there was a lot of discussion on /r/linux about this yesterday. concessions seemed to be that Devuan seems fishy, but I'll let you read for yourself. http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2nm2u9/theyre_going_t...
consensus?
Don't panic and keep forking Debian
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly why Linux will never dominate the Desktop environment by the average user. You basically can't use Linux without at some time going to the cmd line to fix some dam configuration or driver problem.
And, yet, it dominates the tablet and mobile environment, which is already more important than the desktop market ever was. Funny how that works.
I know exactly what you mean. But we both know these are very different things. For most people, their tablet and phone works absolutely seemlessly, with drivers, apps, downloads etc just working they way they want them to. It just never works that way on the Desktop unfort. I know loads of "average" people who have tried to use MINT/Ubuntu but eventually a big chunk end up reaching for Redmond after they spend too long looking at StackExchange trying to figure something out.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#23Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#24The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…
"becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace"
Seems like Linux has been competing just fine, but I take it you mean "a desktop linux that appeals to windows/osx users by being similar to them so the learning curve is small".
That seems to more be about a lack of effort and manpower, not because people are pulling in different directions but more that the people who would actually build that stuff don't want it enough to dedicate their free time to building it. That and designers don't seem to be nearly as interested in contributing to FOSS as do programmers.
Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects. A success is having a large number of contributors, all cooperating to solve a shared problem so they can all spend more time on something else, with some of them dedicating themselves to the problem because it's interesting and helps their friends.
No one is doing it at the scale necessary for the same reason Apple isn't spending all it's money developing products for people who couldn't possibly pay for them. They aren't stupid.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#25I'm for sure not feeling the love for systemd, it seems un-UNIX and a solution looking for a problem, and change for the sake of change. That said, not so big on the idea about a fork, I'd rather see debian do the normal debian thing, and support both things, maximizing freedom. That said, if that can't happen, a fork is inevitable - for the love of god pick a better name.
You seem like someone who's used a variety of init systems, so I have some questions:
1. Why is systemd considered "un-unix"?
2. Why is sysv considered to "follow unix"?
3. Can you provide or point to some explanations on the ideologies that motivate the difference of opinions regarding sysv/systemd?
4. Really, can someone provide some context and history for all this?
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#26The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…
"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it." Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).
The cost isn't zero, but it's proportional to how many other people are likely to have encountered the same pain point. If you run a desktop OS with 5% of Windows' market share, you're going to have more trouble finding help (or at least sympathy) when things go south.
Also, as an ISV or IHV, if your app or device fails to work with Windows, it's a DEFCON-1 emergency. If it fails to work with one of 5,000 random obscure Linux distros, well, they'll get back to you on that, someday, maybe. It's simply economics in action.
Note that neither of these are issues in the tablet or phone markets, which is why people citing those markets to defend Linux on the desktop are all wet. (They're in good company, of course -- lots of people in the Windows world have failed to understand why those markets are different, including the developer of Windows itself.)
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#27I'm for sure not feeling the love for systemd, it seems un-UNIX and a solution looking for a problem, and change for the sake of change. That said, not so big on the idea about a fork, I'd rather see debian do the normal debian thing, and support both things, maximizing freedom. That said, if that can't happen, a fork is inevitable - for the love of god pick a better name.
[deleted]
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#28Is there a single name associated with this? A single developer's name? And they are requesting donations?
well, one single name can be got via "whois devuan.org":
Franco Lanza
Unixmedia s.r.l.
Via Cosimo Del Fante 4
Milano, Italy
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#29Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?
Many people complaining about it is that it doesn't follow the Unix philosophy. I think that it's not so much that systemd is un-UNIX like (after all, it could be argued that X-windows is un-UNIX like too). I think the problem that people are having with it is that it is a cathedral that is getting erected right in the middle of their bazaar.
(personally, I don't mind systemd, but I also didn't mind SysV, or BSD init styles either).
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#30The same freedom that leads to all the many, many flavors of linux gives a great diversity of ideas. The downside is it fragments the finite development efforts of the contributors to the point where it becomes difficult to compete with the wider marketplace. I wonder sometimes if it were possible for everyone to contribute to one linux desktop if the situation would be different today. As it stands, after nearly thr…
"The amount of time and effort I spent wasted on package incompatibilities, instabilities, and debugging strange hardware/driver related issues isn't worth it." Doesn't this assume that this cost for commercial OSes is zero? In my experience, that hasn't been the case (as an OSX user, haven't used Windows for software development in a long time).
It is far from zero. On Windows, it is just not considered Microsoft's problem by most people - the blame is spread across lots of different software vendors/developers.
Just as an example, at our company, we run a Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal server, with Outlook 2003 installed for email. A while ago we decided to replace the aging Internet Explorer 8 installed on that machine (shudder) with IE11 (still shudder - but it's company policy), and if people are going to use IE, I thought at least they should use a reasonably current one.
Turns out, that Outlook uses IE for rendering HTML emails, and that Outlook 2003 using IE 9 or newer for that purpose results in HTML mails being truncated randomly. Since some of our users run Outlook almost exclusively in their RDP-sessions instead of their local desktops, this was a rather big deal for us, and it took me a while to figure this problem out.
And keep in mind, this problem was caused by the interaction of two problems written by Microsoft itself. Imagine the non-deterministic fun you can run into with applications by a dozen or more software vendors, running across several versions of Windows, 32 and 64 bit.
(Yes, I kind of needed to vent. Sorry.)