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Well certainly part of it is much of the .deb ecosystem still feels like its stuck in the late 90s linux era to me. But maybe I'm alone on that gut feel.
Can you elaborate, please? What do you mean by this?
LIW left out one major chunk: because Debian is a volunteer organization, and nobody can make a volunteer do anything that they don't want to do.
Left out another major chunk: the conflict that arose over the eventual systemd adoption. To me that conflict altered the concept of ''What is Debian'' permanently, for better or worse (depending on who you listen to).
added: Debian's (to me) about (among other things) technical superiority, a robust packaging system, as well as user freedom and choice. It's super easy to not use systemd these days, "what is debian" didn't change, there was just a slight delay in reality catching up to principles. :)
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes systemd itself, I think that unfortunate debacle can only be seen as causing harm to the entire Debian project. The politics of it certainly generated a lot of distrust and resentment among the users and contributors. The project's reputation was undoubtedly hurt. Perhaps most importantly where the technological impacts. It's one thing when a user can generally ignore the p…
> before systemd negatively affected the quality of Debian Is there any publication quantifying this? I followed the whole debacle with interest, and my personal experience with my servers was the exact opposite: adopting systemd improved reliability and made administration significantly easier. It's sad that this was politicized by a small part of the community, but the end result was worth it.
Beyond that, I've heard of enough problems involving systemd from my Debian-using colleagues and acquaintances, too.
I don't know if it's been formally studied in any way, but it was clear to me that I definitely wasn't alone in experiencing problems involving systemd.
The widespread negative sentiment that exists toward systemd, including from well beyond the Debian community, didn't just come out of nowhere.
From what I can see, it was generated thanks to a lot of people directly experiencing a lot of unnecessary problems caused by systemd.
Sometimes I daydream about getting a fuck-it amount of money. During this thought process I always make a plan of what open source software project I should donate, and debian is always one of the first several candidates. Now I just need the money! (meanwhile I donate to debian anyway)
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`sysvinit` is still available in the current version of Debian, Bookworm, released less than 4 months ago:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/sysvinit
Note that `runit` is also available:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/runit
Also, while it's not the default init system, there are instructions for setting it as the active init system, on the Debian wiki:
Note that while packages aren't forced to provide native sysv init scripts (or native runit init scripts either), I hear that sysv init scripts are just shell scripts that are incredibly easy to write even for inexperienced sysadmins (much easier than writing systemd unit files apparently?) so cobbling together any that are missing for a sysv-based system shouldn't be much work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes systemd itself, I think that unfortunate debacle can only be seen as causing harm to the entire Debian project. The politics of it certainly generated a lot of distrust and resentment among the users and contributors. The project's reputation was undoubtedly hurt. Perhaps most importantly where the technological impacts. It's one thing when a user can generally ignore the p…
> before systemd negatively affected the quality of Debian Is there any publication quantifying this? I followed the whole debacle with interest, and my personal experience with my servers was the exact opposite: adopting systemd improved reliability and made administration significantly easier. It's sad that this was politicized by a small part of the community, but the end result was worth it.
Systemd is incredibly controversial among a niche group of people who have strong opinions about how init & core system functionality should work, and then there’s an outer ring of people who focus on one or two problems with some relatively minor problems that Systemd caused for which there are viable workarounds. Like how Systemd terminates processes that belong to your session when you log out.
I remember writing SysV style init scripts or rc.d / BSD style init scripts. It was awful. You had all these copy-pasted shell scripts with various gaps in functionality depending on who wrote them. Getting a service to run in Systemd feels like heaven by comparison. I don’t even care about, like, Docker.
I think the reports of problems (like background processes getting termed on logout, how any security problems in Systemd tends to be severe by nature) were just so numerous compared to the reports of the benefits (like the boot time improvements and the massive improvements running daemons). It was some bad decisions and a lot of bad PR, but the overall impact IMO is very positive.
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Well certainly part of it is much of the .deb ecosystem still feels like its stuck in the late 90s linux era to me. But maybe I'm alone on that gut feel.
I just switched to Debian this year after ~13 years of Ubuntu, and I really appreciate it It grew on me after a long time. I always thought it was not the most "technically sound" way of doing things i.e. I don't really like the packaging model of global updates where you don't know what's going on, and sometimes there are version conflicts But I have come to appreciate the stability and good intentions of the Debian…
Yeah. I keep coming back to Debian after trying out another distro for a while. There are some specific complaints I have about technical choices for Debian, like the way daemons autostart post install. But these complaints are outweighed by the benefits of using a distro with coherence across packages and upgrades. Apt is also just such a phenomenal package manager. It is fast out of the box, and supports some relat…
But it's a small issue compared to the mess I see in the rest of software these days ...
Alpine Linux seems interesting too, although right now Debian suits me well. I guess the problem is that I still don't make Debian packages myself, while Alpine's APKBUILD seems more approachable -- pure shell, while Debian has an array of tools and formats.
But Debian "lagging" a bit can be a feature, not necessarily a bug.