Systemd redux: The end of Linux

Is there a link where one can read about the rationale of why systemd was needed? Perhaps by the person who started off the initial project?

In this case, we have red hat, lennart, Kay, and freedesktop.org working together to force a LGPL RPC loophole to circumvent the GPL. Sounds like an appropriate term.

Pulseaudio still won't detect the headphone jack on my old intel board, and Skype on my newer machines on Linux will routinely fuckup playback.

One also wonders how much of the PA cleanup was handled by people that weren't Lennart.

Nevertheless, Red Hat and Canonical and others continue to try to foster desktop linux, on the now-obvious misguided theory that (a) the desktop matters and (b) they can take share from windows and osx installations.

As a result, there's hundreds of terrible paid desktop programmers, and thousands of their users, who are dying every day because, e.g., the last several iterations of wireless networking scripts were written by morons, their graphics libraries are comically bad, etc., etc.

Into this charged mix of total incompetence and frustration comes a small group of mediocre coders with hubris, backing, and political nous. And what they are promising to the long-abused desktop users sounds amazing to them, like wizardly magic, and literally, and almost entirely, boils down to this: freedom from having to deal with the shitty wireless networking script system. No joke. That is the fundamental issue at play, and the driver behind "faster boot times", "socket activation", and all of the other marketing points. If that idiot who wrote the wireless provisioning scripts had been competent, this entire mess would never have happened.

So the desktop linux users and desktop linux developers, who again have been living in a tiny cage being pooped on every day by their own regrettable choices, reach for this solution with the religious fervor of a drowning victim. And since desktop linux developers tend to be the C team, they don't care about good architecture, they just want things to work for them and their very specific desktop linux use case, which objectively and axiomatically, again, has not worked for decades and will never work.

So they band together in unison, following the exciting, energetic, charismatic and opinionated lead developer. And obviously, Red Hat is delighted, because that's their employee, and maybe they get more market share. And they pack Debian with developers, because there's a ton of horrible little desktop linux apps that grant them votes, and shout down the opposition. And they set up an IRC channel, and they brigade every forum with the same nonsensical attacks on the very architecture that made it possible for the internet to happen in the first place. Including, obviously, this very thread.

In actuality, this group of users is vanishingly tiny compared with the linux installed base, which is mostly phones and servers, where the real action is, and which don't need this halfassed dbus nonsense or the accreting blob of carelessly rewritten known-good-daemons. The desktop linux people are chasing a dead target with a terrible design and religious fervor substituted for technical ability. It will be intriguing to watch it play out. FreeBSD is about to get a big positive jolt of people that know what 'good' is.

As for testing--notice that when a lot of people here are reporting issues with systemd/pulseaudio, their reports are pretty much dismissed out of hand, or they're told "no, you've done something wrong".

For #2, a lot of times somebody with the right political position (say, Lennart at Redhat) or just the ability to shout louder and longer than anyone else will get something put in, regardless of technical advantage. Don't even try to claim otherwise.