Disagree. Linux has been gradually changing with the push towards systemd, snap, flatpak etc.. Today's FreeBSD resembles the Linux of 10 or 20 years ago a lot more than today's Linux does.
I'm not sure that that's the win that you think it is. Linux 10 to 20 years ago was pretty terrible, at least on desktops.
Everyone hates on systemd, but honestly I really think that the complaints are extremely overblown. I've been using systemd based distros since around ~2012, and while I've had many issues with Linux in that time, I can't really say that any of them were caused by systemd. systemd is easy to use, journalctl is nice for looking at logs, and honestly most of the complaints I see about it boil down to "well what if...", what-if's that simply hasn't happened yet.
FreeBSD is cool, but when I run it I do sometimes kind of miss systemd, simply because systemd is easy. I know there was some interest in launchd in the FreeBSD world but I don't know how far that actually got or if it got any traction, but I really wish it would.
For all its usability issues, Linux 10 to 20 years ago had advantages that, for a certain kind of user, were worth the cost. Frankly Linux on the desktop today is the worst of all worlds - it doesn't have the ease-of-use or compatibility of Windows or OSX, but it doesn't have the control and consistency/reliability of BSD either.
- find Zoom in the package manager (can't)
- find zoom-client in the package manager (can, but it appears to be authored by some person and not Zoom Inc)
- go to the Zoom website and download a .deb and then run a command
This is fine for me, but let's not pretend that a regular user wanting to install something as basic as Zoom is going to have an easy time of it.
[0] https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti...
Same thing for RPM distros. So the only real catch is knowing which package to download.
It's definitely harder than those things, and lots of regular people struggle even with them.
Btw I just went to Zoom as well with my work Mac and I got TWO buttons: "Download for Apple Silicon" and "Download for Intel". I guess that a normal user will panic here, no?
And I don't want to go into all of the time spend getting systemd unit files correct. There is very active community suggesting things you can add, which then of course breaks your release for users in unexpected ways. An enormous waste of time.
Looking back on the time I spent in systemd land, I don't miss it at all. My system always felt really opaque, because the mountain of understanding systemd seemed insurmountable. I had to remember so much, all the different levers required to drive the million things systemd orchestrated... and for very little effect. I really prefer transparency in my system, I don't want abstraction layers that I have no purpose for. I don't take it as a coincidence at all that since I moved away from systemd distributions, my system has become quite a bit more reliable. When I got my Steamdeck, the first systemd setup I've used in years, one of the first things I noticed is that the jank I used to experience has showed its face once again. It might not be directly tied to poetteringware, but it's very possible that this is a simple 2nd or 3rd order effect from having a more complex system.
[1] - https://www.fortinet.com/resources/articles/xz-utils-vulnera...
I am hardly a super genius and I really didn’t find systemd very hard at all to do most of the stuff I wanted. Everyone complains about it being complicated but an idiot like me has been able to figure out how to make my own services and timers and set the order of boot priorities and all that fun stuff. I really think people are exaggerating about the difficulty of it.
None of these issues are "difficult" and perhaps that is why you think people are "exaggerating" and engaging in bad faith. I would challenge you on this and suggest you haven't seriously interrogated the idea that the standpoint against systemd has a firm basis in reality. Have you ever asked the question "Why?" and sought to produce an answer that frames the position in a reasonable light? Until you find that foundation, you won't understand the position.
Of course I have run non-systemd distros, like Ubuntu (back when it used upstart), Gentoo, and of course FreeBSD (yes I know it’s not a Linux distro but close enough for this particular point), so it’s not like non-systemd stuff is foreign to me, and I am just not convinced it is actually causing more headaches than other systems.
Indeed, but the one that has been around for much longer is likely to have more bugs flushed out by now.
That is the main issue in modern software. The only way to "improve" something, is to add another abstraction layer.
FWIW, Devuan is good enough to keep me from switching to a BSD, but I guess the vandals that work at the big corporate distros are starting to delete X11 support from applications even though Wayland still hasn’t hit feature parity.
On the bright side, the last time I tried it, steam ran OK in a FreeBSD vm, except the VM had no video accelerator. That’s the main application keeping me on Linux.
Huh ? It worked much better than today. It was not so bloated and people kept improving things instead of changing them every year.