On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 21:46 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by anselm
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?

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.

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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.