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Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

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Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#61

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

Avshalom wrote: post #32
pezgrande wrote: post #6

As a Linux normie, I've never understood why systemd is/was so much opinioned about.

Okay so back in ~2000 the audio system in Linux was ALSA and it kinda sucked so along come a guy named Lennart Poettering who wrote pulseaudio which improved things in a lot of ways but also kinda constantly didn't work. Poettering in those years constantly blamed everything on other software in the stack and became kinda wildly disliked. We all had to use pulseaudio though because everything important decided to int…

So he creates a program that was good enough that pretty much everyone started using it.

And he complained about a lot of dependencies but then went and actually wrote fixes/solutions for them that was so good that nearly everyone started using and even depending on it.

It sounds like the people who were sitting on the sidelines complaining about his complaining had ample opportunities to write better alternatives than the programs he wrote but didn’t do so. Instead they relied on character attacks and FUD (well, except the folks who developed pipewire), while Poettering wa engage in elite hacking by implementing solutions and letting users and distro makers decide whether they wanted to use those solutions.

I don’t see how Poettering is the villain here.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#62

Post by Jnr »

nechuchelo wrote: post #12

While I think systemd is a great init system (as well as some other components under the systemd umbrella), I really dislike when components up in the stack hard-depend on it. We can't use GNOME, plasma-login-manager, and soon Flatpak without systemd. Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.

Like wayland?

Where none of the desktop environments offer the same feature set. And the more compositors there are the harder it is for apps to use those new protocols, and guaranteeing a ton of bug reports from users using an unsupported compositor. That just hinders Linux desktop app development.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#63

Post by gf000 »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #20
pezgrande wrote: post #6

As a Linux normie, I've never understood why systemd is/was so much opinioned about.

It violates the Unix philosophy of 'do only one thing and do it well', but personally, it has never been a problem for me. I had a nightmare last week wherein I read a headline that systemd was writing its own kernel. When I woke up I realized it was a possibility, after all it has replaced GRUB. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot

Linux kernel, X server, web browsers all seriously violate the Unix philosophy.

And to be perfectly honest, it's nothing more than a philosophy - it's not some universal truth, e.g. a browser by definition is not doing "one small thing" and complex workloads are better organized by monolithic software to a certain degree.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#64

Post by debugnik »

boje wrote: post #31

Linux Desktop is starting to smell a lot like Android now judging by how vertically integrated it is becoming. With the push for a permissively-licensed (MIT, BSD etc.) userland and concentration of developers within a small group of companies and orgs sponsored by them, they might eventually do what Google is doing and start delaying releases for sourcecode, or stop altogether. (MIT, BSD and other licenses do not ma…

> they might eventually do what Google is doing and start delaying releases for sourcecode

Who is "they" here? There's no value to gain from closing the freedesktop ecosystem: no company has a distribution chokepoint like Google does with Play Store, the overall PC market is in decline and everyone would switch to existing anti-systemd alternatives.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#65

Post by m4rtink »

codethief wrote: post #37

> they want to move the permission management from Flatpak into the service layer, through a new service called systemd-appd. Systemd-appd gives applications an identifier and stores their permissions, and then this data can be queried by the rest of the system. In turn, this enables a slew of other features, not least of which is subsandboxing. This is fantastic news! As I've argued here on HN many times over the ye…

Yeah, it sounds promising but far from simple in practice. :)

There were some early attempts in mobile Linux distros, like original Ubuntu Touch or even Nokias MeeGo and it turns out the main issue is actually improving security while not blocking whole categories of applications from working.

In the early Ubuntu Touch case I remember that you had to as a user allow your image viewer access to individual pictures from SD card, one by one, to see them in the app. This made it basically useless.

In the MeeGo use case IIRC third party chroot/shell environments like Termux were impossible due to the way their security/sandboxing system was setup. At the same time all apps had internet and microphone access & it was impossible to disallow it per app.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#66

Post by 7bit »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #20
pezgrande wrote: post #6

As a Linux normie, I've never understood why systemd is/was so much opinioned about.

