Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 17:28 UTC (Sun) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop by ThomasAdam
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

Thanks for that explanation. It's that lockin / loss of flexibility and innovation which makes me detest Wayland so much, and why systemd annoys me so much too. I fell in love with UNIX when I first used it around 1980, for its flexibility and one-tool-one-thing functionality. I remember trying to explain the difference between pipes and backticks to my brother around 1987 or so. When he finally got it, I could hear the revelation in his voice.

Systemd and Wayland are throwing that away. Monolithic control has always sucked.

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Gentoo on a frame.work 16 laptop

Posted Jan 11, 2026 21:16 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Systemd and Wayland are throwing that away. Monolithic control has always sucked.

I think you're blaming the wrong thing ... I agree the old Unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" is great, but ...

SysV was a disaster on that front. Pretty much every distro (I exaggerate but not much) had its own version of every script. Scripts were full of boilerplate that would get missed and mess things up. Etc etc.

Systemd pid-1 is a simple program (program not script) that just fires off daemons and makes sure they're running, according to a simple definition file. Yes I know systemd the project has grown and grown, but having dealt with SysV, Linux, Unix-that-can't-make-up-its-mind-what-it-is ... while systemd has suppressed *variety*, I think that's all to the good. There aren't half a dozen ways to find out your hostname, for example, any more.

Wayland? What's monolithic about a *protocol* that allows the display server to communicate with the kernel? There were/are multiple X11 servers - X, X11-386, X-Org, XWayland ... We now have multiple compositors - ?Plasma, Whatever Gnome, Weston, Wayback, etc etc. What's monolithic about that? A more monolithic system would probably be an improvement!

And unfortunately from the PoV of the systemd/Wayland haters, people are adopting them because they "Just Work" (tm). I keep banging on about design. There are two "second system creation" mechanisms. There's "the old system is rubbish, we need to rewrite it", and "the old design is outdated, we need to redesign it". Say what you like about Poettering, he does view design as very important. And the result is almost always smaller, faster, simpler, and less buggy! than the previous one. Plus easier to modify. People who think "it needs rewriting" almost always rediscover all the corner cases from the old system the hard way. People who design first usually have their "oh shit" moments before they start coding ...

And that's what's wrong with X. The world has shifted underneath it, large chunks of the core protocol are obsolete and a liability, but they can't be junked. While Wayland is a major pain in that all this stuff has been thrown out, so everything on top of it needs a rewrite, reality is all this code was obsolete. And there just WASN'T an easy fix ...

Cheers,
Wol