Was ist das? Eine neue Suse Linux Enterprise? Ausgezeichnet! Suse has kicked out a new version of its enterprise-grade commercial Linux distribution, Suse Linux Enterprise 12, more than five years after the last major-version release. Not that the German firm has been resting on its laurels in the meantime. Countless patches and updates for the platform have been released for version 11 …
The three key strains of Linux today are:
GNU/Linux
Systemd/Linux
Android/Linux
Anyone, it seems, can build a userland stack. But at the center of it all, there is still Torvalds. He's ornery. He's blunt. He's to the point. And he's usually correct.
Go ahead and try to make it Systemd/RedHatnix or whatever the hell ego-driven digital phallic madness drives the gravy train next...it won't hold a candle to the semi-benevolent dictatorship of an Angry Finn obsessed with quality control.
There's your mistake: you think of systemd as just a replacement for init. It's not. It is attempting to be - piece by piece - a replacement for every single core element of the OS that isn't a kernel. Including all the fundamental userland tools (and the freaking shell) that we think of as being core to the "GNU/Linux" package.
In very much the same way that Android runs a Linux kernel but is thought of as "Android", not as "Linux", so to is systemd evolving into it's own thing. Mark my words, the GNU toolchain will be next with systemd. He's already gone after everything else, and he won't stop until he, personally, controls the whole goddamned thing.
@Trevor
Just keep reciting "Lennhart is mortal". The universe is eternal (relatively) and resilient. One day both systemd a nd pulse-audio will succumb to "The Unix Way" as proclaimed by those eternal heros -- Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.
Herr Poettering is just Red Hats version of Novell's Miguel de Icaza. Eventually his ideas will also be spewed out and carefully stepped around. Anyway how old is he? He can't survive much longer than me, the future is safe from both of us.
Before I even read the article I was telling myself "please no systemd, please no systemd, please no systemd"... no such luck it appears. Admittedly I'm now working with RHEL 7.0 boxes which have... surprise surprise... systemd. No /major/ issues AS OF YET but I do like to have a fall-back plan.
Well, I too hated systemd with passion, till I learned it a little. I am not a fan exactly, but I understand that there are some real benefits to it when your application infrastructure is a little less static, but YMMV.
If your application is just a single service running on a few dozen or hundreds of servers, then systemd is a big, unwelcome impact, but if you already have to work in a complex heterogenous environment with myriad of dependent services, systemd complexity is peanuts and you can use it to actually make things more robust and simple. Um, yes, I did say that.
Now bring torches, I have already prepared the stake for me :)
I'll upvote. I'm home user. Also use the supercomputers.
I sort of get everyone who says "why can't it be init scripts?" is complaining, I really do.
But it is entirely possible to de-systemd your system, since it is the "init" process that controls(lled) those scripts. I guess change init, and tar -xvf my-init-scripts should work?
Unless systemd is somehow added to every executable on the system?
The thing about systemd is that if you have problems, submit a patch. Perhaps get it to use zipped xml for a format, rather than opqaue blobs (yes, I don't like that either).
Oh and pulseaudio works fine for me,
P.
not whether it is technically better than what has gone before, or whether the boot process could do with a good overhaul, but whether it philosophically fits with the GNU-Linux/*nix mentality and ethos, and where systemd is going?
Systemd may be everything its fans say it is, but if that means a 'my way or the highway' approach, where previously people have been able to choose without crippling their overall setup, or severely limiting their access to downstream software through dependency issues, that is a 'bad thing'.
Most of us like things that make life easier, but when easier means trading in choice, independence, and freedom then there are questions to be asked, decisions to be made, and consequences to be borne.
On the face of it systemd sucks, but if the majority support it for the sake of an easy life, and end up losing freedoms that GNU/Linux tried to stand for, then we'll all bear the consequences of learning to love Big Brother.
Pretty much. Systemd is the danglies in practice, especially for people born this side of 1960 who are used to systems coming batteries-included and not having to string together unholy, write-one-read-never shell scripts to get things working. I can understand the criticism around not being Unix-ey, but frankly I don't care. It works, it's battle-tested, it improves (substantially - particularly MTTR) a lot of under-the-hood stuff and in practice actually makes things easier to manage (who seriously used hand-cranked scripts for config or read syslog files by hand in this day and age anyway?).
If someone disagrees? Great! Fork yourself over to Gentoo or Slackware and enjoy the freedom we've got. No one's forcing you to use systemd.
Oh c'mon, this is not a religion. We are technicians/engineers. We get tools, we do stuff. Tools evolve, change as requirements change. All this is under GPL, you can scan the source code for Big Brotherly things, you can even do your own patches if you are so inclined. Today you are "forced" to use systemd, before you were "forced" to use init. Frankly, it is a symmetrical situation. Do you think init was somehow democratically chosen from bunch of alternatives by large plenum of opensource developers and users? No.
Before with init, it was complicated to create dependencies and this created unholy mess of script-fu with init (especially in real world where there are more services than smtpd and httpd), today with systemd it is slightly more complicated to do "trivial" things such as running single purpose server, but more complex things that were almost unmanageable before, are possible to manage again.
Boo-hoo.
>'my way or the highway'
There is no such thing as 'my way or the highway' in the Freetard ecosystem (GNU/Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris ...), there are numerous alternatives to systemd out there, you choose whatever floats your boat - yes it takes a little configuration, but hey, it can be done and there are step-by-step instructions available on the interwebs.
'my way or the highway' is the mantra of proprietary bullshit, exclusively ... like Adobe software that is sooo bloated it uses more resources than an entire OS needs to build a kernel ... all to display a 1mb bitmap, Windows that has a footprint of an entire package repository, or iTunes ???
Remembers Suse with a little nostalgia. I bought the 7.0 Professional version back in the day, worth it for the books alone that were shipped with it. I read them and became an instant power user. I was able to compile a kernel, optimized for my hardware - back then, performance required hacking (no, window cleaner, you DO NOT KNOW what hacking means, you confuse it with cracking).
Anyway, I moved to Debian for apt alone, after a move to from Suse to slackware.
I remember the nightmare it was to install an rpm with dependencies, you require 5 rpm's, which each require another set of rpm's, et cetera ad nauseam. I kept it on my workstation, though, until v8.x, not sure which release it was exactly, where a night-time update replaced glibc with something that did not allow me to launch even a terminal.
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