Comment by Dalewyn

3 months ago

>However I can't understand why systemd is the point of so much disagreement.

I think the simplest way to describe it is that it's a religious conflict.

A not insignificant segment of people who develop and/or use Linux are fervent followers of POSIX philosophy, the Unix heritage, Free Open Source Software development, and the Anti-Microsoft Church (note: Poettering is a Microsoft employee).

These people have a religious duty to hate systemd, it's essentially heresy. It's not a disagreement based on technical or even practical merits, so the conflict can't be addressed with technical debates and will continue for the foreseeable future.

6 comments

Dalewyn

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Brian_K_White  3 months ago

You think you get to just declare the opinion that differs from yours invalid by calling it religious?

Don't the holders of that opinion get to call your position equally religious?

"not a disagreement based on technical or even practical merits" indeed, right there in the mirror.

The first few minutes of this video absolutely articulated some perfectly technical and practical merits. So have some comments here on this hn post. I don't see how it's valid to say no one has ever produced any.

  • Dalewyn  3 months ago

    I think the debate on systemd as regards to its merits was decided already years ago when all the major Linux distros adopted it. You need to go way out of your way to run Linux without systemd now, people who want that setup have clearly become a (very small) minority while the rest of the Linux world moved on.

    The conflict as parent commenter witnesses it continues because that small minority continue to (very loudly) disagree not on the merits. It is their prerogative to disagree if they desire, but their basis is much more about beliefs than superiority.

    It's like Polandball memes where UK crazily chants "Britannia rule the waves...!" while US goes off to freedom some oil with its boats.

egorfine  3 months ago

> disagreement based on technical or even practical merits

Philosophy can't be reasoned based on merits. Of course there are technical merits as to why systemd-as-PID1 was (not today!) an extremely good piece of software compared to sysvinit, there's no question about that. Likewise there are valid technical reasons why systemd-timesyncd should be abolished and never mentioned again.

But how do you decide LP's attitude on merits? How do I argue with Red Hat who shoved systemd down everyone's throat?

So yes, it's a religious question of sorts. The religion that made Unix unix.