On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 17:41 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by ksandstr
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

If there are really so many people who don't like systemd (to avoid more loaded terms), then how is it that all the major Linux distributions have managed to adopt systemd without there being either a massive exodus to distributions like Slackware or else an obvious and popular initiative to produce systemd-free forks of Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian? All of these distributions are freely available, and the “we have commit privs and you don't“ argument doesn't count when everyone is free to make a forked repository where they have commit privileges.

This suggests that people are quick to bitch and moan but not so quick when the time comes to act. If not having systemd on one's system is not important enough to one to actually do the legwork (which is really straightforward compared to many other free-software projects since the required bits and pieces already exist; it's not as if one would have to write sysvinit and a zillion init scripts from scratch) that puts into perspective their complaints of how they're getting screwed over by those people who are in fact prepared to spend their time working on stuff.

There are issues with systemd but there are also people within the systemd community and the various distributions who are committed to getting these issues fixed. In the long run, systemd can only get better at delivering what most Linux users will find useful. It is up to you whether you want to avail yourself of this or whether you prefer to pursue another approach, but please stop complaining that it is all a huge plot to prevent you from having other people work on your behalf, for free, in order to produce the Linux that you want.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 21:46 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> If there are really so many people who don't like systemd (to avoid more loaded terms), then how is it that all the major Linux distributions have managed to adopt systemd without there being either a massive exodus to distributions like Slackware or else an obvious and popular initiative to produce systemd-free forks of Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian?

Where's your facts and figures to support that assertion? I see new recruits on the Gentoo forums every week who straight up cite systemd as their reason for switching. comp.sysutils.supervision.general is quite alive as of late too.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 23:05 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Well, there are no visible projects aiming for systemd-free versions of the mainstream distributions. For example, for all the heated debate going on around systemd in Debian, no Debian developers have so far resigned in disgust after the decision for systemd. Similarly, it seems to be business as usual with all the other mainstream distributions.

Maybe some people are looking at Gentoo more closely now. If so, more power to them. However the idea that “large swathes” of the Linux community are really opposed to systemd to a point where they seriously consider switching distributions just to avoid it is probably wishful thinking on the part of those who don't like systemd.

FWIW, I teach Linux system administration for a living and thus get to meet rather a lot of Linux sysadmins of various backgrounds in my professional life. I have yet to run into one who didn't think systemd was a good idea and a considerable improvement on the status quo. For many people it comes as a bit of a shock at first but then it grows on them, and the more they find out about it the more they like it.