On 10.10.14 09:18, Craig Sanders wrote:
On Thu, Oct 09, 2014 at 06:53:16PM +1100, Erik Christiansen wrote:
So, what is all the kerfuffle about? The fact that not all new runlevels correspond with one of the old?
the problem with systemd is not that it makes some minor changes to the init process, but that it tries to do too much.
If systemd just did init, then nobody would give a damn, but it's absorbing way too many low-level system functions into itself - udev has been merged; it does logging; has half-arsed substitutes for ntpd, cron, automount, inetd, and network configuration. this feature-creep is on-going, with more being absorbed into systemd all the time....and announced just a few days ago, a console daemon to replace the kernel's virtual terminals.
OK, now I'm frightened too! Such monolithic madness is antithetical to the core concept of unix, and alien to the modularity which users and administrators cherish. The resulting artifact will not be Linux any more, but L$, spawn of the derangement that is M$ architecture. Absorbing udev is no biggy, I think, but the rest are not even remotely integral. If the policy becomes "anything that systemd uses is ripe for absorption", then the plot has been lost.
Apart from the inevitable problems associated with being a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none the result will be the death of innovation for all functions absorbed into systemd as it is impossible to replace any one of them without replacing systemd entirely....which makes the job of developing improvements just too big a job. right now we have several alternatives to choose between for cron, ntp, logging, etc - each of them with different advantages and disadvantages. With systemd, it becomes a one-size-fits-all-or-else situation. If what it does doesn't suit you then tough luck, because you can't replace it without breaking your system.
That system does not sound like one I would choose to use. If necessary, there's always FreeBSD. Linus can have Linux to himself again, if all the other distros all go feral.
the second major problem with systemd is that it is becoming (or has become) mandatory - unneccesary dependencies on logind or systemd itself make it nearly impossible to avoid having systemd installed.
at least when gnome jumped the shark with gnome 3 there were alternatives like kde, xfce, lxde, etc we could switch to. there'll be no such alternative for systemd. for a while it will still be possible to hang on to sysvinit or upstart or whatever but eventually the effort required to keep everything working with dependencies breaking stuff all the time will be too great.
Yes, Gnome is hardly irreplaceable. Let's ditch that too. I find LXDE just as good. Non-paying users have only one power - voting with their feet. You have convinced me, and I believe I may well have installed my last Debian distro. Erik -- There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore better" - John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"