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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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It is a bit of a bummer if you spend quite a bit of time tracking down a very weird DNS bug and it turns out to be systemd-resolved.

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.

I like BSD especially because it lacks systemd :)

> 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.

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.

I believe this is pretty unfair. Today's Linux on desktop is pretty straightforward for any normal user, given that there are no lines anymore between local and remote software. Windows shoves ads down your throat and MacOS make you pay a premium on HW which normal people spends on phones, not laptops or desktop computers anymore.

I just tried installing Zoom on my Ubuntu desktop, and the options seem to be:

- 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.

Most Ubuntu based distros let you just double click on the deb and just install the deb file. I don’t see how that’s appreciably different than Windows.

If you look at the website[0] you might see the difference.

[0] https://support.zoom.com/hc/en/article?id=zm_kb&sysparm_arti...

This page presupposes that the graphics tool to install .deb packages is not preinstalled, which isn't true for either Ubuntu nor Mint. If it is preinstalled the steps are really just "double click on it and then click install".

Same thing for RPM distros. So the only real catch is knowing which package to download.

It's possible the image could autodetect the OS (or even autodetect the presence of a package manager) and present a single option to download or launch the package manager into the right screen, which would then put Linux at parity with MacOS or Windows, but currently it can't.

It's definitely harder than those things, and lots of regular people struggle even with them.

I mean, it's either "App Store" or downlaod from vendor, no?

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?

The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit[1], fun fact.

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...

Any sufficiently large codebase that runs an operating system will have security exploits eventually, so finding an example of this really doesn’t change anything. I am sure FreeBSD has had security issues in the past.

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.

I think you misunderstand the issue being raised, hence your confusion. The "difficulty" isn't the individual facets of the system, but piercing the opaqueness of the entire picture without wholly specializing into it. On the very basis of using a configuration DSL loaded with strange quirks, the init system part of systemd alone is already asking to take up more space in your head than an init system reasonably should. Having to memorize a completely different set of string expansion behaviors, for example, and all the edge-cases that introduces at the boundary of shell scripts. One small example, and only of the tiny slice that is the init part of systemd. We can talk all day about the problems with resolved, udevd, logind, and so on.

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.

systemd solves problems that are not easily solvable in the old SysV init way. If you need resources to load in a specific order, for example, it’s trivial to do this with systemd, but you have to muck with weird symlink stuff to get the same effect with SysV. There are lots of things like that. You can hand wave this away and act like it’s not important, but it absolutely can be important to correctly make sure services load in the right order, and being abke to designate dependencies if services.

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.

> Any sufficiently large codebase that runs an operating system will have security exploits eventually

Indeed, but the one that has been around for much longer is likely to have more bugs flushed out by now.

> I don't want abstraction layers that I have no purpose for.

That is the main issue in modern software. The only way to "improve" something, is to add another abstraction layer.

Desktop Linux kind of peaked 20-25 years ago with Debian. Ubuntu was a win for a few years after that, but it’s been a long slow slide since.

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.

> 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.

Huh ? It worked much better than today. It was not so bloated and people kept improving things instead of changing them every year.

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