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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

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You mean the Devuan which for more than a year and a half had a bug which resulted in the empty string being set as root password?[0]

[0]: https://linuxiac.com/devuan-users-are-at-risk/

Nope.

1. That link is dead ("Access Denied")

2. The bug is not in Devuan, it's in something called refractainstaller, which is used for Devuan live-ISOs. If you just install Devuan that doesn't happen.

3. With a refractainstaller live-ISO, and if you chose to not define a root user, then this bug manifests.

The bug seems to have lingered for so long because despite being rather obvious (i.e. you can just become root) because nobody tried to secure a live-ISO-based system, which is something you typically use as a "rescue disk" or to diagnose hardware.

So - is this a screw-up? Yes. Does it reflect significantly on Devuan as a project? Not really.

To draw a parallel - the fact that systemd has had bugs which other init systems didn't, or had gotten over decades before, does not mean it's an undesirable project. My (and many people)'s problems with systemd regard its fundamental design philosophy, as well as its governance/behavior as a software project.

>1. That link is dead ("Access Denied")

Works for me.

>2. The bug is not in Devuan, it's in something called refractainstaller, which is used for Devuan live-ISOs. If you just install Devuan that doesn't happen.

From the link:

>>When you download and install the desktop-live Devuan image, you will be prompted to create a user account at the end of the process.

... ie it seems to be talking about the normal process for installing a Linux distro - you make a live CD, boot it, and run the installer.

The one which set your root password to "" if you used the live-cd installer and selected the sudo option?

I'm a windows user since 3.1 and don't know much about linux except the few trials and my pihole.

What's the impact of having systemd (or not) for the everyday layman like me that just uses Visual Studio Code to build flutter apps ?

Nothing. Systemd is a suite of software that handle a lot of the low-level operations on Linux (In particular, the service manager, some network configuration, along with some other stuff). Historically, those operations were handled by different services (like SysvInit).

A lot of people are mad about it for a lot of reasons, but if you're not a system administrator, it's probably better to stick with systemd, since it's what most of the linux community has standardized on, and thus it's much easier to find information online about using those systems.

I _am_ a system administrator and systemd has been an overwhelmingly net positive for me

Amen to this. I understand some of the complaints with it getting into name resolution and other things, but having had to decipher vendors init scripts it's a huge improvement for managing services.

When you add in things like Podman and it's use of systemd it's overall not a bad thing at all.

>but if you're not a system administrator

And even, probably, if you are.

> What's the impact of having systemd (or not) for the everyday layman like me that just uses Visual Studio Code to build flutter apps ?

Compared to initrd, after Debian upgrading to systemd, the system boots slightly faster and shuts down slightly slower (or same speed, depends really what you run)

By "unencumbered by systemd" they mostly mean "works worse". We've removed tens of thousands lines of fixes for "easy", "simple" sysv scripts when we upgraded our servers to version that runs systemd.

most of the general purpose distributions use systemd. Almost every general purpose distro you've ever heard of. They all adopted it by choice, because they thought it was a better option than the alternatives for one reason or the other.

Basically, don't worry about it.

Very little.

It's an idealogical flamewar, that in most cases is without impact.

The binary format of the log file still seems to me to be a bad idea - it introduces corruptibility and complexity to a vital service that should be simple and uncorruptible.

If a failing system starts to do weird things, plain text append only logging is preferable.

It’s a problem because people do not wish to learn new paradigms. Put me in that camp - took months to debug a 90 second hang and work around it. Of course, fast boot owes to its parallelization.

> What's the impact of having systemd (or not) for the everyday layman like me that just uses Visual Studio Code to build flutter apps ?

Nothing. I run Void Linux Musl with XFCE and I have no issue running Steam and other big glibc programs in Flatpak, docker, etc.

Better GNUinos or Trisquel, no propietary bits included.

GNUinos is very nice as well! https://gnuinos.org/

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