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Re:Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state [video] by bitwize on Thursday December 29, 2016 @01:20PM (#13278937)
Three if you count Mir.

And you forget the constant churn of protocols, APIs, services, and whatsits in other domains not related to the display server. init to upstart to systemd is one example. It'd be one thing if there were a more robust rearchitecting in the spirit of the original (like runit in the init space), but nope -- it's always "that which exists is all legacy cruft, and must all be burned to the ground". And once problems come up, the new stuff too must be completely razed before starting afresh.

The current push to wipe X from the pages of history and pave the way for a Brave New Wayland World reminds me more of GNOME's troubled development cycle, marked by a complete churn of APIs, components, and UI standards every few years, than it does of Unix tradition which has kept knowledge alive and broadly transferrable from platform to platform for 40 years.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state [video] by scrollaway on Thursday December 29, 2016 @01:42PM (#13279102)
> Three if you count Mir.

Canonical's attempt to powergrab over wayland, like someone else said below.

> init to upstart to systemd is one example

Upstart, another canonical brainchild.

As for initd, it's a similarly old system with a lot of cruft. Systemd brought the linux desktop and server an insane amount of QOL that it was sorely lacking.

Honestly, there's no nice way to put it: It's incredibly arrogant of you to claim that various systems are useless simply because you can't see why they'd be useful.

That OSS community that "loves churn", the people who are working on Wayland and such, it's a talented full bunch that is, in the majority of cases, giving its talent and time away for the good of the community. They're certainly not forcing you to use what they're making (like you seem to think they are), so it's incredibly thoughtless of you to shit on their work like that.

Re:Ubuntu 16.04 Unity 8 current state [video] by bitwize on Thursday December 29, 2016 @08:45PM (#13281893)
I hate sysvinit, but the init binary itself is quite small and cruft-free. It's the /etc/rcN.d stuff that has all the cruft. This boggled my mind (and got me hacked) when I came off Slackware, where I'm used to fine-tuning service access by tweaking a shell script or two.

Had systemd been a framework like runit, which nicely combines Unix primitives into an easy-to-use and featureful framework, I wouldn't whinge so much about it. But its design is monolithic (despite having 60-odd binaries, they all mutually and tightly depend on one another), its code is not that great and it's basically an inner platform in its own right. And all that isn't necessary to achieve the goals of dependency-based startup, process isolation, etc.

Sendmail belongs in the dustbin of history. But its replacements, like qmail and exim, preserved its spirit while fixing its deficiencies. Thus it is with init and runit. The current environment does not favor keeping the spirit of the past alive, but burning it to the ground and erasing it from memory. And when serious deficiencies are found in the new hotness, the answer is to burn that to the ground too. I blame the GNOME project, whose manifesto was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck"; Unix not sucking involved writing a Windows-like inner platform and encouraging or coercing developers to target that instead. Famously, GNOME has undergone at least two slash-and-burn cycles and its latest installation is known for its instability.