Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along • Hacker News Board

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#61

Post by exelius » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:01 PM UTC

vertex-four wrote: post #51

exelius wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main alternatives seem to be OpenRC and Upstart. One of the biggest criticisms of systemd by its detractors is that it's unproven and not stable; and neither of these address that concern. Upstart was developed by Ubuntu, which has stopped supporting it and is adopting systemd because they recognized the need to standardize on a single system. After the Debian committee voted to go with systemd, Ubuntu (being a D…

> The main alternatives seem to be OpenRC and Upstart. There's also outliers like nosh[0], which implements at least some of the good bits of systemd (socket activation is in there), and the ideas and general architecture are solid enough that it could be extended to implement more (device/path dependencies through udev and inotify are two that I hear people wanting). Then separate pieces of software can implement th…

This debate has been raging for the better part of two years and many of these alternatives didn't exist when it started. Really though, systemd has the momentum and I don't see anything else remaining a mainstream alternative unless it just emulates systemd's functionality.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#62

Post by e7620 » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:02 PM UTC

api wrote: post #14

fidotron wrote: post #11

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the long run, though the short term is utterly depressing. My hunch is Lennart will be vindicated, on the basis that systemd as it exists right now is not right, but it can be evolved into something much better, and while that may not have occurred to other projects here the stakes are enormous. There is a definite strand to the resistance that any change t…

I agree. So far I've seen it as a classic conservatives vs. liberals debate. The conservatives have no interest at all in changing the Unix paradigm under Linux. It works perfectly well, thank you. The liberals see it as archaic and unsuited to a wide variety of new use cases including rapid-deployment VMs, containers, mobile and laptop computers, and the desktop in general. I side with the liberals here, but with a…

Not really, I use a dozen init systems, each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way. The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd.

Maybe those forks don't add nothing for you, but for me they're beneficial, because I think Darwinian evolution also applies to software.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#63

Post by erhardm » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

bkor wrote: post #40

erhardm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH, I currently feel the same way because of the opt-out, not opt-in situation. On one machine running Debian Sid I just found myself running systemd after an dist-upgrade..blowing my mind considering that I didn't choose Arch in the first place for the rolling release machine because of the systemd. But GNOME3 is to blame making systemd a hard dependency(Even if they mostly seem to be from the same camp, RH).

systemd provides things and does things that are useful. That is why GNOME depends on those. Blaming us? Try actually understanding why. It's not a hard dependency btw, you still have ConsoleKit support. A project not maintained for almost 3 years or so. Then there is that systemd-shim. Initially very very buggy, but now ok-ish. OpenBSD is working on some shim thing as well.

Others working on systemd shims out of necessity is a sign, IMHO, that systemd is in reality a hard dependency in the near future (and developers trying to free from that dependency). I don't say systemd is not useful, GNOME using it shows also to good sides of it, but others feeling a little forced to choose systemd or The Unix Way I think is the wrong way to do it. Why can't we have both(modern init system and unix philosophy)? Not possible? Not enough interest/resources?

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#64

Post by nanoscopic » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:06 PM UTC

uselessdguy wrote: post #54

nanoscopic wrote: post #49

That was a very long and detailed explanation of the sides of the argument. It misses one huge thing: Consistency. The elephant in the room is that most people who dislike systemd simply dislike it because they learned and used init.d scripts, runlevels, and chkconfig, and that is the extent of their understanding. The main hatred for systemd is coming from people simply being resistant to change. If it ain't broke,…

No, I specifically addressed this: -------------------------------- "The rather huge scope and opinionated nature of systemd leads to people yearning for the days of sysvinit. A lot of this is ignorance about good design principles, but a good part may also be motivated from an inability to properly convey desires of simple and transparent systems. In this way, proponents and opponents get caught in feedback loops of…

Most people don't know much about any of the details. They have simply done things one way for a long time and now it is changing. You haven't addressed that besides accusing those people of being "ignorant about good design principles" and "having huge misunderstandings that leads to a lot of wasted energy."

From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the entire discussion is the real waste of energy.

The people who know a ton are a different category altogether; you have addressed those.

The category of people you are ignoring is those who did it one way now they are suddenly "forced" to change.

I feel the same way about firewalld as I do about systemd. Iptables was confusing, but I used it till I was able to do what I needed. Now all of that knowledge is useless because I have to use a different system to stay with the rest of the group.

