Comment by sxzygz

1 day ago

Sadly is Linux is no longer what is used to be for my generation that cut their teeth having to patch kernels for basic hardware support.

Linux is now effectively systemd/linux, and is attempting to become flatpak/systemd/linux through various corporate sponsored initiatives. The only thing worse, in my eyes, are people who distribute things as docker containers.

The Linux distro as such is becoming an anachronism. There’s no real place to innovate without the inertia of choices made by external projects being enforced on you.

I think it’s a generational change. My generation had Microsoft to contend with, and so sought certain freedoms, but this generation has walled gardens and AI to contend with, so freedom à la Microsoft seems okay and so Linux is being Windows-ified, while Windows itself becomes its own abomination.

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sxzygz

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palata  1 day ago

> Linux is now effectively systemd/linux

This is my issue with systemd. I wanted Linux because I wanted to have a choice. The philosophy was that users should have a choice. Systemd goes against that: it's taking over everything and more and more projects require systemd. Flatpak as well: if a project only supports flatpak, chances are that it won't be easy to package normally. So if I don't use Flatpak, I'm screwed.

People who don't see the problem with systemd "because it works" miss the point, IMO. It's like those devs who proudly ship their project in a docker container, because they are not capable of making it properly available to package maintainers. "It works", but I can't package it for my distro because it's a big mess. Developers don't have to package their project for all distros, they just have to properly provide the sources. But more often than not, they don't know how to do that, and instead see Flatpak/docker as "good alternatives that just work".

  • ondra  18 hours ago

    > Developers don't have to package their project for all distros

    Essentially nobody uses the sources we provide. Literally nobody packages them. A few people use our rpm and deb packages, but the vast majority uses a (slightly broken and outdated) docker image built by third party.

    You might not like it, and I certainly do not, but unfortunately containers seem to be the best alternative that just works, compared to everything else.

    • palata  17 hours ago

      > but unfortunately containers seem to be the best alternative that just works, compared to everything else.

      I think it's actually the worst alternative that works. If it didn't work, people wouldn't do it. And the better alternatives require more effort.

      I think it unfortunately goes with popularity: when programming becomes more accessible, the average quality of code gets worse. When Linux becomes more accessible, the average level of its users gets worse.

      What made Linux desirable for me risks getting worse the more popular it gets. I went from Debian to Arch, to Gentoo, and eventually I may have to move to a *BSD. Because apparently what I want disappears when a system gets massively popular.

      3 replies →

  • theamk  16 hours ago

    Except for the main pid1 process, systemd is one of the most customizeable things, certainly much more than old shell-based things. Everything is documented, can be disabled or replaced, and in such a way that the rest of the system can keep functioning, and the system upgrades don't mess it up.

    A lot of people said you can edit /etc/init/ scripts, but this was pretty annoying, as the moment you upgrade the package, your package manager throws a conflict at you. It was certainly non-scaleable if you have many machines with automated upgrades. Compare to systemd overrides, where there is both drop-ins and wholesale service replacement, and system upgrades never mess with that.

    Heck, even something as simple as "disable distribution-provided service" was a pain! I can't remember how many times I've added "exit 0" to /etc/default/something file, just because the sysvinit did not respect user decisions during upgrades or reinstalls! Compare to systemd, where I can "mask" the service even before it's installed.

    And for deeper changes? Pre-systemd ubuntu had this this stupid "system is online" idea, and I once needed to customize this.. this was lots of undocumented reading and hacking on the script, and let's hope we did not need to upgrade. Or something like "my service X should start after NFS, but ssh should start before NFS" - this was pretty hard as well, and would cause upgrade conflicts.

    Systemd has lots of problems, but the customizeability is one of their best parts. It is the only thing that I know which clearly delimits "user" vs "distribution", and gives all the power to user.

    • palata  15 hours ago

      I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing. I am not saying that systemd is bad. I am saying that when a project has a hard dependency on systemd (which is not necessarily systemd's fault, to be fair), then it doesn't work with an alternative init system.

      1 reply →

pjmlp  1 day ago

I would have not bothered with Linux if Windows NT had a proper UNIX subsystem.

I needed a way to avoid going to campus and fight for a DG/UX terminal.

It had nothing to do with FOSS fighting.

  • jeroenhd  1 day ago

    > if Windows NT had a proper UNIX subsystem

    They actually did, but they made the mistake of packaging only the bare basics with it, and hiding it away as much as they could: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

    The American government added some obscure law that forced POSIX compatibility on operating systems for certain grants, so Microsoft made their business OS POSIX-compliant.

    In theory, nothing stopped you from downloading and installing up-to-date versions of common UNIX tools. Had Microsoft had the necessary foresight, they could've killed deverlopers' dependency on tools like Cygwin and Git Bash and Linux entirely for many pieces of software, but they were too busy trying to make Win32 the standard ABI.

    Funnily enough, Win32 became the standard for proprietary software on Linux (thanks to Wine+Proton) while many Unix/Linux-based tools became the norm for development, even on Windows (git, Qt). How different things could've been!