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Cool but obscure X11 tools

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Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#121

Post by [deleted] »

microcolonel wrote: post #41
dexen wrote: post #26

>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. >An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems. >Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected systems. [1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

[deleted]

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#122

Post by liability »

Sammi wrote: post #101
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

Relevant talk: The Tragedy of systemd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo "systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. As a FreeBSD developer I decided I wanted to know why. I delved into the history of bootstrap systems, and even the history of UNIX and other contemporary operating systems, to try and work out why something like systemd was seem as necessary, if not desirable. I also tried to work out why…

I've been using SystemD with little complaint since around 2011 or so when Fedora switched. I don't count myself among the systems haters, but that talk is hot garbage. It's just a big ad hominem that boils down to "people just hate change."

But that lacks explanatory power. Lots of things change and don't receive backlash, even in the desktop Linux domain. Plenty of people are skeptical of Wayland for instance, but the conversations tend to stay relatively cool-headed.

I think there are two things going on; the first and most significant is that most Linux desktop users (not sys admins or packagers, just desktop users) never had to know what a sysv init system was and never fucked with it, but then their distro switched, something broke (maybe their packagers' fault, maybe not!), they googled the problem and at the end of that Google dive they found out the answer involved a component they were previously unaware of, making itself known to them in a way that caused them hassle. Any upsides were washed out by this initial first bad experience. For me, I was using Fedora at the time so I knew I was getting bleeding edge shit and might get cut. That was exciting for me. It was my hobby, so I liked systemd. But that didn't blind me to the wants and desires of more typical desktop users who wanted the "just werks" experience.

(The other factor is that Lennart has bad social skills and it seems to rub off on the people he works with. Some might argue that the critics started it, but I don't care who started it. Stop jabbing your little sister or I'm turning this car around!)

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#124

Post by Avamander »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #107
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

After his foolish use of alloca() in systemd was revealed, it's clear that the derision is well deserved. One would think that after cutting his teeth on PulseAudio he'd have learned how to write safe, system level C.

Please, it's not like any single other component in Linux desktop is somehow more secure. If anything, most stuff on Linux desktops are majorly more buggier and unsafe, they're just less popular in most cases.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#125

Post by adrianmonk »

Fun point of trivia about XBill: you might not guess from XBill's (ahem) slick, beautiful user interface, but one of the two people who wrote XBill is Matias Duarte.

Yes, that Matias Duarte, the guy in charge of UI for Android and who came up with Material Design.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#126

Post by Avamander »

microcolonel wrote: post #41
dexen wrote: post #26

>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. >An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems. >Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected systems. [1] https://cyber.dabamos.de/unix/x11/poettering.gif

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

I do too thank him for actually manageable and nice-to-use service management and how much less it actually gets in my way than other inits, audio systems, logging and logrotating systems do. I instantly dismiss anyone's opinion who finds stuff like `rc-service $(name) status` or tracking down where the f* some garbage decides to log (turns out it's stdout >:|) even remotely acceptable.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#127

Post by Avamander »

big_chungus wrote: post #111
scrollaway wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work. It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying…

> Code which, for most people, does work. That doesn't mean other stuff couldn't have been better. Here's the problem the systemd argument: it's motte-and-bailey. Systemd is a huge collection of tools, not just an init system: it's got resolved, journald, logind, tmpfiles, bootctl, networkd, and more. However, whenever it's criticized, proponents fall back on "but it's a great init system!" I agree that the unit file…

> Oh, and Lennart Poettering is also a jerk. Not an "I'm brash" kind of jerk (like Linus can be), but an "I'm an insecure person; don't critique my code" kind of way. Also, he thinks he's smarter than every one.

I think it's largely due to how the community has treated him. It's frankly disgusting.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#128

Post by djur »

cr0sh wrote: post #118
microcolonel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!

From my understanding, and I may be wrong, the reason why systemd is..."controversial"...had mainly to do with the heavy-handed way it was incorporated. It was almost like it appeared out of nowhere, written by one person who "thought he knew better" (maybe he did? but that's not the point), without any community input or discussion, and yet despite all of this somehow it got crammed into a distro (I don't recall whi…

SysV init, which was the traditional type used on Linux systems (with some exceptions like Slackware), was itself derided by critics as overcomplicated. And since it was part of the commercial distribution of UNIX released by AT&T, it was viewed by many as corporate contamination. Not "organic" at all. The BSD world never accepted it.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#129

Post by liability »

pjmlp wrote: post #106
randolando wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the fundamental shift away from the long accepted design philosophy of software doing one thing and doing it well. This means "grown adults" can't uninstall the software components that they like, because they aren't individual components anymore. Systemd would probably not be hated on as much if it was only a "better" init. But instead it is an opaque and centralized system that is replacing a growing…

You mean the myth of the UNIX way, never followed upon commercial UNIXes and somehow became a cargo cult on FOSS community only thank to a book of UNIX idols?

Right, the only true Unix philosophy which ever described reality was "worse is better."

Just look at the GNU coding guidelines, it explicitly mentions that GNU tools are not to use static buffers and silently truncate long lines. Why? Because that's what proprietary Unix implementations were doing at the time! Silent truncation of long input lines! Is that "doing one thing and doing it well" (DOTADIW)? Hell no!

DOTADIW is an ahistorical description of Unix. A humble-brag with little basis in reality.

Re: Cool but obscure X11 tools

#130

Post by tempguy9999 »

pjmlp wrote: post #106
randolando wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the fundamental shift away from the long accepted design philosophy of software doing one thing and doing it well. This means "grown adults" can't uninstall the software components that they like, because they aren't individual components anymore. Systemd would probably not be hated on as much if it was only a "better" init. But instead it is an opaque and centralized system that is replacing a growing…

You mean the myth of the UNIX way, never followed upon commercial UNIXes and somehow became a cargo cult on FOSS community only thank to a book of UNIX idols?

I notice you make a claim then don't give any backup. Could you expand on this, for me as a unix naif? thanks
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