Don't get me wrong, I don't support GamerGate (or the other side) at all. Yet, all gamers aren't women-hating misogynists, despite the reporting.

This meant that while the media coverage was generally accurate there are GamerGate supporters who aren't aware of the true origins and now incorrect feel that they were misrepresented — precisely the kind of distraction the original 4chan / burgersandfries cadre were hoping for.

Please note that I don't side with either of the sides, both sides are acting stupidly and I would rather spend time browsing TMZ than to engage in the stupid flamewar.

Matt had a shirt on with women similar to WWII bomber girls, fully clothed in 1940s/1950s style corsets or as Rose Eveleth and her foaming at the mouth outraged Twitter followers say they are naked women.

Some people get outraged at nothing these days.

Perhaps you should ask yourself why that is?

Of course, it's easier to just heap in outrage.

Also, it looks like you might be getting downvotes (due to the coloring of your comment when I viewed it anyway). Wasn't me, I upvoted you fwiw.

You're just going to end up (as tptacek has already done) with people talking past each other about different definitions of what GG is, what it isn't, what gaming is, what gaming isn't, whether or not rape and death threats are inherently sexist or threatening, and so on and so forth.

Nice derail.

Only a very small minority of games journalists are truly unbiased, as the vast majority depend on access granted voluntarily by publishers to get the info that drives the traffic they need to make a living. They're often little more than an extension of game publishers PR departments.

Unfortunately it's very hard to solve this problem, as there's no way to force a publisher to share helpful access to critical reviewers.

Also, one time a game publisher had sex with people in the game industry which proves that all women are whores.

Oh man, I was so close.

But this is not necessarily the dislike and rejection of systemd. These are not the same thing. Nor does the fact some people are behaving badly make systemd any more preferable to me.

Pottering's accusations that Linus somehow is responsible for the all the ugliness is over the top also IMHOP.

Again, not condoning ugly talk and specifically ill wishes. This is far behind acceptable behavior. But I don't like the idea behind systemd. I am worried about it growing. I don't need systemd. I don't want systemd. But as long as there are alternatives, I don't really care if others do.

From what I've seen the good intentions behind systemd were marred by the fact that when it was announced the (mostly skeptical) responses to it were met by systemd supporters who held the attitude 'we're saving nix, join us or nix dies', and this has created the current atmosphere of debate.

While these death threats and the like are in no doubt horrible, it seems that some bridges need to be built between the people who support systemd and those who do not, because the attitudes on both sides of the argument are rather poor, and this makes the open source community look even worse.

Edit: I said nothing about systemd users currently making threats, rather that their attitude at the beginning of the project at some level caused the response that we see today. They are not completely to blame, as are not the people who are against systemd and do not send death threats. Regardless, it seems that recently, HN only supports the idea of 'there is no gray, only black and white'. People like these are the reason why the systemd creators cannot engage in debate, because on both sides the people who shout the loudest win out over the reasonable voices.

I can see that systemd as a piece of software has many benefits. However, as a software project, the attitude as you mention, is a major problem. In my one single minor interaction with systemd people, I already agree with this criticism:

"My experiences with systemd's Debian maintainers (and, indirectly, systemd's upstream) have been far from satisfactory in this regard. Instead of taking a flexible approach, and being willing to provide a range of glue facilities and approaches for different daemon upstreams, the systemd community seems doctrinaire. Daemon authors are expected to do as they are told by systemd upstream, rather than systemd upstream making things comfortable for daemon developers.

This is IMO the opposite of the proper attitude."

(from https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2013/12/msg00182.html)

This counts as a "technical reason". Though not directly about the software itself, a project with such an attitude should not be relied on because the people in control do not have your best interests in the long run.

People who support systemd are not launching personal attacks, calling for physical harm against non-systemd supporters. This is a unidirectional attack. And it needs to stop.

Has this ever been substantiated? From my understanding, the "death threats" were more along the lines of people saying awful things like "I hope Lennart gets run over", not "I am hiring someone to shoot you". Lennart made a comment about a bitcoin collection, but provided no actual proof. Personally, I'm skeptical - I've seen quite a bit of vitriol about systemd, but never anyone campaigning for bitcoins to hire a hitman. It seems like a rather easy way to bring a lot of discredit to your detractors.

