Another part of the reason is that Red Hat forcibly landed systemd in Fedora and then RHEL7, and RH is an elephant on the scale of Linux development.
Just seems like if it's as bad as so many say, it just doesn't make sense for all these distros to blindly go along. Even the GNOME lockin doesn't seem like it'd explain it.
Most RPM-based distros (openSUSE included) tend to follow RH's direction, so that's not surprising. Besides, SUSE has always been enthusiastic about most desktop efforts.
Arch Linux have at least two systemd developers on their team (Tom Gundersen and Dave Reisner). In fact, it was tomegun who wrote the Arch migration rationale: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530, based on the usual fallacious arguments (http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/2014/09/systemd-biggest-fall...).
Also, distros have blindly went along with other bad ideas before. The most prominent examples were HALd and LSB-style initscripts.
In fact, I'm not sure why you're at all surprised. Large groups of people in real life have collectively made far, far more catastrophic decisions. Why would a bunch of distribution maintainers adopting a piece of software be so shocking?
When there were problems about a desktop manager revamp or some crashy audio daemon, you could liquidate certain choices as irrelevant or lazy. Now the entire ecosystem's guts are being rewritten by RedHat for RedHat, and the developer community is simply going along because, in practice, they have no other choice. Nobody else has the appetite, the manpower or the political weight to put together a competing project with a single chance of success.
When chips are down, Red Hat owns Linux more than we like to admit.
Thing is though that while freedesktop.org is presented as being about cooperation and compatibility between desktop environments, a very large portion of what happens there is dictated by Gnome.
And Gnome is yet another project that on paper is independent, but with big RH contributions in terms of programming manpower (its the primary DE of both Fedora and RHEL).
Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.
This. The whole Linux community seems to be paranoid. It has to be a grand scheme, a plot to take over Linux, a conspiracy to kill "the UNIX way". Maybe it's just a group of guys solving their problems.
I don't see how anything of this is really Red Hat's "fault". Seriously. They develop a piece of software which solves their problems. They also incorporate projects they already maintain to improve functionality and make developing things easier. It's their projects, they're allowed to do that. The code is still open. It's not like everybody (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc) didn't have the ability to fork udev.
Yet all these projects chose not to fork the projects incorporated by systemd. Reason (1) might be it solves problems for them as well. There's no need to fork something that perfectly works for you. Reason (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing. The people advising against "corporate influence" are not able to do anything of value in modern computing anymore (I'm well aware this is over-simplification, please bear with me). Requirements for software have changed. It's not 1970 anymore. And while the "old-school" users and devs are complaining about systemd & co, the "youngsters" are busy changing the ecosystem.
May well be the case.
Somewhere GregKH mentioned how the pace of kernel development had changed, with git being a major part of it.
It may well be that the pace have now gotten to the point where hobbyists have a hard time keeping up, as they have things they need to do besides stare at code all day.
This is nobody's fault, but it's not healthy in the long run.
Totally agree. The needs of modern computing (server-, desktop- and security-wise) have drastically increased IMHO. You need to read so much documentation and existing code before you can even start coding. That's just not feasible in your free time after work if you're having an active social life or another computer-unrelated hobby.
Although I have to admit I might be biased about this topic. I'm contributing to a FOSS project which got a lot of flak for trying to raise money for employees in a ... well, more aggressive way. While not necessarily agreeing with everything that happened, I do believe you need to work full-time on modern FOSS projects to push ahead.
This is so not true that it is bordering on FUD. Systemd's leadership depended on debian making a fairly democratic, open and violently fought battle between upstart vs systemd. Everyone knew that Ubuntu (which is pretty much defacto installed in every laptop sold in Asia) would adopt systemd based on Debian's decision.
It was an argument that went on for a year. Read it for yourself if you want - https://bugs.debian.org/727708
Not only did Debian make the decision to support systemd, it voted to NOT support other init systems. Mark Shuttleworth made his announcement the day after (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316 ).
It is an interesting position to take by painting systemd as the lackey of a capitalist monopoly trying to take over the world. I can see how that can get a lot of mindshare. The truth is far simpler - systemd is far superior.
> Not only did Debian make the decision to support systemd, it voted to NOT support other init systems.
This is incorrect: systemd was merely voted as the default init system, other init systems are explicitly supported, here's the TC decision:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/08/msg00...
actually, I was referring to https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003 . But I see how my language could be interpreted that way.
Canonical revenue is 67 million according to wikipedia, by contrast Red Hat is 1.5 billion. That is 3 extra zeros (and even then it is almost 1/100 of Microsoft's revenue).
But that is a recent move, while RH has been in the Linux development effort for some time.
The fact of the matter is that "Distros" like Debian etc are dependent on upstream developers to provide new versions of there system. If a large portion of important subsystems are developed by RedHat developers then they will adopt that code and be driven in the direction upstream wants to go.
"Distros" do not develop, they package upstream into compiled binaries and add there configs and perhaps package management. In short most of the distros will bend which ever way the upstream wind blows.
Thats why I use a "Distro" Like Slackware or Crux that is built from scratch and not based on another system. What limited autonomy there is in Linux land is with the independent Distros.
For instance their main book use eudev rather than udev, because they found the effort of extracting udev from the larger systemd project a right pain.
They do however maintain a parallel systemd book for anyone interested.
By comparison Debian just has enough resources for keeping Debian running. SUSE seems to be an afterthought at this point. Ubuntu seems to mostly be concerned with itself.
I think that's a touch unfair. The fact that Debian runs on the BeagleBone Black and RedHat doesn't puts a bit of lie to that statement.
In particular as Fedora already have ARM versions across the board.