Gentoo Ought to Be About Choice
rich0gentoo.wordpress.com
rich0gentoo.wordpress.com
Let's put it this way:
there are a few of us (including myself) in #gentoo with a file called "FuckLennartPoettering" residing within /etc/portage/package.mask/. in this file, you will find:
sys-apps/systemd
sys-fs/udev
net-misc/networkmanager
I haven't read anything on fdt's attacks on gpl and gnu? Got some links?
Hi I am nobody. Nice to meet you.
Your lifestyle choice of systemd is accepted by the rest of us. But don't pretend you'll ever be in the majority.
I have heard all the arguments against systemd and many are totally valid. Some of the implementations and management of the project leaves a lot to be desired.
That said, I have run Gentoo on my home desktop for over a decade, Arch on personal/work laptops, Debian on some personal development shell boxes, and CoreOS/Debian on the hundreds of servers I maintain between work/volunteer projects. I may touch all of these in a given day, and I can't tell you how great it is for my personal sanity to be able to run 'systemctl restart ...' or 'journalctl -fu someservice' on any of them. Having a common set of core system tools available across desktop/server distributions has huge advantages.
Also there are some real advantages of systemd design (bloated or not) a lot of people overlook. For one, I help maintain shell services for the general public. Giving users root is of course not sane, but at the same time users are constantly wanting to run their own databases, webservers, etc. Since migrating to systemd we can just tell them "create a unit file in ~/.config/systemd/units with whatever you want, and it will become a system daemon run as your user". This is a huge win for security, administration ease, and usability.
I have also used Gentoo to build base images for embedded systems with minimal resources, and systemd would of been a terrible choice for those use cases. It would of been a terrible choice for ChromeOS.
Choice is what Gentoo has always been about. Let's quit the zealotry and ensure Gentoo continues to be the Linux OS that offers the maximum choices to include the right tools for the problem you are solving.
I fully support the author here.
Embedded wants parallel startup gains, sure, but there are videos floating around youtube of embedded systems booting linux kernels and a full GNU base system in less than a second using init scripts. Why the hell would you want a non-predictible bootup (which systemd does in the name of "speed in bootup") on an embedded system?
All my KVM/Qemu VM's are currently gentoo (and arch+OpenRC) based. most use less than 10MB total. systemd requires more than 5 times that amount by default. CoreOS starts with gentoo and then strips it further, and it doesn't use systemd at all.
Gentoo (minus systemd) is the base of ChromeOS and ChromiumOS. You had to have known that. I refuse to believe that you're one of the lucky 10,000 XKCD talks about.
Your post, and the main article, are just quiet astroturfing/zealotry. You guys have plenty of distributions. We heard Lennart's "wake-up call", and ignored it, because he was leading the march towards a new operating system. We like GNU. We don't particularly like/need/want the Violate-GPL-Over-RPC functionality system Poettering implemented in PID1.
Gentoo is not denying choice. We're denying you guys the right to have systemd be a default. The safest distros (Void, Gentoo, Calculate) are all avoiding systemd on purpose. You certainly have the choice to compromise your system and taint your GNU system, but don't expect your silly march off the cliff to become the default for those of us left with actual GNU systems.
I have been intimidated with the idea of 'building from source'. Recently I have been curious about trying Gentoo and BSD, but every time I do some research it is not encouraging.
Start with Calculate Linux. it's gentoo, but without the scary install, and most of the packages are binary-based. If your package isn't binary'd already, you'll have to wait for it to build. that'll take longer than you may expect. If you're testing new packages, you may have to make an ebuild. Ebuilds are surprisingly simple.
You can use systemd if you enjoy that sort of massochism, but it's definitely not (recommended) required.
As the linked writeup says, Gentoo is very much about choice. The ability to keep use flags turned off meant I had a leaner system with fewer dependencies, and I never had (pulse)audio problems all the while I had to fix family members' computers running kubuntus and such every week. No need to fix and change configurations and whatnot after every update -- set the system up once, and it'll mostly work the same way for a long long time. The other monolithinc distros seemed to break every time a big upgrade rolled. And since your programs are built against your libraries, you don't get the dependency problem of having to update all your packages just because someone bumped a popular library or two. It's all nice, and there's nothing to fear re. building from source, as the portage tooling do it all for you automatically. It just takes time, which can be a problem and one reason why I'm not running Gentoo now. Also, the last time I used Gentoo, it required a little more configuration than I think it should. As in, I think it could use more defaults that you don't need to touch unless you want to.
I can't speak for the other BSDs, but OpenBSD is totally opposite to Gentoo. You get binary packages and are mostly discouraged from building from source. There aren't that many knobs and optional dependencies. The devs want to provide good defaults and eliminate the need for twisting knobs and configuring things that can be handled by the OS. Indeed, they want to remove knobs, so that there are fewer ways to shoot yourself in the foot making the system less secure, or to just generally end up in a poorly tested configuration. You don't get to choose between five bootloaders, three init systems, seven filesystems and a few hundred kernel options. And if you go out of your way to build a very special custom system, you can expect no help from the community when you run into trouble.
A year or two later, I bought a netbook so I could unload and process photos from my camera while travelling. I had no idea what to install on it since I didn't really want to spend all the time Gentoo required, and I knew I wouldn't be updating the system regularly, which could result in a lot of pain on Gentoo if you ever needed something new. And I had too many bad experiences with all the other Linux distros I'd tried. So, just for the heck of it, I tried OpenBSD. Ten minutes later I have a working system and GIMP one pkg_add away.
As for the desktop.. well, I didn't switch from Gentoo directly. I had been running Debian for a short while. I can't remember why exactly. Could be that I had a hard drive break and I didn't have the time for Gentoo. Unfortunately Debian had been a pain from the start and one night, in a bad mood I was, for some reason I had to reboot. Which I couldn't, because apparently in some routine round of package updates Debian had messed with the bootloader. By that time I was just so sick of it, and didn't really want to look for yet another distro. I went to bed, and next morning installed OpenBSD, which had already proven painless so far.