This reminds me a lot of everyone complaining so much about Windows 10. If you're not prepared to vote with your feet, your complaints are just wasted breath (or keystrokes) when the vendor obviously doesn't care one iota about your grievances.
I have taken to likening systemd the the lovecraftian shoggoth, because both are amorphic masses that changes shapes and sprout new "features" continually.
This means that unless you have the deep economic pockets to rival Red Hat, you basically have to follow along.
End result is that whatever comes out of Fedora sets the de-facto standard in the Linux ecosystem these days, for better or worse (imo, the latter).
Perhaps, but is it really that hard to just stay with the older init services (sysv, upstart)? Slackware still has sysv AFAIK.
Also, if they really wanted they could team up with other distros to share the workload.
As for Gnome, this simply isn't true: Linux Mint proved this by hosting not one, but two renegade DEs: Cinnamon and MATE. And KDE and Xfce are still around, and not hard for distros to adopt if they choose; they just don't, they'd prefer to jump on the Gnome3 bandwagon for some odd reason.
>This means that unless you have the deep economic pockets to rival Red Hat, you basically have to follow along.
Again, Slackware seems to disprove this. Perhaps also Gentoo. Neither of these are large distros.
>End result is that whatever comes out of Fedora sets the de-facto standard in the Linux ecosystem these days, for better or worse (imo, the latter).
The existence of all the Debian-derived distros, using apt, seems to partially disprove this, but I get your point and I agree about it being worse. I really wish the Linux ecosystem had perhaps 3 or 4 large players, but each roughly equal to each other, instead of there being one commercial behemoth with too much power. Unfortunately, while Debian seems to be holding its own somewhat, SUSE went down the tubes ages ago and hasn't done any kind of power-wielding or standard-setting, and Ubuntu has tried and failed and is turning into just a Debian respin.
These are exactly the kinds of complaints I was saying I find less than compelling, because many of the same people who raise them then think the Linux project is okay to run like if UFC was also a papal state.
I am as amused as the next person by Linus' occasional invective on LKML, although I think it is sometimes a bit over the top. The difference between Linus and Lennart is that Linus tends to easily and of listen to the voice of reason, whereas Lennart, in Lennarts' mind, can do no wrong. Moreover, Linus has a 26 year history of shipping quality, working code built by a small army of developers. Lennart.... doesn't.
Mentioning these two in the same breath, in the sense of "well, Linus can do it, therefore so can Lennart" is a ridiculous kind of argument.
Linus's message there says "Yes, this is a problem and needs to be fixed, but here's a suggested work-around. Although, that's still a stupid way to use the interface, and you shouldn't be doing it that way."
Lennart's equivalent message would be "That's a problem with you, not with my software. It was changed to support [blah]. Use it correctly, and you won't have that problem. Now, go away."
In the first case, the problem gets fixed, and advice is dispensed on the better way to do things. In the second, the problem doesn't get fixed (or even acknowledged), and the universe is as it should be and always is, because The Dev Is Right.
Ted Ts'o: https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/EJrEuxjR65J
"For me a lot of "good taste" is about adding complexity when it's needed, and avoiding it when it's not needed. And if you do have complexity, making sure you have the tools so you can debug things when they break. And for me one of the things that I don't like about systemd is that it has added a lot of complexity, and when it breaks, trying to debug it can be almost impossible."
Also:
"Heck, I don't even I want to file bug reports, just so I can get abusive messages from Lennart. At least when Linus flames me, it's because I did something wrong which hurts users and which I d*mned well should have known better, given my years of experience in the community. Lennart just flames you because you're wrong, and he's right. By definition."
And:
"The high bit, in my opinion, is "not being able to admit you are wrong". If someone (such as Lennart) is always right, then it's impossible to have a technical discussion in a post-mortem to avoid similar problems in the future. In a company, if there are personnel issues like that, you can escalate to the person's manager, or use other mechanisms. In the open source world, all you can do is route around the damage. Whether you call the inability for someone to admit that he or she has contributed to the problem a "lie" or just that they were "mistaken" is really beside the point as far as I'm concerned."