Hacker News Reader

Comment by _8j50 | Hacker News Reader

So, the whole thing with systemd is not that "it's bad" but that "I don't like it and I am stuck with it". Moreover, it leaves those of us who don't like it disenfranchised by distros that insist on using only systemd

Opensource is about alternatives. Forks are a good thing,I wish devuan great success so people like myself won't have to whine about systemd all the time. If you like systemd and it's philosophy,I wish you the best of luck with it. Just keep in mind that others don't have to like it and different people or organizations have different needs.

View on HN

My thoughts exactly. I personally have nothing against systemd and haven't been directly affected since I rarely need to touch init scripts, but I still appreciate Devuan and loosely follow its progress for this reason. (Kind of like ReactOS — 99% I'll never want or need it, but the fact that it exists is still really cool.)

I was a systemd proponent until I had a hosed box. At that point I learned that alternatives are important. It made my life very difficult due to how opaque it is.

Whike problems are surmountable, rehearsing for failure is advised.

It is also plain bad but even more important is lock in that you mention. Bugs can be fixed but wrong philosophy can't.

We've been living with sysvinit style systems for years, and were able to transition away. We could easily do it again.

> Forks are a good thing,I wish devuan great success so people like myself won't have to whine about systemd all the time.

The real issue with systemd is that there simply aren't enough volunteers (both individuals and companies) out there willing to contribute. In short, since gnome is pretty much developed by RedHat and systemd is developed by RedHat, gnome is tied into systemd.

If there was enough of a community around gnome that RedHat wouldn't be able to pull it wherever they want, gnome wouldn't have been able to be that coupled with systemd. The issue is that debian simply doesn't have the manpower needed to de-systemd gnome.

The guix team have de-systemded gnome they use Shepherd. But it would be great to have these efforts upstream

That's not quite correct. GNOME only really needs systemd's logind component. For Guix that component has been carved out of systemd as elogind. GNOME is virtually unchanged.

It is not quite only.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html

Unfortunately I've run into bugs where services provided by the kernel (encryption key management) work on distributions without systemd but break on distributions with systemd.

There definitely is bad too.

Did you open a bug?

So true!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com