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Comment by Randor | Hacker News Reader

Interesting,

I don't really understand why distribution maintainers are allowing this one project to have so much control over the operating system.

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There's a couple of possible reasons from the structure of your question:

1. The project really doesn't have that much control. Like packaging any other software, it adds a feature you can choose to install, but it does not affect the distro if you don't enable it.

2. The project generally comes up with good ideas, or at least better ideas than the shared consensus of historical UNIX practice, such that incorporating the product's changes is a sound technical decision.

In this case I suspect it's 1 - the article points out that it's optional.

> Like packaging any other software, it adds a feature you can choose to install, but it does not affect the distro if you don't enable it.

I didn't want systemd, and there wasn't really an option for me to 'disable' it. I switched distros, because that was vastly easier.

> The project generally comes up with good ideas, or at least better ideas than the shared consensus of historical UNIX practice

[citation needed]

> I didn't want systemd

I'm talking about this feature that is the subject of the article, not systemd in general.

> [citation needed]

I'm discussing possible reasons why a distro might choose to trust systemd. Perhaps I should have said, "The distro believes that...." Whether systemd does or does not do this is debatable, but it certainly seems possible, which is the entirety of my claim. (Also, I'm tentatively concluding that this is not the reason why distros are okay with this particular change.)

> Perhaps I should have said, "The distro believes that...."

I think so. As it stands, you are flat out stating that systemd produces better system design than UNIX - which is not only questionable of itself, but in blatant disregard of those who disagree with the systemd design philosophy.

Even if I were making that claim (which is not what that comment said), there's no blatant disregard involved - the claim is not that systemd is good, but that it's better than UNIX, which is truly terrible.

Do you even know what UNIX is?

I think the fact that all major distros have gone the direction of systemd is probably a good indicator that it makes sense to move there.

I’m sure the distro leads are smarter than I am, too.

People seem to forgot, but majority move to systemd was caused by GNOME not working on systems without it, while the API it depended on was made near impossible to implement outside of systemd (the docs were incomplete and incorrect, etc).

That was the tipping point for systemd adoption, caused by incestuous relationship between systemd, GNOME, and Fedora.

They had no choice. After the udev fiasco running the Linux kernel without systemd becomes prohibitively complicated for many use cases. The main GUIs were similarly captured (e.g. with logind). You obviously can still run a Linux kernel based system without systemd but it is already hard and will get harder to run the larger userland components that other distros get “for free”.

If you don’t like systemd then the only sane option for you is to make the jump to FreeBSD.

Gentoo is looking at you disapprovingly .

I used gentoo without systemd for some time but things became problematic. Bluetooth headphones were barely functional, Firefox required pulse audio or sound didn’t work out of the box.

I’m not in love with systemd, personally. But it’s harder to live without it than with it.

Because it makes their lives easier. Not only does systemd take on a lot of the work distributions used to do by theirselves, a lot of the features of how it works makes maintaining packages easier (e.g. the fact that you have 'system' unit files which can then be overridden or augmented by the admin as a seperate file).

I wonder the same thing about privacy: why are so many people willing to give up so much for so little.

I think the answer is the same: this is emergent behavior.

Nobody is in charge, so somebody does something in their own self-interest and the effects cascade widely.

Systemd adds a feature, few know about it, and it spreads via the normal release channels.

Same thing happens with telemetry. Docker has telemetry, ubuntu keeps screwing with it, etc.

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