The destructive desktop — Linux in trouble?

Wait a moment. DBus is not a 'gui thing'. It is a protocol for inter-process communication. I'm not in bed with it in any way, but it seems to do a good job. You can use it from ~every~ language of your choice. Its adoption cannot (just?) be blamed on politics, it's just dead easy to use for a programmer.

Lately (and that seems to be something the author of the blog post resents) it pushed further into the system layer, for example with dbus activated services (systemd, but I'm pretty sure upstart had that as well). For as long as I can remember your distribution always started a system-level dbus instance and (only here we're talking gui/desktop environment heavy) one per session/login/user.

If you have problems with dependencies between a couple of programs that talk different protocol levels:

- Someone messed up packaging. Or you installed something in a ~weird~ way

- The same could easily happen with any other 'let's make these processes from totally unrelated projects and running using different underlying technology communicate' solution. Dbus cannot protect you from changing interfaces.

- .. except, maybe it _wouldn't_ easily happen, because without an easy way to do what dbus offers I guess you'd have fewer software and less integration points. Which you might label a Good Thing and I'd disagree.

Ubuntu still is easily manageable from the command line. It might be different from your LFS/Gentoo/Arch etc. solutions, but it's closer than FreeBSD and others. I've no love for Ubuntu, but claiming that you cannot easily (okay - define that) learn its ways and how to fix or customize it yourself? I think you should reconsider that part..

Speaking as someone who has a couple of legacy servers running Gentoo: Don't do that.

Usually there's no need to have a compiler on a production machine and certainly not on a router. Unless, well, your package manager wants one. Yes, I know that you can have binary packages for Gentoo, but that kind of defeats the point.

I haven't found a serious distribution that doesn't allow you to install a stripped down system and go from there.

Didn't downvote you, but .. How?

The project authors certainly don't care about people with 'special' requirements. For them it just saves time. Now the packagers _could_ do what you suggest, but especially for such a central library it doesn't make sense. You want to have only one version of that thing for a gazillion reasons.

The original request for this thread? Well, it seems that person wanted to port a library to a completely different system _and created the binary for that system_. Right, he can statically link it. What does he gain? He still needs to gather all dependencies before and his complaint (as a developer/distributor) of having to meddle with glib would be the same. He didn't complain about distributing another couple .so files as far as I understand the issue.

The issue with static IPs & Network Manager is posted all over the internet (just google "network manager static ip" so I assume they know about it already. Frankly I don't know enough about how NetworkManager works to dig into the source code and isolate the issue, since it's been ongoing for a while and I'm not the only person experiencing it I'm going to assume it would not be a simple fix.

I could use dhcp rules but then I sometimes have to move my development machine to other places where of course I will be on a different dhcp server which I may not have admin access to. The workaround of having a shell script that sends a bunch of "ifconfig" commands does the job for me whilst still allowing me to use NM for wifi config but it just seems like something that should be unnecessary.

I sort of assume that most experience Linux people have experienced some sound issues at some point. My problem with pulseaudio has always been the slight latency that seems to happen between sound being sent by the program and played by the speakers which means that for example when an MP3 file is paused the sound continues for a fraction of a second. Sure this may not be a huge issue and I didn't even notice it for a while but as soon as I noticed it, it really started to grind on me. Not to mention that it makes the system terrible for doing any kind of audio editing.

The solution for this is to uninstall pulseaudio and go back to ALSA which is a bit of a pain in itself, but once you've achieved this you get odd problems like (in ubuntu anyway) the sound control panel applet disappears and you have to run alsamixer to change the volume, also volume control for some programs (such as spotify) stops working completely.

There are a number of other various small issues that can make desktop Linux a pain to use sometimes, this is why I am often surprised that canonical seem to prioritize redesigning the GUI every few releases over fixing stuff like this.

if I could downvote.

Linux is always about choice. If you have enough information and time you can choose what ever software stack you want with it. You can even change any configuration software that comes with your distribution with any tool you want.

Also author does not rant about building a self owned distribution. The rant can even be considered good if you do think Linux is only about graphical desktop applications. Linux software can be configured or used without these but it's getting real hard to disregard their influence over other software.