Is systemd better? Sure. Is firewalld better? Dunno; I think so. Am I ignorant and clueless and misunderstanding everything? No... I just have a different perspective than all of the people fighting about this. All I want is to continue my simple life. Learning new stuff is a drag if it worked fine before. ( I'm aware of how sucky 'fine' is... )

This is not an argument; it's just a statement of how I and a lot of people feel. We used to have a normal car; now the steering wheel is gone and replaced by a grid of 20 buttons that control an automated robot who steers for us. We were used to the wheel. We ask for the wheel back and we are told we are clueless and ignorant and should use the buttons.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#65

Post by e7620 » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:07 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #20

If systemd is bad for servers, why did RHEL[1] and CoreOS adopt it? Are we to believe that these companies work against themselves? [1] AFAIK 90% of Red Hat's revenue is from servers, not desktops.

> 90% of Red Hat's revenue is from servers

just a correction, red hat revenue is from support contracts.

> If systemd is bad for servers, why did RHEL[1] and CoreOS adopt it? Are we to believe that these companies work against themselves?

I know of two theories:

1) making systemd a dependency for gnome and the rest, red hat is trying to exterminate *bsd, which is considered better for servers.

2) "Software that ain't broken doesn't sell $$$upport. "

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#66

Post by e7620 » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #11

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the long run, though the short term is utterly depressing. My hunch is Lennart will be vindicated, on the basis that systemd as it exists right now is not right, but it can be evolved into something much better, and while that may not have occurred to other projects here the stakes are enormous. There is a definite strand to the resistance that any change t…

> The idea of a Unix where you get rid of bash/csh/whatever and just run a lua/python/ruby prompt and have your apps implemented largely in that same language

systemd doesn't help with that AT ALL. Other init systems do support this notion much better.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#67

Post by bnolsen » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #11

It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out in the long run, though the short term is utterly depressing. My hunch is Lennart will be vindicated, on the basis that systemd as it exists right now is not right, but it can be evolved into something much better, and while that may not have occurred to other projects here the stakes are enormous. There is a definite strand to the resistance that any change t…

If anything the whole systemd mess has put more attention on the init system and dependencies. There's plenty of drama and its a modern vi/emacs kde/gnome fight that people are passionate about.

I think what burns a lot of us anti systemd people is the apparently lack of sound engineering principles and overengineering. It's just a damn init system! Other init systems (runit, etc) had already mostly solved many of the problems systemd claims to solve with dramatically less code leaving things like logging, scheduled jobs, etc to tools that absolutely didn't need replacing.

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#68

Post by pessimizer » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #55

jimktrains2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of the main reasons I approve of systemd. It is something completely new fighting against the old entrenched cruft. Most people aren't anti-systemd because it's new, but because it doesn't conform to their philosophy of how their computer should run. There could be newer init systems that conform to their ideals, but systemd is not one of them.

Could there be, or are there? Because it is entirely possible that their philosophy is too rigid to permit a system that is substantially different from what exists now, in which case "They're against it because it's new" seems like a fair assessment.

Are you arguing that it may me that all objectors to systemd would be dissatisfied with all possible init systems different than what exists now?

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#69

Post by chc » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:15 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #68

chc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could there be, or are there? Because it is entirely possible that their philosophy is too rigid to permit a system that is substantially different from what exists now, in which case "They're against it because it's new" seems like a fair assessment.

Are you arguing that it may me that all objectors to systemd would be dissatisfied with all possible init systems different than what exists now?

I'm arguing that "It doesn't agree with their philosophy" is not incompatible with "They don't like it because it's new." It's not uncommon for people to build personal philosophies that work out to "change is bad."

Re: Why pro-systemd and anti-systemd people will never get along

#70

Post by e7620 » Tue, Oct 21, 2014, 7:18 PM UTC

nanoscopic wrote: post #64

uselessdguy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I specifically addressed this: -------------------------------- "The rather huge scope and opinionated nature of systemd leads to people yearning for the days of sysvinit. A lot of this is ignorance about good design principles, but a good part may also be motivated from an inability to properly convey desires of simple and transparent systems. In this way, proponents and opponents get caught in feedback loops of…

Most people don't know much about any of the details. They have simply done things one way for a long time and now it is changing. You haven't addressed that besides accusing those people of being "ignorant about good design principles" and "having huge misunderstandings that leads to a lot of wasted energy." From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the…

> From the perspective of the average linux user ( one that knows little to nothing about linux internals ) the entire discussion is the real waste of energy.

If all distros adopt "systemd/linux", a future plan for systemd according to lead developers, what happens if systemd collapses? It would take GNU/Linux with it. Remember how pulseaudio adoption by ubuntu drove users away. I want others to have access to UNIX, the best OS in the world, just like I had the opportunity.