maemo.org - Talk - Distro Wacko ...Qu'est-ce que c'est...

Lennart Poettering. That name still has people in a tizzy over Pulseaudio, despite the fact that he no longer maintains it (someone else does) and that it works peachily. He's the head guy behind systemd. So we already have people that hate the project by association with Poettering.

For the most part, it's not that people hate systemd ITSELF. Rather, they hate that it's becoming the default init system for a LOT of distros. However, their blame is misplaced 90% of the time. Do they look at the distro devs and say, "How dare you?" Nope. The hate train is inbound for systemd-land and full of explosives.

There's anecdotal cases of systemd breaking people's distros (outside of Arch, but that was a long while ago), and there's something else I should mention. If anyone tells you that their scripts stop working or that their drives are unbootable after switching to systemd, they're a charlatan for the former and they have no clue what they're talking about for the latter. systemd has nothing to do with their precious scripts, and having nonessential drives not boot means that the default behavior is working as it should.

You gotta remember something; Linux is not Windows. The distro devs owe their users nothing. A lot of end-users complain that the devs "don't listen to their base," but fail to realise that the devs don't have to, especially regarding technical decisions. Even with that said, look at how petty this whole debacle has gotten; they're flipping out over free software included by default.

And now we have the Grand Schism involving Debian and its newest fork, Devuan, which won't last even a few years. It takes some very egotistical, emotional people to fork the world's biggest OSS project in the name of a f_cking init system. "Devuan is representing the freedom of choice when it comes to its init systems, unlike Debian!" Alright, so go ahead and chastise the Debian project for being very abrasive to the ReactOS kernel, Haiku kernal, and ignoring the kFreeBSD kernel.

*crikets*

Worst of all, you got these conspiratards that already like to speculate that Red Hat is working with the NSA to get backdoors into Linux, but now they're saying the same for systemd. You think the NSA could do better to accomplish their goals than by implementing backdoors into an OPEN-SOURCE project?! *golf clap*

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With all that said, Linux isn't more unstable/unusable/unpredictable/mean because of systemd; rather, the people who set their heads on fire about this subject are the ones who are becoming the monster they're talking about (which doesn't exist btw). OpenSUSE doesn't exhibit the behavior they're talking about. Arch Linux laughs at these complaints. Fedora has their NOTABUG stamp ready for those who don't RTFM. Mageia's user-friendliness hasn't degraded not one bit from the switch to systemd (arguably, it's improved).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikiwide

It might be that there are more people and-or corporations using Linux instead-of-or-alongside Windows, and thus more people are using Linux, for one reason or another. It may cause quakes in Linux community, because people with radically different mindset and habits arrive.

These quakes do happen, but not suddenly. There's always a buildup, mainly because these people don't understand that things are done differently in Linux than in Windows (installing software+drivers being a major thing). They don't understand that you can't improve on anything by offering a clone/something similar; rather, the only way to make something better is to make it different.

You have these "I want Windows without the malware/spyware" types that can't make the switch to Linux. What's the best advice for them? Update your AV, don't go to untrusted sites, harden your browser, DO YOUR RESEARCH, and stick to Windows. When I used Windows, the only nasty code that got on my computer was using a then-insecure Internet Explorer and network worms that arrive through email.

Getting off-topic now. Anyway, the point is these kinds of people have always existed within Linux-land, and they are FAR from the reason as to why peopl are forking Debian (I still can't get over that).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikiwide

Or maybe, Linux distros are reaching stage of "maturity" when they are too large to innovate, and instead they switch to uniform systemd-and-polypaudio

I won't go into detail over this, but the response to this is a resounding no. Only the Ubuntu and Fedora projects have the "too big to fail" mentality.

With that said, unification on the lower level will, at the very least, save developers making packages for Linux some grey hairs when packaging for a variety of diistributions. The notion that a package for Debian should work for OpenSUSE (once repackaged into an RPM package) is understandable, and should lead to elimination of useless overhead.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wikiwide

Or maybe, Linux feels that some new innovation is needed, to keep it from getting tangled in continuous mess of maintaining distros similar to each other, and compatible with their past.

This bit has me confused. There's no single entity maintaining a bunch of distros. While it's common for people in Linux-land to feel like innovation is needed just to spite MS+Apple, not everyone feels that way (if the systemd flamewar is any indication).