Story

LQ) Right now, there are a number of potentially intrusive technical changes coming to some of the major distributions. How do you feel some of these will impact Linux in general and Slackware specifically? Are there any you would considering merging into Slackware? (55020 & tuxrules)

volkerdi) Yeah, I see a few things coming down the line that may cause a shakeup to our usual way of doing things, and could force Slackware to become, well, perhaps less UNIX-like. I guess the two big ones that are on the horizon are Wayland and systemd. Whether we end up using them or not remains to be seen. It's quite possible that we won't end up having a choice in the matter depending on how development that's out of our hands goes. It's hard to say whether moving to these technologies would be a good thing for Slackware overall. Concerning systemd, I do like the idea of a faster boot time (obviously), but I also like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable, and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. I don't spend all day rebooting my machine, and having looked at systemd config files it seems to me a very foreign way of controlling a system to me, and attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well. To the typical end user, if this results in a faster boot then mission accomplished. With udev being phased out in favor of systemd performing those tasks we'll have to make the decision at some point between whether we want to try to maintain udev ourselves, have systemd replace just udev's functions, or if we want the whole kit and caboodle. Wayland, by comparison, seems fairly innocuous, assuming that they'll be able to implement network transparency either directly or through some kind of add-on compatibility layer. Again, another thing that most desktop users don't have a lot of use for but many users can't do without. I like X11, and would probably stick with it if moving to Wayland meant losing that feature, even if Wayland's rendering method carried with it some benefits like reduced rendering artifacts or increased video performance. I guess we'll just have to see what the overall benefit is when it's far enough along to make such comparisons.