Re:Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie
by wooger on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @07:27AM
(#9026709)
Please note: These problems don't crop up in non-rolling distros nearly as much. The transitions are held off, managed and only rolled out for new major versions of a distro.
There are benefits to running Arch, but 'just works without breaking' is not something it's good at.
Re:Has modern Linux lost its way? Some thoughts on Jessie
by gh02t on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @08:05AM
(#9026833)
Indeed. I love Arch and generally it has been very reliable for me (more so than Kubuntu or Suse ever was previously). However, the transition to systemd was one of the few times where I had a issues. Systemd is pretty mature these days, but back then it was much buggier and less well-supported.
In the long run though, I'm glad to have made the switch. I find it much easier to maintain. I also use FreeBSD at home and while I love it too, some aspects of maintaining it don't feel as nice (I suck at writing init scripts apparently).
It's the reason I started preferring linux in the first place - I run into bugs on windows and mac os x, and I can't make a system fully the way I like it, except with something like linux. But I digress.
Things also work fine now, but during the transitions from "udev and group permissions" to HAL to udisks / consolekit to systemd / logind, stuff broke. It seems like the same group of well-meaning people worked on HAL then dropped it, worked on consolekit then dropped it, and ended up in the systemd ecosystem.
The various desktop / filemanager projects that started supporting one of these previous systems, to be more compatible with the others and theoretically make things easier for users, sort of got pulled from one to the next, whether it was better or not. Because the previous was unsupported and somehow getting more flaky.
Anyway... it's not the end of the world, there are still other distros and more minimal projects, and it's all still open source. There are even people trying to maintain independent udev and consolekit (the end of the usb-drive-access line, if you don't get on systemd).
But it is annoying that there are these people and projects, that have a lot of influence on other prominent, "classic" projects, that are trying to make a linux system like windows or os x, and adding huge amounts of coupling and complexity. All because they want all sorts of things to "just work" and attract the "common user". Both of these goals are futile, and the costs paid are for naught.