It violates the Unix philosophy of 'do only one thing and do it well', but personally, it has never been a problem for me. I had a nightmare last week wherein I read a headline that systemd was writing its own kernel. When I woke up I realized it was a possibility, after all it has replaced GRUB. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd-boot

[dead]

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#67

Post by Avshalom »

adjejmxbdjdn wrote: post #61
Avshalom wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay so back in ~2000 the audio system in Linux was ALSA and it kinda sucked so along come a guy named Lennart Poettering who wrote pulseaudio which improved things in a lot of ways but also kinda constantly didn't work. Poettering in those years constantly blamed everything on other software in the stack and became kinda wildly disliked. We all had to use pulseaudio though because everything important decided to int…

So he creates a program that was good enough that pretty much everyone started using it. And he complained about a lot of dependencies but then went and actually wrote fixes/solutions for them that was so good that nearly everyone started using and even depending on it. It sounds like the people who were sitting on the sidelines complaining about his complaining had ample opportunities to write better alternatives th…

Look, I was in CS101 back in those days so I'm not really qualified to say who was right about where/with-what responsibility for bugs lied. Maybe he was completely right and just kind of a dick about it. I'm just reporting that no one liked him and that carried over to the introduction of systemd.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#68

Post by shevy-java »

DCKing wrote: post #55

There will be more of this going forward, I think. Systemd is really not just an init system, it's a full cohesive management system for Linux distros and they've never pretended otherwise. A modular one but still a comprehensive one. Because of that its mere existence is an affront to many people with traditional opinions on Linux and Unix. systemd-appd sounds like it could make some inroads in the threat model that…

> Systemd is not an init system: it's a full cohesive management system for Linux distros.

Exactly. If you look back at the old discussions, you see how people tried to claim systemd is merely an init system, but it never was. So all comparisons to e. g. sysinit and what not, were unfair. Dishonest. The systemd devs were not interested in fair discussions. They wanted more control. And they very ruthlessly went forward with it - also thanks to corporate support. Just look at Poettering censoring discussions and stopping them whenever he could.

> But moving away from that also breaks with the Unix tradition.

Systemd never cared about UNIX. Poettering does not even understand UNIX on top of that.

> Systemd as the system management layer is becoming a centerpoint for moving Linux forward

Forward to ...? I don't really see it as moving "forward". I see it as more top-down control singularized into one crew that manages the software here.

> on servers but especially so on the desktop, and it does so at the cost of breaking with traditional views

Well, I would not call it "traditional", as the name is loaded. I see it more as a way to gain more control over the whole ecosystem. We see the same happen with wayland, but on a smaller scale, as wayland does not try to integrate a billion features and functionality.

> It's kind of hard to watch: I want Linux to move forward, and there's just a lot of good ideas there. But it will be painful for a large Linux community to break with traditions.

I don't like systemd, but I view this more realistic. I saw how the non-systemd distributions struggled and eventually most went extinct or were converted into systemd. Only few remain strong, and those few are often also dead - like slackware. And yes I know the spin-offs, but seriously, slackware is a dead man walking. Void is not dead, but yikes, it's not moving forward either.

It is not only systemd though. The whole linux stack got a lot bigger and more complicated. Nowadays you often need python, meson, llvm, mesa and so forth to compile things. Everything got bigger too. A lot of software was abandoned downstream, such as fluxbox - may be irrelevant to most folks, but this is one example of sooo many more. At the base of this problem sits the funding issue. Corporations have a lot more net-control over the ecosystem nowadays. Due to the funding. I think we need to solve this issue of funding, because otherwise we'll end up with systemd-like projects sitting at the key areas.

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#69

Post by nottorp »

sinpif wrote: post #38
nechuchelo wrote: post #12

While I think systemd is a great init system (as well as some other components under the systemd umbrella), I really dislike when components up in the stack hard-depend on it. We can't use GNOME, plasma-login-manager, and soon Flatpak without systemd. Maybe systemd should have been an API + a spec instead of an unportable implementation.

I'm all for integration of system services if it helps bring a more cohesive OS. Interchangeability is a nice thing when building a system but I don't need it as a user.

... have you ever tried to customize a systemd based distro for something they haven't thought of originally?

Re: Flatpak Will Depend on Systemd

#70

Post by ChocolateGod »

embedding-shape wrote: post #44
ChocolateGod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AppImage isn't truly cross distribution in the first place because how it handles dependencies is not truly portable.

I mean yeah, it doesn't aim to be a "cross-platform compilation/building system" so of course dependencies is up to you to solve, AFAIK AppImage only aims to solve packaging itself, not what goes into that package.

Which doesn't solve the same problem that Flatpak solves, namely having a package format that a developer can target and it run the same everywhere.
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