News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Systemd 254 released, deprecating sysvinit scripts by mort96 on Friday July 28, 2023 @11:31AM (#36908373)
I get the criticism which essentially boils down to, it's turning what used to be a "bazaar" into a "cathedral". Instead of the init system, udev, dbus, logging, networking, dhcp, run levels, cron, login system, etc. being separate systems bound together with duct tape, they're now one coherent system layer called systemd. I personally really like that, but I get why others wouldn't.

I don't get the outrage here about this decision though. If you were relying on systemd's sysvinit script support, you were already using systemd. And systemd .service files are strictly better than sysvinit scripts if you're already running systemd.

Re:Systemd 254 released, deprecating sysvinit scripts by Pxtl on Friday July 28, 2023 @11:44AM (#36908578)
To me that's the proper evolution. As knowledge of a problem matures, it makes sense to mash the best-practices together into a single monolith that's designed to work together with minimal bubble-gum. The Cambrian explosion of small tools makes sense early-on but the cognitive load of that approach is much higher, and some of us have crap to do.
Re:Systemd 254 released, deprecating sysvinit scripts by voidr on Friday July 28, 2023 @12:21PM (#36909225)
Most people complaining about systemd wouldn't even notice if their whole OS was just a single binary.

This attitude does not help the Linux stack, because the one thing software vendors do not have time for is to test against 10+ init systems[1].

I don't need both Wayland and X11, I just need one of these that is reliable.

I also don't need both Flatpak and Snap, I just need only one that does not have crippling bugs.

I also do not want to care about what version of glibc is on the target machine, I just want to compile a blob that anyone using any distro can run.

Choice is good, however not when it comes to the base system, the base system needs to be there and it needs to be reliable and people should build good stuff on top of that, init systems are not exciting things to build.

[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Comparison_of_init_systems

Re:Systemd 254 released, deprecating sysvinit scripts by lproven on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @10:08AM (#36956127)
That's all perfectly fine and a perfectly understandable attitude.

The thing is, it's not really what Linux is about, or FOSS or plain old human nature.

Different people like different things. They want choice and the same choices don't work for everyone. If you have a whole group of Unix computer users all hacking away on what they like and they want, you get diversity and options.

So that means that there are lots of types of Linux with different choices and tools. That's a good thing. It's one of the things I like about Linux.

If you want the one best choice for everything, the democratically-arrived at moderate sensible path of compromise, then go try FreeBSD, which does that but also embraces modern commodity hardware. You still get a wide choice of desktops and things, but much less wide.

But the choices of FreeBSD didn't suit everyone, and as a result there are also OpenBSD and NetBSD and DragonflyBSD and a lot of divided effort that results in slow overall progress.

Me, I am old and grumpy and I want stuff that Just Works™. So, because I can afford it, my home desktop is an iMac, because by and large, macOS Just Works.

But I dislike Apple's modern keyboards, and pointing devices, and lack of ports, and a lot of other things about their laptops. So I use Linux laptops. And there, I do not find that systemd helps me... but the mainstream distros all use it so I just put up with it. And it keeps making my machines fail to boot randomly, and it's not getting any better.

I keep eyeing up distros without it and stroking my greying beard thoughtfully, though.

The moral here is that there isn't, and can't be, One Best Option that suits everyone. It's not possible because different people want different things.