Boycott Systemd (2014)
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Boycott Systemd (2014)
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Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#2Related writeup: https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/2013/06/09/systemd-blo....
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#3Can anybody explain to me what dbus is for, and why I sometimes have to start applications using "dbus-launch" because otherwise they can't connect to dbus. Or why sometimes when I login on other systems using "ssh -CY" I cannot even start applications like eog (eye of gnome) because dbus is in the way, but somehow mysteriously they DO start when I run them with "strace -f"?
Seems to me that Linux systems are starting to see the downsides of a microservices approach.
Edit: thanks for all the replies, yes, I get that dbus is for sending messages between applications, but what is wrong with e.g. UNIX domain sockets?
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#4Can anybody explain to me what dbus is for, and why I sometimes have to start applications using "dbus-launch" because otherwise they can't connect to dbus. Or why sometimes when I login on other systems using "ssh -CY" I cannot even start applications like eog (eye of gnome) because dbus is in the way, but somehow mysteriously they DO start when I run them with "strace -f"? Seems to me that Linux systems are startin…
"D-Bus provides a software-bus abstraction that gathers all the communications between a group of processes over a single shared virtual channel. Processes connected to a bus do not know how it is internally implemented, but D-Bus specification guarantees that all processes connected to the bus can communicate with each other through it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#5Can anybody explain to me what dbus is for, and why I sometimes have to start applications using "dbus-launch" because otherwise they can't connect to dbus. Or why sometimes when I login on other systems using "ssh -CY" I cannot even start applications like eog (eye of gnome) because dbus is in the way, but somehow mysteriously they DO start when I run them with "strace -f"? Seems to me that Linux systems are startin…
dbus is a mechanism that allows different processes to communicate with each other.
I think (but I'm not sure) that it's primarily used by Gnome and KDE.
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#6Related writeup: https://people.debian.org/~stapelberg/2013/06/09/systemd-blo... .
That's from 2013 though.
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#7Can anybody explain to me what dbus is for, and why I sometimes have to start applications using "dbus-launch" because otherwise they can't connect to dbus. Or why sometimes when I login on other systems using "ssh -CY" I cannot even start applications like eog (eye of gnome) because dbus is in the way, but somehow mysteriously they DO start when I run them with "strace -f"? Seems to me that Linux systems are startin…
DBus is yet another message bus, but this time for a few desktop applications. Made famous by BlueZ's requirement of DBus and by it being the only Linux userspace thing that made it into Android before they completely rewrote the userspace stack for the phones.
A ton of "desktop linux" components will attempt to use DBus for inter-process communication because it's easier than a lot of the alternatives.
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#8Discussed at the time:
Boycott systemd - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7639170 - April 2014 (232 comments)
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#9>systemd's team is noticeably chauvinistic and anti-Unix
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER, ONE OF THESE THINGS IS a serious allegation against the values of systemd's maintainers that is not backed up by anything in the text. Unless the writer just doesn't understand what "chauvinism" is beyond being a malword.
>systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy: "do one thing and do it well," representing a complex collection of dozens of binaries
>systemd clusters itself into PID 1 (...) This happens to be another example of SPOF.
PICK ONE! Either it's multiple binaries or everything's in PID1.
Also, the single-point-of-failure is not systemd's fault. Having a PID1 at all is the single point of failure. That being said, practically speaking there are loads of processes that will effectively crash your system if they fail. Does the user care (or even notice) if their system rebooted because systemd died, or because Wayland died and took the desktop session with it?
>Ultimately, systemd's parasitism is symbolic of something more than systemd itself. It shows a radical shift in thinking by the Linux community. Not necessarily a positive one, either. One that is vehemently postmodern, monolithic, heavily desktop-oriented, choice-limiting, isolationist, reinvents the flat tire, and is just anti-Unix in general.
By 2014 every relevant commercial UNIX-like was shipping the moral equivalent of systemd's all-encompassing setup. systemd clones modern UNIX in the same way GNU clones classical UNIX, because systemd does all the basic system maintenance tasks that people expect out of a modern desktop.
I'm not sure if "postmodern" is being used in the sense of "I can't figure this out" or "they put critical race theory in my userland". Perhaps this is me talking without the necessary historical perspective, but Mark Shuttlesworth's quip about the "Open Source Tea Party" comes to mind here.
Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)
#10Can anybody explain to me what dbus is for, and why I sometimes have to start applications using "dbus-launch" because otherwise they can't connect to dbus. Or why sometimes when I login on other systems using "ssh -CY" I cannot even start applications like eog (eye of gnome) because dbus is in the way, but somehow mysteriously they DO start when I run them with "strace -f"? Seems to me that Linux systems are startin…
Dbus doesn't have anything to do with systemd FYI. It's a communication bus for processes to talk to each other through structured RPC messages.