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"Boycott Systemd" movement takes shape

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Last time I spoke to myself... (Score: 3, Interesting)

by genx@pipedot.org on 2014-09-07 22:06 (#2S4P)

... is the answer to the question:
> When's the last time you heard someone advocate moving immediately to Slackware or Gentoo?
That was when Debian decided to go for systemd. I switched to Gentoo. Debian remains on weak machines on which I do not want to compile every program, but I pinned systemd so that it should not ever get installed.

By the way, I had switched to Debian when Arch went systemd. What a joke that was: "don't worry, I promiss the regular init scripts will be maintained, you need not oppose systemd as default, do not be afraid, let us do" said one lead Arch developper. Less than 3 months later, he announced traditional init scripts would not be maintained any more. And he now works at RedHat! Really funny...

I considered and still consider moving to *BSD. But 20 years of Linux (15 years as main/only system) are a bit difficult to wipe. Dual booting is a bit annoying because *BSD and Linux do not support really well a common filesystem. Maybe running Linux in a VM on a BSD like some people run Windows in a VM on Linux, for the few applications requiring Linux. But I have the feeling that virtualisation software is not as well developped on *BSD as on Linux.

What worries me too is that, as someone else already pointed it, systemd seems like a shiny symptom of the tendancies of the last 5 or 10 years. Bloat, complexification, over-automatisation, hiding more and more stuff from the users (and from admins now), novelty for novelty, bad documentation (and never up-to-date because everything is changing too quickly), corporatisation (most pieces of software have been taken over by big corporations(RedHat, Canonical, Google, Apple, Oracle, Intel...), there is not much left to hobbyists, students, universities researchers). Basically all the things that I could complain about under Windows during the 90's and early 2000's and that made me enjoy and switch to the refreshing Linux. And I am afraid those tendancies would slowly contaminate the BSDs, starting with FreeBSD/PC-BCD.

Re: Last time I spoke to myself... (Score: 2, Interesting)

by scotch@pipedot.org on 2014-09-08 08:26 (#2S4V)

I started to use Linux long time ago (at that time I was a hobbyist and PhD student in engineering but now I'm a sysadmin by trade) because I wanted to understand every bit of my system and to be able to follow every execution path on it. Today it's becoming increasly difficult even impossible. I used redhat 4 then mandrake then debian (potato). It was fun, it ported values I do agree with, it fitted my needs. I started with one box in my attic up to 22 boxes in my garage before moving to the datacenter. Now I'm unhappy with the direction debian is heading. I loved squeeze but wheezy is not my cup of tea. I tried gentoo for awhile but on the production servers I manage I don't want to compile anything (not even installing the compiler...). I'm now trying alpine (discovered from the weekly distro post ;) ).
The major problem I see with systemd is that rebooting for some application upgrade is not an option but on kernel change (if the "new" fix is for an problem I encounter, not just for the sake of it). Also the involved "new" complexity is another major pain. I liked stable system and by stable I don't just mean "with no random crashes" but with no changes for the sake of change.
I suppose I will need to take (loose?) a lot of time trying to find another distro (even not linux) fiting my needs while still being fun to administer and being understandable at low level...
They are improvements in the landscape but also a lot of regressions :(

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2014-09-08 13:36 Interesting +1 genx@pipedot.org

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