Who's Afraid of Systemd?

by
in linux on (#FGW5)
Now that systemd is uneventfully running the latest releases of major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu, you might imagine that opposition to it is melting away -- but you'd be wrong. Instead, the rumors are as common as ever. Devuan, the anti-systemd fork of Debian, is still trudging towards a release while making the same arguments as ever. Devuan's home page asks: Have you tried to opt-out of the systemd change in Debian and stay with sysvinit? You will quickly notice that "Debian offers no choice." Yet a search quickly unearths instructions for making an install image without systemd and for removing systemd from your system.

Nor does the claim that systemd violates the Unix design principles stand up under scrutiny. Systemd is actually a general name for a series of related, similarly structured commands. From this perspective, systemd conforms to the principle of one program doing a single function in much the same way as the Linux kernel or a command line shell does. It is a suite of programs, not a single monolithic one. Systemd may not be ideal, but systems continue to boot and function the way they are supposed to.

In fact, not only are the most common anti-systemd arguments easily discounted, but they are surrounded by a vagueness that raises suspicions. Wild claims are made without any attempt at substantiation. The result is an air of secrecy and danger that, however appealing and reminiscent of freedom-fighting that it might be, does nothing to justify the anti-systemd rhetoric or make it plausible. Devuan's mailing list mostly shows the same dozen or so posters, and has raised only 7934 Euros. Supporters sound as though they are doing more fear-mongering than constructive effort.

Devuan needs large iso files (Score: 2, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-08-07 03:39 (#GP6M)

Devuan is starting to look like it's repeating Debian's mistakes. 1)It is trying to support lots of architectures up front. Why not stick with x64 for now, handle the other architectures later?
2)lots of file formats, but the only ISOs are for netboot. That's OK for people with lots of bandwidth. If they built a large (600MB or bigger) ISO I could download it while I sleep (which is the polite thing to do since my bandwidth is limited) and use it for multiple installs. Especially if the ISO included language packs. Installing Debian is a real PITA and takes forever because it always downloads those language packs. That's dumb. 3)take the time to make a liveCD. It isn't that difficult. 4)create an ISO image that can go on a thumbdrive with an NTFS filesystem, using Unetbootin. The 'dd' command is destructive. It's another PITA to reformat the thumbdrive to make it usable after the install. This is part of 'plays well with others'.
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