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Systemd redux: The end of Linux

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281–290 of 464 posts

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no opinion on systemd until yesterday. In fact I had a glace or two at the code and it's pretty clean and I liked the rough objectives laid out. I installed CentOS 7 on a machine last night that we're replacing CentOS 6 on and was poked in the face with timedatectl and dbus problems for an entire hour, some of which were intermittent. Debugging these issues is a horrific pain. I lost 4 hours on it. I've never l…

You know this is funny, I remember reading comments EXACTLY like this about 3-4 years ago but with pulseaudio in place of systemd. Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it and said it was the worst thing since the crucifixion of Christ. Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? There are very few. Pulseaudio now…

I checked out several free synthesizers recently on an Ubuntu system. None worked on first try. Thought I got half of them working after a while (the others would have needed JACK).

On my Debian system youtube videos stop playing sound once in a while (video continues), thought I suppose it's not pulseaudio's fault (so just a general sound problem).

You asked ;-) (I still agree with you that it got better than it once was)

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#282
post #7

Everything I read about SystemD is negative. Negative on the technology, negative on the people who created it. Nothing positive. How is it that SystemD is about to dominate the market? Who is driving SystemD adoption, and why?

Its the same way Dropbox was trivial, iPad is useless and so on. Once the non devs adopt it, you will see the positively side.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#283
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Systemd is offering a more compelling solution than anyone else, and if you don't like it, well, you should submit a patch, write some code, or implement it yourself. Or go back to using windows for general use and software development which is in fact what I've done. It's amazingly sad after many years of being a strong linux supported but this has killed linux for me. I see no point in continuing to use it.

That's really not a terrible idea actually. I switch back and forth a lot between the Windows and the Unixy ecosystems and by far the best end user experience, tailored[1] developer experience and (I'm going to get slated for this), mobile experience is on Windows by far. [1] tailored as in platform specific. For cross platform stuff, it's not so good.

Someone created a new account in order to post a pro-windows reply in a systemd thread.

Color me surprised.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may be wrong, but I took GP to mean that FreeBSD is a good enough OS to use daily, hence Torvalds wouldn't have had a need to create Linux. Obviously, Torvalds hasn't abandoned Linux in favor of FreeBSD today, and no one said he has or is planning on it.

> I may be wrong, but I took GP to mean that FreeBSD is a good enough OS to use daily, But that's not at all what Torvalds's quote means. He meant that, if FreeBSD had been available, he would have worked on contributing to that instead and improving it for daily use, rather than building Linux to be used for daily use. (The state of FreeBSD in this hypothetical world has no bearing on the state of FreeBSD today). In…

>In terms of FreeBSD today, while it's possible to use it for daily use, it suffers from even worse driver issues than Linux does

No it does not. It has fewer driver issues by far. Because it does not have broken half-assed binary only drivers by obscure vendor X that don't actually work. Unsupported hardware is simply unsupported, rather than broken.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#285
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to know how this even became an argument in the first place. It's not that I don't like systemd, it's that [insert affiliated party] is way too cocky It blows my mind to see people regress so far back into arguments that this because an issue of emotions in a technical debate.

It's not a matter of emotions. It's a matter of having observed similar behavior in other projects which went similarly off the rails. Poettering's own track record with Pulseaudio comes to mind. There's also the GNOME project, which I identified as actively intelligent-user-hostile around 2004. It's been somewhat gratifying to see that particular perception bear out with time. There are other projects which have sho…

I could give a shit about personalities themselves, I really could.

Then stop poisoning the well.

But I'm also not blind to technical failings with roots in personality traits. And those are what I'm seeing in the systemd crowd and leadership.

The problem that I see that most arguments against systemd are first and foremost about Lennart Poettering. And if technical reasons are brought forward, they can all be summarized as: does not conform to the UNIX philosophy (monolithic, replaces existing tools with tightly-coupled equivalents, binary logs).

I think that a reasonable argument can be made that, with the exception of binary logs, these things are true for many UNIXen. You will find only few people who would say that BSD does not conform to the UNIX philosophy. However, the BSDs have the aforementioned traits as well: developed by one project and tightly coupled (e.g. you cannot just take most BSD utilities and libraries and compile them on Linux or Solaris, it requires serious effort).

