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Boycott Systemd (2014)

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Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#11

>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 c…

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Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#12
post #3

Can 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.

From the article:

> udev and dbus are forced dependencies.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#13
post #3

Can 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 sort-of standardised way for applications to communicate; generally used so that a service can make itself available to clients (e.g. battery status, bluetooth devices, plenty of other things that I don't happen to use).

Generally I only start it if an application won't work without it. Biggest issues for me (personally) is it's linux-specific and (unless I'm missing something) limited to the current host); otherwise it's client-agnostic sockets FTW.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the article: > udev and dbus are forced dependencies.

Yes systemd can use dbus, but plenty of non-systemd systems use and used dbus.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#16

>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 c…

“Chauvinism” just means being prejudiced towards one’s own group. Chauvin was a 19th century French fictional character who was excessively patriotic.

You may be thinking of “male chauvinism”, which of course has nothing to do with “systemd chauvinism” (or “SysV chauvinism” for that matter).

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#17
The whole argument about Systemd being counter to the Unix philosophy because it clusters a bunch of seemingly unrelated pieces of functionality(networking, device detection, process initialization, session management, power management, et. al) is not really applicable in my opinion.

All of the functionality on that list has two things in common that make them good candidates for Systemd: they all require programs to be started and stopped in response to state changes, and they all will require different programs to be started at initialization based on the initial state of the system. I was annoyed too when udev became systemd-udev and broke a few pieces of functionality I was relying on 15 years ago but if you're building a system around the Linux kernel it's a really useful toolkit if you have the resources to use it, because it does a ton of stuff for you.

Before Systemd I was having to write ifup/ifdown scripts and monkey with shell scripts in init.d and updating udev rules to control initialization, which was more Unixy but also riddled with edge cases. For example, there's nothing stopping ifup/ifdown scripts from running out of order with certain udev rules when you plug in a USB-to-Ethernet adapter without inventing your own ad-hoc synchronization mechanism. Systemd builds that same thing in and essentially makes it the default.

It's had some irritating teething problems, and I would also prefer some more interchangeability and some reduction in the amount of binary code, but I have a better experience with it than without it in the systems that I work with.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#18
Not sure why this is posted after 9 years. The page itself seems to have been hijacked by some scammy ad company, and one of the distros suggested as an alternative (CRUX) is still alive, but lacks mindshare.

From what I can see there's still a groundswell of anti-systemd sentiment, and there are distros that attempt to avoid it.

Edit I was mistaken about how active CRUX is, corrected.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#19
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From the article: > udev and dbus are forced dependencies.

Not true (although maybe in the systemd world?). udev just populates /dev dynamically (rather than having to create all the /dev/ entries manually/via scripts).

Even udev is optional (upon upon a time, adding a new device involved knowing the right 'mknod' invocation in order to be able to connect to it - udev sort-of solves that).

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