How is it pronounced? DEV-on? de-VWAN? (like Juan) dev-oo-ahn?
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Don't panic and keep forking Debian
41–50 of 135 posts
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#42The 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…
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.
Best Linux desktop? ChromeOS.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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 wa…
"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects." except that the size of the userbase drives companies to port their products to the platform.
Sure, there are long term high level strategic interests that could be helped for sure.
How convincing is this though?
"I would like you to volunteer to work on this project that you don't want and wouldn't use (and therefore probably won't do a great job with). You will be inundated with support requests from unskilled users. I would like you to do this because if a lot of people do it, it might convince a unspecified number of companies to port their software to linux at some unspecified time in the future. That's only if you are completely successful building this for and marketing this to people who you don't understand or care about. You will have no help from designers or user interface people because they don't give a shit about you or this. Design and user experience will be the most important parts of this, technical quality will not influence success because the users don't care about that. You will get no social capital from this because the users don't give a shit about what you do.
Do this instead of one of the huge number of really interesting projects building things you would love to have that are on your plate right now, the ones where your peers will recognize, appreciate, understand and value your hard work."
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#44Earlier 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.
As if that was different on Windows. Windows only works smoothly until it does not, and then you inevitably have to invoke some command-line tool you never heard of before and won't find any documentation for, or you have to edit some arcane registry key. Most people I know who use Windows at home either call "that guy" they know who knows his way around a computer, or they just reinstall their system (which is not s…
Hmm, I possibly would have agreed with you up until XP, when it was very very buggy and crash prone, but after that for the average user I really doubt that is the case. Thought I think we can agree to disagree depending on our respective experiences.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#45The 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…
I run windows in a VM to run lightroom. Similar situation except my experience about stability is the exact opposite. > Again I wonder how things could have been if everyone was pulling as a coherent team instead of in different directions. If everyone keeps pulling in the same direction you might end up in a dead end. With a plurality of approaches natural selection comes into effect. Anyway, how do you propose to f…
Out of curiosity, have you ever considered darktable?
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#46The 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 wa…
"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects."
I'm sorry, but that's absolute baloney in the context of the parent post. By and large neither Windows or OSX users need to deal with low level OS stuff, whereas Linux users frequently do. These sorts of issues affect long time users and new users. From what I've seen, Linux users tend to either go straight to a mainstream distro, or distro hop for a while, get bored or frustrated with dealing with unnecessary complications, and end up on a mainstream distro as a result. At first you take pride in learning more, but after a while you just want something that works and gets out of your way. Describing user wants as drains on FOSS means that you're ignoring the issues that are drains for everyone.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#47Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?
In short: it's taking over Linux userspace. It's slowly leading us to a point where systemd will be "the Linux middleware", and all apps (above it) and the kernel itself (under it) will not work without systemd.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#48Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?
systemd replaces a large number of startup and utility programs (specifically: sysvinit, pm-utils, inetd, acpid, syslog, watchdog, cron and atd). It also adds new daemons for logs, logins, locales, hostnames and a few other services.
Most of this is a good thing. Faster. Newer code that is easier to maintain. Less reliance on shell scripts favoring declarative config files instead.
But change has lots of difficulties.
The biggest resistance though is coming from people who are simply accustomed to the old approaches and don't see a problem with them.
But there are other objections from people who think systemd is too big in scope or too controlling or focussed on one technology or another or... some kind of conspiratorial trap or something (http://boycottsystemd.org). I think these arguments are a little hyperbolic since systemd isn't actually a single monolithic system and is really an overarching project to update a lot of major system utilities.
I'm personally more of a Mac user than Linux user. On the Mac, 10 years ago, launchd replaced many of the processes that systemd is now replacing in Linux. Particularly for things like cron and inetd (which were horrible to configure and work with) it was a huge improvement. However, the Mac never replaced as much all at once. It was a much gentler transition. In fact, discoveryd (which does a lot of what systemd's hostname daemon's are trying to do) was only introduced in the current Yosemite.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I don't think anyone really considers sysvinit to "follow Unix". In fact, I'd say sysvinit is more of a historical accident than anything. An actual example of a service manager that follows the Unix philosophy would probably be daemontools and its derivatives (s6, perp, nosh, daemontools-encore and runit).
When I first started using Linux, I found SysV init very intimidating (along with the rest of the system). When I eventually stumbled upon Slackware, and then FreeBSD, I was euphoric about how simple it was to configure system startup.
Which, I guess, is why the BSDs feel a lot less pressure to replace their init/rc system than Linux distros.
Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian
#50I'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?
With the caveat that I haven't kept up closely with systemd
1. It is attempting to unify a bunch of previously disconnected functionality into a single program. Typically unix is composed of small single-purpose utilities that perform a single function, rather than a giant monolithic blob of code (with obvious exceptions, like emacs).
2. Partially because it has been around for so long and has so much history, and partially because it follows a unix tradition of using plain text configuration and shell scripting to solve problems.
3. The systemd folks believe that sysv init isn't capable of doing things that are important to modern systems (ex. dependencies between services, reacting to devices coming and going, intelligent daemon management, etc), and that doing those things correctly requires that an init system be 'more' than people previously thought it needed to be. They are also very....confident in their ideas, and don't hesitate to re-implement functionality (like logging) if it makes is easier to interoperate with their other code.
People opposed to systemd believe that it is too complex for such a critical piece of system functionality. They also resent the fact that systemd seems to require tight coupling to the rest of the system, and that it is aggressively pushing into so many linux systems. Many of them also probably have a long history with sysv init, and are comfortable with the way that it works. (Some portion also probably recall pulseaudio, which had similar grand visions, was similarly aggressively pushed into use before it was fully baked).
4. I think 1-3 probably cover most of this.