People always argued that this was a good trait of the BSDs (and I agree to some extend), because it allows better integration and use of BSD-specific features.

However, when systemd does it, it's suddenly violating the UNIX philosophy.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#286
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple one PID files. Assume server with lots of processes. Service A starts writes PID to disk, lets say 123. lots of processes start and stop as it goes along and does its work. Service A crashes/stops working PID 123 gets reused by a new process SysAdmin comes and hits /etc/init.d/ServiceA restart shell script calls kill 123 which was a totally different process now not at all related to ServiceA. etc... Clean unm…

> Not starting a database before the filesystem with the database files is mounted. This was solved decades ago with numbered init symlinks: K20postgresql S20postgresql

Don't those correspond to runlevels? I can boot to runlevel 5 and not have all file systems present and working e.g. an NFS filesytem might not be available.

So I would say it has been hacked around for decades. Not cleanly solved. But I am not the best informed here so please add more details about how numbered init symlinks guarantee file system being there before a service is started.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no opinion on systemd until yesterday. In fact I had a glace or two at the code and it's pretty clean and I liked the rough objectives laid out. I installed CentOS 7 on a machine last night that we're replacing CentOS 6 on and was poked in the face with timedatectl and dbus problems for an entire hour, some of which were intermittent. Debugging these issues is a horrific pain. I lost 4 hours on it. I've never l…

You know this is funny, I remember reading comments EXACTLY like this about 3-4 years ago but with pulseaudio in place of systemd. Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it and said it was the worst thing since the crucifixion of Christ. Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? There are very few. Pulseaudio now…

>> Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it

I've been with Ubuntu since 2007 and went through the PA transition. I agree it is so much better now. Changing audio sources is easy and faster than on Windows 7. By Ubuntu 12.04 this was stable for me. Like changing from speakers to headsets for a meeting, smooth with PA at least on Ubuntu. Until PA I never thought I'd see audio united on Linux.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#288
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know this is funny, I remember reading comments EXACTLY like this about 3-4 years ago but with pulseaudio in place of systemd. Pulseaudio was Lennart's previous project. It broke everything in linux sound for a while, everybody moaned and hated it and said it was the worst thing since the crucifixion of Christ. Yet, name one problem you had with sound on linux in the past year? There are very few. Pulseaudio now…

Pulseaudio still has problems. Sound suddenly being muted, it using the wrong alsamixer settings, sound being garbled until you pass in arcance settings or change it back to Alsa. Granted, the error might be more in part of the rest of the ecosystem, though I doubt it. But it is sadly far from "just use pulseaudio and everything will work instantly". And if it works, there is no need to think that Alsa alone wouldn't…

Strange I don't see the issues you're talking about I use Ubuntu Desktop on a variety of desktops and laptops. I'd say PA was stable by Ubuntu 12.04. I do Skype and Google Talkplugin (now Hangouts).

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#289
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean this Kay Sievers? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/05/torvalds_sievers_dus... - It's basically the buddy of Lennart at Red Hat - at least that is my impression from far away.. systemd may be nice but it's coming from Redhat and cgroups are changed due to because systemd folks wanted it that way as far as I followed that debate...

look at how many people actually contribute to systemd. It's far more than just redhat folks

But the patches that didn't fit the roadmap dictated by RedHat have been rejected.

Re: Systemd redux: The end of Linux

#290
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really extrapolating from ONE data point? In some sense systemd is more stable in that it's fixing some longstanding bugs with sysvinit, but of course it will have some bugs of it own. If you don't want to deal with that, you could skip a release.

No it's not just one data point. This is the final straw to use the old phrase. After a few years of serious problems, our most recent being CIFS VFS problems causing panics and mounts locking up on CentOS 6.5, hard locks on RH certified hardware, power management hell and so much incredible churn with no progress and the sudden "fuck POSIX" approach, it paints a really bad picture of the current state of things. The…

Hmm, I don't see any of that, odd isn't it?
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