Even the former is obviously not acceptable, but no one is being done any favors if we suddenly conflate an offhand mean spirited comment with actual death threats or attempts on someone's life.

Edit: Someone linked the actual conversation - http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx...

It's obviously a joke and not an actual attempt to hire a hitman. They shortly after proceed to talk about how Red Hat has replacement clones if anything were to happen, anyway.

Is it a shitty joke? yes. Is it mean spirited? Yes. Is it the same thing as actually trying to have someone kill the man? No.

Yes, it is clearly a joke.

What???

Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!).

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

http://logs.nslu2-linux.org/livelogs/maemo/maemo.20130215.tx... (Ctrl-F hitman)

No bridge is sacred enough to warrant physical threats when burned. No attitude poor enough to elicit the response that this did. It's bloody software.

Worse. It's bloody open-source software.

You don't like it, you fork the last version you did and start from there. If enough people agree with you, you'll be fine. If not, you are probably wrong.

Looking from afar, you'd think this was some tiff over imaginary lines on a map or something. Now that would be silly.

Gentoo is waiting to welcome all the systemD haters. OpenRC is going strong.

We also support systemD as well because USE flags rock.

In fact being able to see the sysV and systemD init files side by site was what finally convinced me it is an improvement. An improvement with many questionable additions... Like free money attached with losing my 25/20 eyesight to normal 20/20 or some other minor debilitating affliction.

No, they have not. Some random asshats have done what random asshats have always done. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got death threats when he killed off Sherlock Holmes. This is not some new thing or some internet thing. These are not people who were ever involved in a debate for them to carry over into something more extreme. They were never part of the community. This desire to blame other people for someone else's actions is immoral and dishonest.

I've very little to criticise it as an init system... My criticism falls more towards the issues of "why is this all in one process not task specific child processes launched by a core init process" and "why can't you make this work on BSD" and "why the f%*^# hell are you building kdbus... Please stop killing the kittens"

Systemd does not run on BSD because of Cgroups and that is something the BSD maintainers don't want. Here's a small set of justifications why : systemd leverages core Linux infrastructure that has already diverged from OpenBSD

http://lwn.net/Articles/524920/

Having said that, there is work that the systems is sponsoring a project that implements systemd on OpenBSD

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4MjQ

Systemd on the other hand is rightly couples to the Linux kernel (to the point that you may have to update systemd and the Linux kernel in lockstep), and its many sub-systems are tightly coupled to the existence of systemd-pid1.

This makes systemd a whole other beast from OpenSSH.

I guess I can explain my 'imaginary' problems a bit. Like normal people, I had several random things thrown in rc.local(set drive power settings,disable blue tooth on laptops, set raid sync rates,ect).

The first issue was, systemd never even executed this file. I had to go do random googling just to get it to execute.

After that, it was hit or miss on whether everything within the file would even get successfully executed. I'm guessing because some dependencies or modules aren't loaded yet, which shouldn't matter since rc.local is normally ran last. Sure, I could take each individual command and make its own init file which is what systemd docs recommend over rc.local. But seriously, why should I have to go to that length to fix something that has been working fine for 15 years?

It was not my intention to flame you. From your tone and sparse message, I assumed you were making yet another unfounded accusation about systemd; so many people on both sides (but mostly on the anti-systemd side) have been making ridiculous and untrue statements so often and for so long that I tend to just expect random made up nonsense to fly with reckless abandon. In your case, you have had a bad usability experience with systemd; and I can't deny your experience. I wasn't there.

That said, it is my understanding that rc.local continues to work fine on systems that choose to enable the compatibility layer. Fedora is my desktop and laptop OS of choice, and I don't think I did anything to make my rc.local files work. I don't use them for much, but I do have some custom hard disk spin down times and such setup on one of my machines, which continued to function after upgrading to a systemd-based version.

If your distro opted not to enable the compatibility layer by default, I suspect there's an easy way to do it yourself with a single command line or installation of a package.

