Re: OT: Open letter to the Linux World

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Wed Aug 13 2014 - 21:08:30 EST


On 12/08/14 01:38 PM, Christopher Barry wrote:


What is intelligence? Not exactly the spook kind, but rather what is
the definition of intelligence in humans? This is pretty good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence#Definitions

By most accounts, the self-appointed and arguably too influential
creators and thinkers of the day around the 'One Linux' idea fit the
definition of intelligent people - at least in the technical realm.

And their messages are pretty compelling:
* Simplify cross-distro development.
* Enable faster boot times.
* Enable an on-demand, event driven architecture, similar to 'Modern'
Operating Systems.
* Bring order and control to subsystems that have had as many different
tools as there were distros.

All seemingly noble goals. All apparently come from a deep desire to
contribute and make things better.

Almost anyone could argue that these intelligent people thought hard
about these issues, and put an enormous amount of effort into a
solution to these problems. Unfortunately, the solution they came up
with, as you may have guessed by now, is 'systemd'.

While not new, it's grotesque impact has finally reached me and I must
speak to it publicly.

So, what is systemd? Well, meet your new God. You may have been praying
at the alter of simplicity, but your religion is being deprecated. It
likely already happened without your knowledge during an upgrade of
your Linux box. systemd is the all knowing, all controlling meta-deity
that sees all and supervises all. It's the new One Master Process that
aspires to control everything it can - and it's already doing a lot.
It's what init would look like if it were a transformer on steroids.
It's complicated, multi-faceted, opaque, and supremely powerful.

I had heard about systemd a few years back, when upstart and some other
init replacements I can't remember were showing up on the scene. And
while it seemed mildly interesting, I was not in favor of using it, nor
any of them for that matter. init was working just fine for me. init
was simple and robust. While configuration had it's distro-specific
differences, it was often these differences that made one pick the
distro to use in the first place, and to stay with that distro. The
tools essentially *were* the distro. I just dist-upgraded to Jessie,
and voila - PID 1 was suddenly systemd. What a clusterfuck.

You might want to send this to a mailing list that's remotely relevant, like perhaps a Debian one. Though I wouldn't expect a very productive response there either, since you neglected to include any reasons behind your rant other than "they changed it, now it sucks".
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