers.
It's refreshing to read to someone that actually says "I was so wrong"
I was wrong also with systemd, I hated it mainly because I already knew init.d, where files are, where configs where etc. Some years later hate is gone, I'm not a power user, but I just now know how to handle my things with systemd and all is good.
I see most often that it's the people who live in init.d - interact with it multiple times a day - who are most vocal about systemd hate. I'm going to call "old dogs don't like new tricks" on that one.
I do get into that layer of system maintenance, but it's maybe 1-2% of my time, mostly a set-it and forget-it kind of relationship. There was a time when the old ways were easier due to more documentation and guides on the internet, which I lean on heavily because I interact with this stuff so rarely. Those days passed, for me, 8-10 years back.
I hated it and still do because for a period of years every weird, difficult to find issue on a bunch of servers was caused by systemd. It may be fine now, but I switched to Devuan and have had incredible stability. Poettering's response to security issues was also terrible and honestly the dude seems like a real piece of shit.
BASED,
Try dinit too. It's probably the easiest to use alternative to systemd
I'd say the main bad part of systemd is how it's used and now expected everywhere.
If you search for some Linux guides or install something complicated or whatnot, they always expect you to have systemd. Otherwise, you're on your own figuring how things work on your system.
This shouldn't really happen. Otherwise, yes, it's great, it integrates neatly, and is least pain to use.
In my opnion, systemd is like core-utils at this point.
It's so integrated into most things and the default so many places, that most guides assume you have it.
I use it because I'm frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.
I'm a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the "unused ram is wasted ram" phrase that has caught on with people.
I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and...require you basically to be a developer to use them.
I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can't imagine how fucked I'd be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.
Unused memory IS wasted memory and my Linux machines, AFAICR, always have buffered everything possible since twenty years ago, it's not a systemd thing. It also speeds up things, why the long face?
90mb ram
If you're in a system where 256mb of RAM is the limit, sure - go for the RAM efficient OS options, they're out there.
Can you even buy less than 2GB of RAM in a desktop system anymore? Even the Raspberry Pi 5 starts at 2GB (and, yes, the older models have less, but I did say desktop system, implying: reasonable desktop performance.) Maybe if you feel the need to use a RasPi 3 as a desktop for something then you should dig around for one of your more efficient OS configurations, but I'll note... back when RasPi 3 was the new model, Raspbian came default without systemd, but offered a systemd option. The systemd option booted from power off to the desktop (such as it was) in about 1/3 the time.