Comment by ifdefdebug
3 months ago
I think you are beating a somewhat dead cow here. systemd wars are over. It's in most mainstream systems nowadays, but there are also lots of cool projects out there doing different things. Everything's fine, nobody wants to go into those old pro and con flame wars any more.
Everything is fine, unless/until many developers begin to assume systemd is present and make software ports to non-systemd Linux (or *BSD) systems prohibitively expensive.
> Everything is fine, unless/until many developers begin to assume systemd is present and make software ports to non-systemd Linux
Nothing wrong with this if a system service is going to be present on 99.999% of installs and frees the developer from having to do work.
e.g. GNOME swapped its service manager for subprocesses (e.g. bluetooth) to systemd user units because it does a far better job.
> Nothing wrong with this if a system service is going to be present on 99.999% of installs
Is there a sign linux installs will hit this metric in our lifetime? I don't think there's any strong indication of this. There are multiple distros devoted to not moving to systemd.
> GNOME swapped its service manager for subprocesses (e.g. bluetooth) to systemd user units because it does a far better job.
Not on computers without systemd it doesn't! Besides, Gnome still runs just fine on systems with init scripts like *BSDs with no visible loss of quality or stability so this was a purely political choice to spite their own linux user base.
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> Nothing wrong with this if a system service is going to be present
This kind attitude will be the death of Linux. In the form of systemd-os.
> a system service is going to be present on 99.999% of installs
It's not, because a large number of users and system administrators dislike it, and don't use it. And the high number it does have is mostly due to distributions forcing it on you - so that you can only remove it by switching distributions altogether.
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> systemd wars are over
Well yes but actually no.
With every new Ubuntu version I have to carve out new metastasis no one asked for. For example, 24.04 (or maybe even 23.10) changed the way sshd is started up - by systemd listener instead of sshd on its own like it was for decades. This way they saved a few megabytes of RAM (solely on computers that are not exposed to the internet, of course).
While fighting against systemd-as-PID1 is futile for many years, fighting against the spread is definitely worth it.
So you are mad about Ubuntu, not upstream systemd?
It's the culture that I'm mad about, and it's coming from systemd crowd.
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Fair, point taken: Some people are working on systemd replacements because they want to build some cool things in that area. Just like there are multiple programming languages and no one says "Why don't you just use Java/C++" it should be OK to work on Linux systems without systemd and not think too much of it.
This doesn't make sense. I, for one (transitioning to Linux usage only gradually), haven't been aware of the systemd and its criticism, and I'm grateful for the info. Then, the informed users can vote with their feet. Things change all the time, and only mass adoption/usage is what makes a given distribution to be mainstream or niche.
So, please do continue to criticize, continue to raise awareness. That's useful.
> Then, the informed users can vote with their feet.
That's the thing, that it is quite difficult to vote with your feet. You can't remove systemd from your distribution in favor of separate independent facilities: The combination of its design, its gradual expansion, and the way some higher-level packages depend on it (especially GNOME) - typically prevent its removal.
So, you would need to switch distributions, which most users are not very inclined to do. And - even then, you look around, and you see that the big basic distros: RedHat/Fedora, Debian (and Ubuntu), Arch - use systemd. So almost all of the distributions based on them are also not an option if you want to avoid systemd.
... and the bottom line is that users will effectively not vote with their feet. And neither will system administrators, or whoever maintains OS images at organizations, because it's difficult for them to tell their superiors they want to switch everyone to, say, Slackware, or Devuan.