The implementation of systemd - it is tragic

[Howard White]

Okay folks,

Many of us like to beef about the complexity of systemd and how it has
interfered with our lives. I offer this very thoughtful video taking
the affirmative argument for systemd.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo>

Howard

[Csaba Toth]

It is a true tragedy which even Linux users often don't realize and are just blissfully ignorant against. And unfortunately by Debian dragging its feet to even take a stance which reasonably supports alternatives: all the major distributions (so not just the Poetter related RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, etc but also all Debian variants like Ubuntu) are doomed to be bogged down with this bloatware. Maybe it could have heightened my stance if over the years Poetter wouldn't be such a prick any time some bug emerges. Bullying kernel developers to budge instead of fixing the bloatware. Trying to sweep security vulnerabilities under the rug by denying to include CVE numbers and advocate against CVE numbers and downplay the importance of it. I gonna puke!

I'm currently using Devuan https://www.devuan.org/ for many years now. I'm a developer, and sometimes things are hard, like for example snap is dependent on systemd so I have to live without it. I feel like a misunderstood freak often times, or like a cult follower. But I just see something what even many Linux users don't see. I want to compile a presentation about the subject one day. There are very few distributions left who try to fight this cancer.

One read: https://artixlinux.org/faq.php

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[Michael Chaney]

I've been using Unix in one form or another for 30 years now.  I understand init and have done some really low-level work around init.  It's a simple system that works.

Unfortunately, I also understand its severe limitations with modern systems and the need to deal with changing hardware at run-time and all that.

The main issue with systemd is that it doesn't solve the problem properly and that's because the wrong people wrote it.  Like so many things in the tech world, though, nobody is properly disgusted with it and motivated enough to actually write something better as there's not enough mindshare to go around.  (This is the same reason everybody hates facebook yet everybody still uses it.)  If you were going to write a replacement it would have to be so obviously much better out of the gate that systemd developers would abandon ship and come over to your side. But systemd is mostly kind of good enough so getting over that "much better" barrier is tough.

This is something that redhat or someone like that should have worked on years ago.  Because they didn't, we ended up with Poettering.

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Michael Darrin Chaney, Sr.
mdch...@michaelchaney.com
http://www.michaelchaney.com/

[Greg Donald]

On Fri, Nov 5, 2021 at 12:32 PM Csaba Toth <csaba....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It is a true tragedy which even Linux users often don't realize and are just blissfully
> ignorant against. And unfortunately by Debian dragging its feet

Awesome! Can we next talk about which desktop environment is best?
Gnome sucks. xfce4 is the best. Who's with me?


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Greg Donald

[Howard White]

Greg,

This is all personal preferences - YMMV.

Just think, you could be running MacOS or Windows and not have any
choice as to desktop manager...

Remember the desktop manager dark ages - when Microsoft cane out with
Windows 8 and Ubuntu allowed Unity to escape? Yours truly was in a
world of hurt. Now I continue to use Gnome Flashback because it allows
me to manage my work spaces in a manner that is productive for me.

Native Gnome 3 is not helpful.
xfce - meh
KDE - too much like emacs
Enlightenment - spend more time setting up than using
Windows 10 - annoying
MacOS - Really? How much overhead for glitz?

I admit to being an old(er) dog who is set in his desktop ways.

Howard

[Tilghman Lesher]

I dunno, Howard. I've been using KDE for ages, and the most galling
thing about it is that it's written in an abomination of a language,
C++. Second most galling is when I upgrade, and I find that an
application that I liked using has been replaced wholesale with an
application that works better, but which has a completely new name
that I can't find without a Google search.

The only thing worse than having to write an application in KDE with
its massive collection of classes is having to write an application in
GNOME, which uses awful casts to move void pointers around, a truly
awful system. It's amazing GNOME works at all.

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Tilghman

[Kent Perrier]

Oh, come on! Let's get to something that is really clear cut, vi being better than emacs!

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[Curt Lundgren]

Oh, that's it!  Now Kent gets a lump of coal for Christmas.  Not a large one that could be used to provide useful heating, just a small crumbly one.  Use vi and enjoy; I'll use Emacs and be very happy.

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[Howard White]

I'm still looking for a modern port of FSTE from the Honeywell GCOS6
days... Sigh.

Howard

[Csaba Toth]

C++ is not frightening, in fact modern C++ is pretty tame. The problem is that all of these projects (KDE, Gnome) are old enough that their codebase is very large and they carry a lot of technical debt. I still fear these less than the current trendy framework (which is changing like every 5 years). So if someone builds a castle from shit based on JavaScript I trust that less all day every day vs a GNOME or KDE even though they are old codebase. Because I know that a shit castle will lead to a disaster sooner or later.

I have to tell though I never wrote a desktop app for KDE / Qt or GNOME (I believe you are dealing with C there instead of C++?) but have wrote app against plain X decades ago. So from desktop developer perspective they could be very well painful.

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[Csaba Toth]

My take:

GNOME 3: if I would not use Xfce that could be a good candidate

Xfce: very kind with resources, no fluff, my windowing environment the last 4-5 years now.

Enlightenment: I used it in the past and liked it, but it needs more resources than Xfce.

Windows 10: compared to Linux I like how easy it is now to copy paste stuff between command line shells, or Power Shell.

MacOS: I try to stay away from it to oppose their walled garden principle. I also cannot stand some historic things like how the window menu is always on the monitor top header, or like how a regular user haphazardly sizes windows all over (which is what I see most of the time and the traditional) instead of maximizing them or having them divide the workspace. I don't even mention how closed source is it, and Apple's disgusting lobbying against right to repair. I cringe every time when I think about that I had to get a MacBook so I can build an iOS app. You can build an Android app on any OS you choose. It's pukingly disgusting how closed their eco-system is and unfortunately especially in California or I see in many conference now even more than half of the software engineers are no iSheeps.

I wonder if anyone uses newer like Linux Mint with Cinnamon (Muffin (a fork of Gnome3’s Mutter – as Cinnamon is fork of Gnome3).
Source: https://ostoday.org/linux/quick-answer-what-window-manager-does-linux-mint-use.html)

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[Csaba Toth]

I understand that old init systems have/had limitations and problems. But writing a monolithic blob to solve those is a fatal solution. Ok, Poetter says that the kernel itself is monolithic, so why is it a problem that systemd is too? Facepalm!!!

I often recall one of my all time favorite blog posts, which is by Joel Spolsky (founder of Stack Overflow, ex engineer at Microsoft) and is titled "Things you should never do" https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/. In that blog post basically he visits the constant temptation of throwing out a codebase and rewriting it from scratch, which essentially arises sooner or later with every codebase larger than a Hello World. But the temptation is getting greater as you pass the 3 year mark.

Writing a new code from scratch often gives the false frenzy good feeling that you are typing, vs understanding an existing large codebase is very hard cognitive work and you are mostly not typing code.

That truth is highlighted by Joel on Software as "It’s harder to read code than to write it.". Boom!

Many years after systemd got traction I some developers fixed crucial problems in SystemV init. Unfortunately that came too late. Older init systems may still have some issues stemming from architectural choices, but with systemd we ended up having for example binary log files (WTF!), and a too large codebase with lurking security holes. Now it's that blob which could be very well thrown the fuck out and rewritten. I wouldn't shed a tear. But to stick to my stance - no rewrite - maybe an alternative would come around which is better? Very low chance though now that systemd took over every major distributions. It's clinching on the kernel as well, my nightmare is that one day the kernel will be totally dependent on it. It had so many clashes with the kernel developers anyway.

All around sad story.

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