Systemd makes using i3 so much easier. No more fiddling with consolekit and dbus just to get working external drives (logind solves the problem of local authentication), no more fiddling with symlinks to set time (timedatectl to the rescue).
> Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the barebones window managers like i3: there was some sort of glibc bug that screwed up clock display on GNOME for at least a year. GNOME assumed glibc did it right, which was a reasonable assumption...but an incorrect one, but with i3 I could control this.
Gnome nowadays use timedatectl AFAIK to set time too. The last time I had a issue with setting date or time in Gnome was pre-systemd days.
While some people may not like systemd, I find tools like timedatectl, localectl and hostnamectl to be quite useful. They work much better than trying to write a shell script or parse something.
Systemd is relatively nice now, but the disdain for it wasn't just 'hate train'.
No, it is mostly hate train. I only read one or two solid (technical) arguments against systemd. And no, no one of them is found in the regular systemd-hate sites.
> Also, the primary developers have a poor attitude.
I think the community have a worse attitude them the core developers, however this is mostly anectodal observation.
> eg: goodbye to all your old ways of looking at logs
systemd enable syslog.service
Here you go, all your old logs in the place you expect them.
There's an invisible pink unicorn who knows the winners of every horse race, but only I can see and hear her. Of course, I'm not going to tell you the winners; that's my secret!
Did you get onto the systemd stuff late? I got in midway along and found a few things that were iffy. One of the definite problems was the core developers' disdain for other people's use cases - even Torvalds said he was ambivalent about systemd itself, but the developers were pretty user-hostile and that was a problem.
> Here you go, all your old logs in the place you expect them.
Cool. In the same vein, do we have centralised logging in systemd yet? Or do we still have to run another syslog tool to ship them? Last I looked half a year ago, the consensus was still "ship them through rsyslog/syslog-ng", so you still have to run your old syslog in parallel. Only the IPU knows why they would make a new journaling system for a primarily-server OS, and keep kicking the "centralisation" can down the road.
Yes, the anti-syslog commentary went too far, but there were a lot of problems with it, especially before it had been battle-hardened. But whether or not you do or don't like systemd, you'd be crazy to say that it fits in with that unix principle I mentioned above.
Perhaps some of us value our freedom?
Perhaps some of us find that it helps to develop on the same platform on which we deploy?
Perhaps some of us find that we don't, actually, spend all that much time on 'admin, busy-work type issues,' having decided on good, solid distros which fit our use cases (Debian works for me, others prefer RedHat)?
At the end of the day, though, it really is about freedom for me. You complain that you must tweak your system; I value that I can tweak mine.
For instance, take sloppy focus. On my Linux machines, I can type in one window while interacting with another, and I use that ability fairly often. On my Mac, I have to spend time resizing and rearranging windows because I have to click a window to type there, and clicking raises it to the foreground, obscuring my other windows. Does the amount of time I spend managing windows outweigh the configuration time for the Linux box? I doubt it. But the end result is that my Linux machine feels like I built it exactly to spec. I value the fact that my OS, window manager, etc. do exactly what I want them to do in the same way that many people value the trackpad. I'm absolutely as annoyed and frustrated by the fact that the maximize/fullscreen button on my OS X windows moves my window to Space N+1 instead of keeping it where it is where a quick Cmd-Tab would bring a background window quickly back on top of the still-visible fullscreen window than I am that the trackpad on my Arch Linux box is less reliable at interpreting a gesture.
You know kinda like you do with apple machines.
everything i have worked out of the box. and, as a plus, android usb tethering works a lot better on linux than on osx (thanks to networkmanager)
If anything, my plan would be to move more of my life into Emacs so that I'm even less exposed to stupid ideas from my OS/laptop vendor.
I have been using i3 on a netbook for the last two days and I can definitely see how it would be lovely. But then again, Linux has changed a lot since I was into it seriously and I'm sure I will experience pain if I have to do anything substantial to tweak it, like symlink timezone files.
The time I spent setting those things up has been more than made up for over the last year as I've spent less time managing windows and more time just doing work.
Unfortunately the Linux desktops were actually worse than the barebones window managers like i3: there was some sort of glibc bug that screwed up clock display on GNOME for at least a year. GNOME assumed glibc did it right, which was a reasonable assumption...but an incorrect one, but with i3 I could control this.
Now that I'm on Mac I look back in amazement at the time I spent on Linux learning ultimately useless stuff like why a bug in glibc would mess up my GNOME clock but not an i3 clock.