He's hit the nail on the head - systemd's fundamental design is not appropriate for the server environment: "I have to provide a system that runs reliably and can easily be reasoned about and yet I have to build it on distributions created by people who consider how long it takes to get to the fucking GDM login screen and if shutting the laptop lid will cause the system to hibernate properly or not."
Why do you "have to" build it on those distros? Why not use a server distro that doesn't even have X let alone GDM?
Assuming that everything the author says turns out true - such as the "big one" exploit - in say an year from now, does anybody know any active popular open source distro that aims to keep systemd away from servers?
Assuming that everything the author says turns out true - such as the "big one" exploit - in say an year from now, does anybody know any active popular open source distro that aims to keep systemd away from servers?
Gentoo still has OpenRC as the „preferred” init system.
So... none? Unintegrated desktop linux is painful, and the fixes for it so far have mostly been hacks. Systemd actually attempts to create some kind of modern cohesive system which is a good thing. Maybe you don't see the downsides to the lack of integration because you're just used to putting up with them.
Tightly integrated operational systems are painful. The article really says it all:
> Linux is becoming the thing that we adopted Linux to get away from.
It's just true in many more aspects than the one where this sentence is placed.
Why weren't any of these objections heard back before Canonical knuckled under? Was upstart even worse? I really enjoyed the "impotent rage" piece linked in TFA's comments.
QR codes for kernel panics is actually brilliant, because it encodes the data which would otherwise just be serialized to screen in a manner that makes it portable.
As a user of linux on the desktop, I've never felt a moment of concern over the fact that it takes longer to boot than did Windows. I'm not sure who is panicked by this and I'm distressed that we would solve all of our problems with init by embracing systemd. If Gnome requires systemd, lets drop Gnome.
As a user of computers, I have never once felt that boot time was adequate for any device I have owned.
As another user of computers, it's pouring if I have to boot up more than one or two groups of things a week. If it ever takes more than 3 minutes, there's something wrong with the hardware.
He's hit the nail on the head - systemd's fundamental design is not appropriate for the server environment: "I have to provide a system that runs reliably and can easily be reasoned about and yet I have to build it on distributions created by people who consider how long it takes to get to the fucking GDM login screen and if shutting the laptop lid will cause the system to hibernate properly or not."
Why do you "have to" build it on those distros? Why not use a server distro that doesn't even have X let alone GDM?
The problem is that in many server environments, particularly at scale, the speed of the bootstrap processes of the OS doesn't matter. One of the goals of systemd is to make the bootstrap process faster, which is irrelevant for those (non-desktop) use cases. So you see, systemd is solving problems, and making trade-offs to do it, that just don't matter for the non-desktop use case. I can of course choose not to install gdm, but that doesn't change the fact that systemd was designed (you might say over-designed) with the desktop use case in mind. Because of that, I have to live with those trade offs, even though my use case does not benefit. Since all major Linux distros are deciding to adopt systemd, it will be very difficult to "roll your own" and use something else, especially since the rest of the userland will assume that everyone is doing things the systemd way, this making it even harder to go against the flow.
He's hit the nail on the head - systemd's fundamental design is not appropriate for the server environment: "I have to provide a system that runs reliably and can easily be reasoned about and yet I have to build it on distributions created by people who consider how long it takes to get to the fucking GDM login screen and if shutting the laptop lid will cause the system to hibernate properly or not."
Was there even an argument presented in the section titled 'The invasion of “desktop linux”'? I couldn't find it. Where's the evidence that systemd is making design choices that are driven by desktop linux and detrimental to usage on servers?
There really wasn't. It starts off with:
"I’m going to state up front (and people are free to disagree with me) that I believe you cannot provide a distribution of Linux that is both designed for the 'server' and the 'desktop' and provide a product that is worth using on either."
I, uh, what? Someone let everybody know that, as I'm pretty sure all the popular server distros (I guess not CoreOS, but that's pretty new) work just fine as desktops. Heck, Ubuntu is a very popular server distro[1], and it's certainly a desktop distro. And it's not like sysvinit wasn't used on both the server and the desktop.