Our servers all run CentOS and we've put a couple of new CentOS 7 systems online recently, and while we don't have any rc.local bits running on them, we do still have a few old style initscripts (in our products, embarrassingly enough, even though our bootup and shutdown module supports systemd and upstart, we still ship initscripts to start our own stuff), and they have continued to function correctly on CentOS 7.

In short, it has not been my experience that doing things the old way has been dramatically cut off for people who need to continue doing so for the time being. In my, admittedly limited, experience, I haven't noticed any difference except the "service" command now recommends systemctl when you run it.

In summary, systemd has not simplified my life. I am not really sure what the rave about it even is. And no, I am not the one threatening the developers. I really don't care enough. I just find it odd that so many praise it so heavily, and I don't feel that way at all. I also know of no sysadmins that are looking forward to its global rollout....

Not even close. To the extent it improves performance, that's a nice side effect. For me, personally, it means a few lines of .service instead of a pile of init.d, service supervision when services unexpectedly exit, easy log integration to see what services are up to, and unified activation of services by a variety of means (socket, bus, path, dependency, etc).

I've been a UNIX/Linux system administrator coming up on 20 years now (professionally since about '99), and I understand the pain. It's hard to break the habits of all that time; it's always worked before. In a pinch we've always been able to stick some shell commands somewhere and have it fire up the stuff we wanted to fire up.

But, it's nice to have one "thing" to ask questions of that will tell us a significant amount of data about the state of our system. It's something Windows Server has had for a long time (for Microsoft-provided core stuff; third party stuff has always sucked way worse than the state of things on Linux has ever been), and was arguably one of the (very few) reasons one might choose Windows over Linux on a server.

I have reservations about systemd. It's big, seemingly over-engineered and intrusive into places that init never went, and does some things in seemingly fragile ways (someone else mentioned that dependencies failing can lead to failure to boot, which is not something init ever really had a problem with). But, it's better than init, on nearly every axis. And, it is the new de facto standard.

So, I will learn it. I will work to make all the software I work on (which has an installed base in the millions, in the case of Webmin) work well with it. And, I'll probably even come to like it, eventually.

Yes! Exactly! When you start breaking people's stuff that was working you will certainly not be getting compliments!

    ~$ grep -r 'rc\.local' /lib/systemd/system
    /lib/systemd/system/rc-local.service:# systemd-rc-local-generator if /etc/rc.local is executable.
    /lib/systemd/system/rc-local.service:Description=/etc/rc.local Compatibility
    /lib/systemd/system/rc-local.service:ConditionFileIsExecutable=/etc/rc.local
    /lib/systemd/system/rc-local.service:ExecStart=/etc/rc.local start

You know, the Linux distro that sets itself apart from the rest by Not Having systemd. Just... not having it. Going with SysV init or BSD init or Something Which Is Not systemd.

Because I don't see one, which implies it isn't that bad.

Slackware for one. Besides, appeal to popularity isn't a very good argument from my perspective.

Is there absolutely no working alternative ?

You don't have to use systemd. If you keep using it when there are other working systems and you don't like it, the fault is entirely yours.

How did we get here? Because people on the internet continually use this highly charged language without regard. It is high time we as a community (at least on HN) commit to stop using such language.

We don't need to use such language. We don't need it. We can easily make our points without it. For example:

> "stuck"? There are many alternatives to systemd. There are many distributions which do not use it.

While keeping with the intent, this replacement no longer uses the violent language and also no lessens the attack on the parent commenter.

We should in general:

1. Not use violent language

2. Not attack commenters

3. Use non-adversarial language whenever possible.

Whatever the original problem was or the top link that is just not a viable solution. It is like saying "you don't have use libc, write your own". Or "Fine, Linus is a jerk, don't use the kernel, install minix but stop criticizing linux".

Let's say I follow the advice and apt-get remove systemd from Ubuntu 14.10. It doesn't look good. It takes along with it gnome-session, gvfs, nautilus, network-manager, pulseaudio, ubunt-desktop, softare-center, update-manager, update-notifier and others. Have you tried doing, maybe I am doing something wrong and there is a easier way to replace it.

One major problem is that gnome relies heavily on systemd. Good thing there are other DMs.

Wasn't that exactly the point of the argument -- how saying "just replace systemd" doesn't work and is not a realistic answer to any of the criticism?