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Boycott Systemd (2014)

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Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#21

Post by toast0 »

amelius wrote: 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…

> 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?

I think the reason for dbus is that all of these processes want to talk to all the other ones, and they need to rendezvous somewhere. You probably don't want to open a unix socket for every 'topic' you want to respond to, and anyway if there's multiple programs interested in the topic, how do you make sure they all get all of the messages, if they all listen to the socket, only one gets the message.

For desktopy things, you could communicate through the X server, but some of the things you might want to communicate with are system daemons, not X applications. I don't know if Wayland provides a way for multiple clients to communicate? OTOH, dbus doesn't transit over the network, so eog on a remote host can't communicate with your desktop environment, so that's kind of a pain. Yet another capability lost overtime. grumblegrumble*

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#22

Post by Cpoll »

kmeisthax wrote: post #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 c…

If you're referring to the word "chauvinism" as a synonym for "male chauvinism": This is the common connotation, and the default understanding of the word. However, the dictionary definition of chauvinism isn't "male chauvinism," and it can be understood to mean something else in certain contexts (I argue such as this one).

The first stanza of the Wiktionary definition: > Chauvinism is the unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people ...

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#23

Post by zh3 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #7
amelius wrote: 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 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.

Eh, some of us would wonder what the easier alteratives are?

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#24

Post by vidarh »

kmeisthax wrote: post #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 c…

I think the biggest flaw of systemd was "political" in grouping too many different tools under the single project name.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#25

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Perhaps the issue with systemd is not technical superiority nor convenience, as many commenters routinely present it.

Perhaps the issue is actually user control.

Personally, I know that if I followed the philosophy of always picking the solutions that were the most technically superior, the easiest to use and/or the most convenient, I would have far less control over the computers I own. YMMV.

For the avoidance of doubt, the term "control" as used here refers to the ability of the user to control systemd and thereby control the computer, not the ability of systemd to control the computer. The later might be "technically superior" to prior alternatives.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#26

Post by dale_glass »

I don't care about a single one of those.

Computers exist to solve problems, not to be compliant with a particular philosophy. The appeals to Unix philosophy, dogma about how logs should be stored, etc, are all completely irrelevant to me. I don't run Linux because it fulfills an ideology but because it does a job.

Also, journald is actually extremely nice. Of all the complaints, I don't really get some people's love for text log files. They're an inferior technology, and rather silly when you think of it. For anything but the most trivial tasks, we have to parse them. Which means we're expending the effort to take some well structured inner state, often cut off a chunk of it (eg, remove milliseconds from timestamps), often convert it to a hard to machine read format (eg, human readable dates), and then proceed to try to reverse this process. This is nuts.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#27

Post by qbasic_forever »

zh3 wrote: post #23
throwway120385 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, some of us would wonder what the easier alteratives are?

Unix domain sockets or FIFOs could be an alternative, but you'd have to do all kinds of complexity to support pub/sub style many to many communication over them (which is what dbus effectively does for you).

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#28

Post by Avshalom »

gerikson wrote: post #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.

CRUX is slightly more alive than that https://crux.nu/Main/News although yeah, other than rubbernecking at the past I'm not sure why this made it to the front page.
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