Live data from Hacker News

Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

techrepublic.com

101–110 of 191 posts

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#101
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Taking a step backward from Alsa is hard, and they managed to do it. Now that same team is messing with sys…

The amount of features and stuff they add to systemd is seriously impressive. They have bugs sometimes, but I have been running it in production for years and years and never had a real issue. Its an incredibly stable system. Sometimes a new version has a bug because systemd has to work in so many context, those get fixed very quickly generally. I would challange anybody, to introduce a totally new system layer on li…

> And Pulse Audio was started by Pottering but he quickly moved on

Which is pretty much what I blame him for.

He has a history of starting ambitious (maybe overly so) projects, doing all the fun stuff until it kinda sorta works, and then riding off into the sunset.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#102
post #92
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just saying "I want things to be the way I first learnt them and don't want them to change." This is fine, but you do have to accept that things are going to move on without you.

By that logic, no mistakes can ever be criticized. I explained, why systemd is a step in the wrong direction in mutiple ways. That has nothing to do with habbits.

> I explained, why systemd is a step in the wrong direction

I see a bunch of "I want X", but I don't see any "why"

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#103
post #88
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an end user, meaning a web app developer, I actually like systemd a lot. I perceive the software quality to be good enough. I've used it in production since 2014 and encountered zero bugs. It does seem to me to be vastly simpler compared to the old way of doing things. I don't really feel strongly either way. I'll be pretty sad if Debian and redhat diverge.

And that is exactly the marketing card that have been played. The dev out numbers the sysadmin and ask for SystemD. Then it's to the sysadmin to live with the numerous bugs and non-standard and hardly documented ways of the Beast.

Honestly there have been zero angry sysadmins in the picture. Actually very few if any sysadmins in the picture since 2016.

Anything I touch that requires sysadmins is outsourced one way or another, either via managed services like rds or in house dbas.

If aws or in house dbas have strong opinions about systemd it doesn't impact me.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#104
post #77
post #62

The fact that we're still having _this_ conversation, after after a decade since being released and years after mass adoption, should say a lot. I can't think of any other software I have to use on a daily basis that gets so much heat, every time it comes up. One can make all the arguments for it they want but the continued public comtempt means something.

The list in the Linux desktop world is honestly pretty long and could be extended at will. Some examples: Wayland, GNOME 3, KDE Plasma, Nvidia drivers, PulseAudio, DBus

Wayland is nearly vaporware, gnome 3 is optional, kde plasma is optional, nvidia drivers are optional and have functional FOSS replacements, pulse I'll grant you (and hope you see the irony) and dbus I can't honestly comment on because the little direct interaction I've had with it was fine but mostly I don't think about it. The flaw with your list is that half of it is optional and anyone who doesn't like those things doesn't have to use them. My daily driver is xfce on xorg.

Two of the three components in your list that are mearly mandatory came from the same engineer. Why we do we keep accepting his code?

FWIW, the desktop world is less important and I run Linux as a desktop. The nightmares I get from systemd are all about my servers. If we could have left servers alone, people like me wouldn't even have cared. As it is, I have to get out the kid gloves when I'm dealing with my service platform because Bad Decisions are now system standard.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#105
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you grant some sinister motive on the part of Red Hat (which I do not), the analogy doesn't work. EEE requires some existing technology to embrace. Lennart Poettering built systemd from the ground up. And everything is open-source and done with the collaboration of the community anyway.

One existing technology Red Hat leveraged to achieve this was Gnome. A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to create a hard dependency on logind which was part of systemd. Other distros were mollified by being told that logind didn't really depend on systemd and they could just take it out and use it. Then, once that was safely ensconsed, Poettering declared that actual…

> A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to create a hard dependency on logind which was part of systemd.

Nobody was willing to maintain consolekit, the logind folks stepped up to provide a replacement and the gnome folks started depending on it. Everyone could have prevented that lock-in by maintaining consolekit or providing another replacement. Nobody did. To this day, tons of folks complain that gnome depends on logind.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#106
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Taking a step backward from Alsa is hard, and they managed to do it. Now that same team is messing with sys…

Pulse has been fine for ... I dunno, a decade or so now. I remember when it was problematic, and then one day I discovered I could do things like send sound to other computers, control different applications independently, turn on bluetooth headphones and just have them work. All the sort of things you'd expect a modern sound system (which ALSA certainly is not) to be able to do without having to edit configs or what…

Unless you use your computer for more than just consumption and you find out that latency wise pulseaudio absolutely sucks. And then you install jack, a bridge from pulse to jack and a whole raft of other fixes to be able to use the same desktop for regular work and audio work.

My main gripe with anything from that group of people is that they refuse to play nice with others, and by extension that their code refuses to work properly with code produced by others.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#107
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do `sudo apache start` in production, how do you do it? Log in to the server and type it in? What about log and metrics agents, how do you start and configure those? Also why are you so judgemental? I don't want Debian and rhel to diverge because I have clients who use both and I don't want to have to do more work to support both.

Sorry I didn't want to sound judgemental. My point was that your argument, taken to the extreme, undermines having multiple Linux distributions in the first place. Which is exactly the embrace-extend-extinguish aspect being talked about elsewhere in this thread.

I just can't conceive of how init could be extinguished, or how life would be worse in any way for me if I was never forced to deal with init again. What's the bad angle? Do I actually have skin in this game I didn't realize?

Edit: I am super duper cool with having multiple Linux distributions. I am just not really excited about being forced to interact with vastly different distros specifically in the course of doing my job.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other day at the office, I was the only one that had heard of, let alone used, Slackware. I am also the oldest in the team, this is probably no coincidence.

I have worked at more than one place where I was the only one who had heard of Linux. I skip paraphrasing the 'let alone used' part, for of course everyone was using it in their routers and phones and proverbial toasters. It is my clear impression that many Windows users would be hard pressed to explain what 'Windows' is and does.

Oh God. I've embarked on a project to try to relearn how Windows works again, and I'm actually having a terrifying time of it.

I"m starting to realize where so many holes in my understanding exist, and abhor how for so long I was just content to accept most things in Windows just happened.

Then I started actually digging into log files and various software distro's and tried to connect all the dots.

Long story short, nothing scares me more now than a computer program that I can't explain why it's doing what it's doing. SystemD falls into that trap for me. It may just be a case of sitting down and reverse engineering it until it clicks, but until then, I'd rather not trust anything important to it.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#109
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list in the Linux desktop world is honestly pretty long and could be extended at will. Some examples: Wayland, GNOME 3, KDE Plasma, Nvidia drivers, PulseAudio, DBus

Wayland is nearly vaporware, gnome 3 is optional, kde plasma is optional, nvidia drivers are optional and have functional FOSS replacements, pulse I'll grant you (and hope you see the irony) and dbus I can't honestly comment on because the little direct interaction I've had with it was fine but mostly I don't think about it. The flaw with your list is that half of it is optional and anyone who doesn't like those thin…

> Wayland is nearly vaporware

Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland on fresh installs for at least two or three releases and generally it’s working okish. There’s still a lot of software lacking proper wayland support, though.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#110
post #96
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I want to write a script that runs on startup, I expect that I can just put (or link) it in some directory where the scripts are that get started on startup This is not very specific, have you never had any race-condition with this? There is a reason SystemD ask some informations regarding the service that needs to be launched. I don't see how ignoring those makes a good argument against SystemD.

No, I can not remember having a race condition regarding startup scripts.

Then you didn't have to mantain a system of any kind of complexity.
Post reply on HN