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Don't panic and keep forking Debian

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Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#51

Post by Paul_S »

hajile wrote: post #45
Paul_S wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? http://www.darktable.org/

Yes I have. And Rawstudio. And Raw Therapee. And while darktable is the fastest evolving one it's still not close enough. But I'm keeping tabs on it. Lightroom is slowing down and to be honest it's way past the diminishing returns elbow at this point so maybe next year. I no longer do photography professionally so it's less and less of an issue.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#53

Post by ams6110 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #26
seccess wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 obsc…

Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop.

FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#54

Post by danellis »

mahouse wrote: post #35
zxcdw wrote: post #23

Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?

There are so many problems with it that it's not possible to tl;dr them. But Google will help you. There are so many posts flaming it (for good reasons) that it will be easy for you to understand everything.

Can you give examples of the most important ones? Are there any that are technical rather than philosophical?

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#55

Post by click170 »

eloff wrote: post #5

The 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 take issue with the idea that if every developer was pulling in the same direction we would be somewhere better than where we are now.

I view the diversity and freedom in Foss projects as a feature, not a bug.

First off, assuming you got a group of people together who agree that they should all pull in the same direction, who gets to decide which direction that is? Why that person, and not this person? Secondly, speaking for myself only, being told to work on projects I'm not interested in will produce sub par work and will drain my motivation to both work with that team and the project itself.

Everyone has a different idea on what it would take to get to the Year Of The Linux Desktop, call me when you reach consensus on what exactly the requirements for that project are. Not to be cynical but reaching consensus seems like the biggest blocker, the fact that there are people pulling in multiple directions I think is a symptom of this problem.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#56

Post by chubot »

lelandbatey wrote: post #25
Aloha wrote: post #13

I'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?

Those are good questions, but answering them won't fit in a comment. It takes more like a book.

One of the best books on the Unix philosophy is "The Art of Unix Programming", which is available for free. (I recommend getting a hard copy and reading the whole thing.)

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

Other books include The Unix Programming Environment by Pike et. al., though it's less explicit about the philosophy.

Here's one part of the argument: systemd breaks the Unix design style because it's monolithic: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2...

But then systemd developers claim it's not monolithic because it's actually composed of multiple processes. They say there is a misconception that all code is contained in PID 1. There are many executables and many processes, so they would say systemd is modular.

But the problem is that all the binaries are released together, without well-defined interfaces. Moreover they are also tightly coupled to kernel features.

If you have 2 binaries A and B, but the interfaces between them is not documented or stable, then it's not really modular, because you can't write your own B' to work with A or A' to work with B.

The recent thread here about dbus is a good example. Traditional Unix is simple text protocols. dbus is this weird text/binary RPC-ish mix which is not documented.

There are lots of other issues with systemd and the Unix philosophy, but that should give you a flavor.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#57

Post by freshhawk »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #46
freshhawk wrote: post #24

Earlier 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." 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…

These problems you describe aren't present for the people being asked to solve the problem, so they don't volunteer their time to fix it.

In my experience they aren't even problems for beginner computer users or people who don't need to unlearn Windows/Mac-isms post Ubuntu and modern hardware detection.

edit: I should add, I'm not saying a project solving these problems wouldn't be popular among users or generally great for Gnu/Linux as a whole, I'm explaining why it's not popular among potential developers. And when you aren't working in a market capitalism framework a large number of potential non-contributing users isn't enough to get things done.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#58

Post by EdwardDiego »

mahouse wrote: post #35
zxcdw wrote: post #23

Can someone TL;DR the problem with systemd?

There are so many problems with it that it's not possible to tl;dr them. But Google will help you. There are so many posts flaming it (for good reasons) that it will be easy for you to understand everything.

Could you recommend some? "Google it" is a non-answer.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#59

Post by cpncrunch »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #48
zxcdw wrote: post #23

Can 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…

I haven't used systemd yet, but I'm concerned about having to learn a completely new way of doing things. I manage a number of servers, and it would be a huge inconvenience figuring out systemd. The old way works fine for me. Unfortunately most of the servers I work with are CentOS, and it seems Redhat has switched to systemd so I'm not entirely sure what I'll do in future. I guess now I have another option.

Re: Don't panic and keep forking Debian

#60

Post by kazinator »

No, no, no. Stupid name.

In the name of tradition, you want a name which is an acronym that says "is not that other thing" or something like that and is perhaps infinitely recursive.

How about WildOS?

   "WildOS is like Debian, omitting systemd"
Or some other "-ild" word besides "wild". Gild? Mild?

Definitely not DildOS though. :)

Debrogas:

   "Debian rid of gnome and systemd"
Retains the Latin flavor of Devuan, in any case.

Rejected bloopers, from my personal cutting room floor:

BSDOS:

   "Because systemd, of course, sucks"
Windows:

   "What-I-need Debian: out with systemd"
# # #

However, in the end, I think a really good name for this fork would be:

   Defiant!
But: not pronounced like the word "defiant" but with emphasis on the first syllable, so it sounds like debian: 'DE-fih-ənt.

"What are you running on that server?"

"Defiant six dot three!"

"What? Debian?"

"No, Defiant! D-E-F-I-A-N-T, spelled like the word defiant."

I love this one. It captures defiance (getting upset and making a fork), sounds indistinguishable from Debian when uttered by a drunk hacker through a G.711 ULAW speech codec, and has an unusual pronunciation so we can endlessly correct people who just say "de-FIE-unt", who instantly identify themselves as not-in-the-know outsiders. Remember all the fun with Lie-nucks versus Lee-nucks versus Li-nucks.

Lastly:

  Deviant
(Also pronounced differently to sound like Debian.) PRO: changes only one letter in Devuan, and deletes one. CON: less abrasive than Defiant. It's deviant because it's forked; it deviates from some originally intended path.
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