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from the Boot-him?-I-just-met-him! dept.
jbernardo writes:
"Having had several issues with systemd, and really not liking the philosophy behind it, I am looking into alternatives. I really prefer something that follows the Unix philosophy of using small, focused, and independent tools, with a clear interface. Unfortunately, my favourite distro, Arch Linux, is very much pro-systemd, and a discussion of alternatives is liable to get you banned for a month from their forums. There is an effort to support openrc, but it is still in its infancy and without much support.
So, what are the alternatives, besides Gentoo? Preferably binary... I'd rather have something like arch, with quick updates, cutting edge, but I've already used a lot in the past Mandrake, RedHat, SourceMage, Debian, Kubuntu, and so on, so the package format or the package management differences don't scare me."
[ED Note: I'm imagining FreeBSD sitting in the room with the all the Linux distros he mentioned being utterly ignored like Canada in Hetalia.]
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 26 2014, @11:02AM
"clean system."
Unfortunately the architecture is bloated such that no one could ever describe it as "clean".
Its NOT a new init system. Its a new init system, and a logging system, and a hotplugging system, all incredibly tightly integrated for frankly no good reason at all other than to make it difficult to use alternatives or replace it piecemeal.
And the way it was rammed into place was getting some GUI desktop environments to require it. Absolutely disgusting political behavior.
No, I think it would nearly define an un-clean system, the opposite of cleanliness.
I am slightly concerned with security issues, so my embedded systems that don't have or need hotplug systems or logging are now vulnerable to future hotplug and logging bugs, which totally sucks.
Its architecture might be brain dead but I haven't had any problems yet (crosses fingers). Replacing a craftsman's toolchest with a swiss army knife might sound idiotic, but if it works, well, that's not so bad. I acknowledge there are negative secondary effects like "here's something with an awful architectural design and it works, so lets copy that design style".
(Score: -1) by chris.alex.thomas on Wednesday February 26 2014, @11:19AM
logging and hotplugging are important when your system is booting up, or services are running in response to devices coming and going.
remember, that as programmer, we all understand that "v1" is always the worst, "v2" fixes some problems and "v3" is where you start to implement new ideas, if this is v1 of a new architecture, then it can be fixed.
but saying that no progress forward is a good thing is just backwards thinking, sometimes you need to branch out and do weird things in order to find better alternatives.
obviously the people designing these systems are not idiots, so they either don't value your feedback, because their idea of a clean system differs from yours, or it's already possible to do what you suggest, but you didnt know it, or that nobody knows what opinions you have, or it's a future idea that will come down the line.
you're post reminds me of a wayland thread, it has a lot of similar statements.
(Score: 2) by hatta on Wednesday February 26 2014, @11:49AM
you're post reminds me of a wayland thread, it has a lot of similar statements.
Is systemd less featureful than the system it replaces too?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 26 2014, @02:58PM
Your post is interesting and well written, although I don't agree with most of it, and have no idea why its posted as a "reply" to my post because its apparently entirely unrelated to my post.
no comment on tight integration solely for "product tying" purposes
no comment on rammed in because of demand from some desktop environment rather than any organic desire from users or admins, or as near as I can tell, anyone at all actually wanting it...
no comment on likely security issues
no comment on architectural design other than its new therefore it must be better. I've been around too long, fooled too many times, to fall for that one LOL. That one might have worked on me in '81.
does contain tangential appeal to authority, which is generally anti-convincing to me, but whatever.
does contain distraction of wayland. I notice a certain similarity in social behavior behind both the waylandites and the systemd supporters. Where are these people coming from?
I do agree with "v1 can be fixed" although not sure how tight integration into unrelated areas and lack of compliance with existing standard interfaces helps speed bugfixes. Usually that's not the preferred architecture and development style for rapid bug fixing. I've not been hit by any bugs so I've not researched that situation in depth.
One interesting thing to think about WRT systemd is most of the opposition revolves around negative PR about its architecture and how its being rammed down peoples unwilling throats. Yet it hasn't been a serious problem, at least for me, although logically cruddy and poorly designed and managed and deployed software should be an epic fail causing me massive headaches. Yet it doesn't, not yet. This conflict does not compute... That indicates the possibly, that the incredibly negative steaming cloud around systemd might not be the most fair and unbiased coverage. In that case, the most logical way to support systemd would be to fix the coverage, but the supporters have been remarkably ineffective at that task. All we get is authoritarianism, mailing list bans, false dilemas, all that kind of stuff. If the code is actually any good, it'll eventually be revealed as good code, although the people defending it generally seem opposed to that strategy, which is even weirder.