Sometimes shouting "UNIX philosophy" in GNU/Linux forums reminds me of emigrants that keep traditions of their home countries alive that are long out of fashion back home.
Go drool some more over Cantrill, will you?
The other systems still fundamentally do init's job, as well as managing services. They DON'T do everything, including:
-replace cron
-handle dynamic device files (udev's job)
-set the hostname
-replace syslog
-replace inetd
-automount
-anything I forgot
Those "traditions" you're speaking of not only are not outdated, but they never were fully realized to their ideal outside of Plan9, which attempted to make everything accessible through file APIs.
The suckless crowds are not about reproducing the original Unix. They are about carrying the torch of that philosophy, and the original unix was just the beginning, not an end in itself. Here's an example of software from suckless that follows Plan9 : http://tools.suckless.org/ii/
Those that worship Plan 9 as the UNIX culture, should actually be aware what the authors think about UNIX.
"I didn't use Unix at all, really, from about 1990 until 2002, when I joined Google. (I worked entirely on Plan 9, which I still believe does a pretty good job of solving those fundamental problems.) I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!
I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy. "
https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-p...
The world isn't a PDP-11 anymore.
Re: systemd itself, I could care less about the bells and whistles, but every time I go back to fiddle with a sysv init script, I yearn for either of upstart or systemd...
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/09/19/low-graphics-mode-in-...
Besides, it wasn't a test of DE performance alone, it was a combination of factors including boot time, script run time, video encode/decode, build from source time, and so on. Yes, DE performance was also a metric, and for fun I did load Unity on both 14.04 and 16.04 just to see what would happen. If I were basing it on DE performance alone and used the default DE for each distro, both Ubuntu versions would be the slowest by far.
Also, 3D acceleration was not an issue, the Intel video hardware in that machine is fully accelerated in Linux and OpenBSD.
> We have been working hard to turn systemd into the most viable set of components to build operating systems, appliances and devices from, and make it the best choice for servers, for desktops and for embedded environments alike. I think we have a really convincing set of features now, but we are actively working on making it even better.
I'm pretty sure I saw others posts, but my googlefu is a bit weak.
So, the expansion was in the plan from nearly the beginning (for good or ill)
Since then I've followed its progress, and while my overall impression remains slightly negative, I'm hoping it improves to the point that it is stable and mature enough for daily use. Until then, I happily run Slackware for serious work and Windows 10 for games.
To be fair, that's pretty much the definition of an init system, innit?
Of course Linux took off, and it sort of reset everything back to stone knives and bearskins. But systemd itself is modelled on Solaris SMF, which is world-class industrial grade service management for large server deployments.
Appeals to the "Unix Philosophy" are the province of reactionary greybeards. Unix philosophy means nothing in the modern era.
Also note that I did have to tweak OpenBSD a little to get it on par with Slackware on the desktop, though the stock install is still faster than the more "modern" Linuxen for most tasks.
And for those who wonder why I do all of this: It's a hobby. It's more fun than watching TV on my off days, and it keeps me up to date on the latest goings-on in the OS world.
This is what I was after. I can't imagine ffmpeg running slower just because of systemd or unity. But yeah, if you're running on a 2010 netbook I wouldn't be surprised if it ran better under Xfce.
I have migrated from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 recently. I am using a NAS drive. After my do-release-upgrade -d, internet was not working anymore because of systemd circularity problem. I had to learn how to create systemd configuration files to describe remote filesystem mounts. It was not easy to find documentation on systemd.
When my computer enters in sleep mode, I can wake it with a press on enter. The next time, it enters in sleep mode, I can not wake it up anymore.
My system used to boot in high resolution. Now, it is using huge fonts that makes boot message impossible to read (25 lines on a 23" screen!). I still do not know how to fix it.
It may not be only the fault of systemd, but migration from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS was a very bad experience for me.
And systemd should be an improvement - it started after upstart, and hit production well after upstart :)
Windows 10 will not be left behind! I mean, ahead!
Microsoft recently pushed out the Anniversary Update, which made at least my Win10 laptop noticeably - as in extra 10 or 15 seconds - slower waking up, and generally more sluggish here and there.
(How convenient, 400 million PCs need an upgrade now. Mwahahaha.)
I hadn't noticed a noticeable slowdown on my Ubuntu 16.04. I wouldn't even know about the controversy except people keep mentioning it.
You know, it's funny, I never said that, in fact I said once it matures systemd is actually a good idea.
Perhaps you're projecting a bit?
First it was "just an init to replace SysV", something I could get behind, and back in 2012 or so I was actually excited about it. Then it started growing, replacing individual components of GNU/Linux with a monolithic mega-app that has more in common with Windows NT based OSes than with anything UNIX-like. Gone is the philosophy of "do one thing and do it well", replaced with "do everything no matter the quality of the results".
I've always been a Slackware user since I started messing with Linux in the late 90s, and these days I find it getting faster and better while mainstream Linux distros slow down and grow more and more bugs. One of my benchmark systems for observing the growing bloat of modern OSes is an Atom based netbook from around 2010. It shipped with Windows 7 Starter, which it ran acceptably but not great.
Recently I tested Windows 10, Slackware 14.2, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, Debian unstable, OpenBSD, and Elementary OS Loki on it. Slackware was the fastest OS on it by a wide margin, followed by OpenBSD, then Debian, Ubuntu 14.04, Elementary, Windows, and Ubuntu 16.04 dead last. Guess which of those (not counting Windows) do not have systemd? Yep, Slackware and OpenBSD. Maybe it's a coincidence, but given how Ubuntu 16.04 on my modern workstation gets progressively slower with each systemd update, whereas Slackware on the same machine continues to chug along with no issues, that's telling.
All of that said, systemd was and maybe still is a good idea, if only they can stop trying to reinvent the wheel and instead fix the spokes they broke along the way. I can't say I'm happy about eroding the UNIX philosophy from Linux, but if systemd is the future of Linux then it damn well needs to be a stable future.