Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

Now if they could just abandon systemd.

Gnome 3 and systemd are closely intertwined. Running Gnome without it would be a lot of work.

The death of unix right there

UNIX was never very good, though. Even at its inception it was a stripped down OS for the PDP-11 because they could not run Multics. C was a stripped down version of BCPL that didn't even have floating point numbers. Looking to the "UNIX way" as the gold standard sets the bar very low.

It only needs logind, IIRC. I run GNOME 3 without systemd.

Erm, just use a distro that doesn't come with systemd?

From where I am sitting, going from upstart to systemd just seemed like an exercise in inconvenience.

As a web dev/devops guy, most of my interaction with both is to set up service files. Switching was relatively easy and I found systemd servics files to be sensible and easy to write. And now I don't have to maintain separate Debian/Ubuntu variants.

So from my purely practical non-sysadmin perspective - a positive change.

There's a lot of good things in systemd, and service-files are definitely one of them.

But we could have a system that works like service-files without all the downsides of systemd.

Looking at the 20 years before systemd, we apparently couldn't. There were a lot of init systems that were better than sysvinit, but only systemd played the politics part of init system adoption correctly.

Well, I agree if by "played the politics" you mean "were willing to force it on users". The other alternatives to the init system were rejected because, in general, init was good enough. Not perfect - but not worth the turmoil, fragmentation, and re-learning required to change it. Basically, those who control popular distributions are able to ignore the masses who use those distributions. Open source has gotten lost.

> but only systemd played the politics part

And that's why people are so against systemd. It's not a better system. Sure, it has some parts that are better, but it, as a whole, is worse. They were just able to play the politics game. Not sure why people always tout that as a positive.

Now if people could only get used to it.

There's always the *bsd family.

systemd is the best. May it never die.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com