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Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

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Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#121

Post by api »

hyperman1 wrote: post #10
znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Taking a step backward from Alsa is hard, and they managed to do it. Now that same team is messing with sys…

> And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist.

Maybe that fits RedHat's business model.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#122

Post by AsyncAwait »

StreamBright wrote: post #94
AsyncAwait wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have s6, openRC etc. as choices, but it's funny that nobody of the anti-systemd folk was willing to pick up the work needed to maintain consolekit, yet when logind came around, had lots of strong things to say. How about picking up the work as well? And none of the alternatives seem to really get away from the bash script paradigm & more towards the declarative side of things, which doesn't feel like much b…

I think that you are missing the point. I was quite happy without systemd. What work has to be picked up really? You are trying to make it sound we could not live without systemd and we must replace the systems. If you want to write a better init system, go for it. Many people tried and succeeded none of them became the standard for linux (partially because there are no standards in linux). https://unix.stackexchange…

> I was quite happy without systemd.

Good for you then. I am sure you were happy with X11's rotting core & didn't need Wayland in your life, you also likely weren't the one having to maintain its decades old codebase.

> If you want to write a better init system, go for it.

Am personally happy with systemd, thanks, if you're not, why don't you go ahead and write a better one, instead of complaining every time systemd's name is mentioned?

> This is exactly what systemd does. Rewriting rock solid, CPU efficient code with something shaky and CPU intensive.

That doesn't seem factual. systemd is a system manager, useful even after the system is booted up, I think people need to understand that first, it's not just an init system, because many modern services fit an event driven model these days. It's written in C and can run fine on tiny embedded systems.

> Factually incorrect. There are many init alternatives that got away from the shell script paradigm. Including SMF in Solaris.

Yeah, and launchd on macOS, by which systemd was literally inspired by, we're talking about Linux here, since that's where systemd runs, at least I was.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#123

Post by makomk »

Xylakant wrote: post #105
makomk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One existing technology Red Hat leveraged to achieve this was Gnome. A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to create a hard dependency on logind which was part of systemd. Other distros were mollified by being told that logind didn't really depend on systemd and they could just take it out and use it. Then, once that was safely ensconsed, Poettering declared that actual…

> A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to create a hard dependency on logind which was part of systemd. Nobody was willing to maintain consolekit, the logind folks stepped up to provide a replacement and the gnome folks started depending on it. Everyone could have prevented that lock-in by maintaining consolekit or providing another replacement. Nobody did. To this day…

ConsoleKit was a Gnome project which was abandoned when they decided to switch to logind. There was actually a fork of it called ConsoleKit2 for a few years but because everyone had to support logind anyway in order to support Gnome and systemd it was a second-class citizen that slowly died out. The distros shipped systemd+logind as default because that was the only option Gnome supported, and the other desktop environments did their testing with logind and let the ConsoleKit2 code bitrot because that's what all the distros used, and gradually it became less and less usable.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#125

Post by api »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #20
znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

> It's complex because it does a complex work Hence it's pointless because it doesn't make things any simpler. All it does is making things monolithic and wrapping concepts that are perfectly fine by themselves, forcing third-party software to write to systemd's APIs. > Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. "Managing systems" is not what is meant by "doing one thing, and doing it we…

> Hence it's pointless because it doesn't make things any simpler.

That is exactly my opinion too. Systemd managed to replace the nasty cruft pile that was SysV init with something even less transparent, more confusing, clunkier to use, and with a steeper learning curve to do simple things like add or change a system service.

There is too much to list, but let's start with the beginning: why name one of the most commonly used commands (for admins) on the system 'systemctl', which is even harder to type fast than 'service'?

That kind of total disregard for UX pervades the whole design. Its like no thought was paid to it at all. Everything is obtuse and clunky with long non-memorable names that give you carpal tunnel syndrome to type.

I loathe stuff like that.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#126

Post by _8j50 »

znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

It has it's place but it doesn't work for everyone.

I mean,there's something called user-acceptance testing for software dev lifecycles right? (Not a pro dev myself) systemd obviously has an issue being accepted by a lot of users even after almost a decade now(?)

Even before systemd there were other init systems used by different distros. The fact that systemd demands other things to adopt to it instead od smoothly integrating with existing systmes is one pain. A bigger pain is how it is expected to work well for everyone. I mean, dislike for "one size fits all" solutions is a major reason why most Linux users became Linux users.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#127

Post by tempguy9999 »

eythian wrote: post #91
doiwin wrote: post #90

Everything I know about systemd is bad. When I want to write a script that runs on startup, I expect that I can just put (or link) it in some directory where the scripts are that get started on startup. Or that there is one main script that calls all scripts that are intended to be startet on startup. I do not want to write a "service" that has some "only run once and then discard" flag or whatever. When I want to lo…

That's just saying "I want things to be the way I first learnt them and don't want them to change." This is fine, but you do have to accept that things are going to move on without you.

Whenever systemd comes up, someone appears to counter any criticism with words suggesting you'll get left behind if you don't follow us. No justification beyond that.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#128

Post by tempguy9999 »

izacus wrote: post #110
doiwin wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I can not remember having a race condition regarding startup scripts.

Then you didn't have to mantain a system of any kind of complexity.

And you have? Can you give an example and how you solved it? Thanks! (edit: not trolling; curious)

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#129

Post by makomk »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #118
pdkl95 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody of the anti-systemd folk was willing to pick up the work needed to maintain consolekit Why would I want to start working on software I don't use or need? Why do systemd advocates always insist that every implementation must include the features they think are important? The entire point of designing for modularity is that different people have different requirements; operating systems cannot be "one size fit…

> Why would I want to start working on software I don't use or need? Why do systemd advocates always insist that every implementation must include the features they think are important? If you don't care about multi-user session management, sure, but considering practically every window manager/DE relied on consolekit and now logind to provide that functionality, I find it hard to believe it's not desirable by a larg…

Not many users care about multi-user session management. An even tinier number of users care about multi-seat session management (which is when you have mutiple users on the same machine at the same time, with their own screen and input devices). Pretty much every desktop Linux user cares about being able to click options like "shutdown", "restart" and "suspend" in the user interface and have them work.

As it currently stands, anyone who wants that basic functionality on Linux - something that's been supported on all other platforms since forever - has to drag along all the baroque undocumented complexity of multi-seat, multi-user support. Why? Well, it seems Red Hat has some customers who sell solutions based on that, or at least used to once upon a time... With the current price of a docking station used to support a single seat in such a setup being comparable to that of a fairly decent refurbished SFF PC, I can't see a huge market for this.

Re: Knoppix 8.6 abandons systemd

#130

Post by [deleted] »

znpy wrote: post #3

I see a lot of hate about systems and I used to loathe it too. Then I took a course on systemd specifically and it opened my eyes, and now I'm quite fond about it. Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system. It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space. It has quirks and bugs like all software, but I think it works very well, all things considered. To those who say that it's…

[deleted]
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