Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

>This anti-systemd bashing is a complete waste of time. Don't like systemd? Don't use it.

This is increasingly becoming a completely unviable option. As more and more distros adopt it as the standard, and more and more software becomes dependent on it and it's various parts, it becomes increasingly difficult to just not use systemd. Particularly those of us in the enterprise world, where we have a limited number of distros that are acceptable for server related work, most of which are now set on systemd being their init system moving forward.

>Do you think there is something wrong with it? Go fix it.

Not everyone that uses Linux is a developer. Not every developer that uses Linux works in the realm of knowledge related to init systems. The group managing systemd is also known to be more than a bit vitriolic and opinionated - what you believe is wrong might be something they thing is right. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - but it does mean that the idea of just fixing it is impractical, even if you have the necessary skills to correct what you think is broken.

>Do you think it's done all wrong from the bottom up? Write a better replacement.

A fair amount of the people that think it's wrong from the bottom up think there are already perfectly acceptable replacements.

>But please, stop writing crap like this.

I haven't gone over the article in depth, but... why? Why are you so upset that people are using the avenue they have available to make their opinion known? The Linux community has far outgrown the days where it was a developer only playground, so your proposed ideas of just write some code to solve everything is ridiculous.

Personally, I'm past caring on the systemd issue - I've long since replaced all of my servers with BSD or Illumos based distros, so I don't have a horse in this race anymore. I just don't understand the visceral reaction of some people in the Linux community to go "STOP SHARING YOUR OPINIONS, IF YOU THINK SOMETHING IS WRONG JUST MAKE IT BETTER"

This is increasingly becoming a completely unviable option. As more and more distros adopt it as the standard

Distros has always had standards and this has never been an issue before.

more and more software becomes dependent on it and it's various parts

This is something completely different and unrelated from what distros decide to do.

For instance, while I really like systemd as a Linux-specific init-system, I cannot for the love of all that is good architecture understand why Gnome, a desktop-environment running on top of X, maybe running on top of Linux, should make it self dependent on a Linux-specific component like systemd.

In cases like that you should not hate systemd, but on the guilty party introducing the bad dependency. This is clearly not systemd's fault.

>Distros has always had standards and this has never been an issue before.

While distros adopting standards has been polarizing in the past, I think this is the most debated issue in the past decade or two. There's been some quibbles over things, and of course there's the vi vs emacs holy wars, etc, but I can't think of a single time where something so integral to the distribution has been such a matter of controversy across the community.

>In cases like that you should not hate systemd, but on the guilty party introducing the bad dependency. This is clearly not systemd's fault.

Oh, I'm not blaming systemd for this (Though it's not surprising Gnome has done this - the Freedesktop.org group is fairly incestuous when it comes to this sort of thing), I'm just saying it's pretty easy to say "Don't use systemd if you don't like it then!", but increasingly more difficult to actually do it.

It's not like vi vs emacs or nginx vs apache where you can quite easily just use the one you want.

> understand why Gnome, a desktop-environment running on top of X, maybe running on top of Linux, should make it self dependent on a Linux-specific component like systemd

GNOME doesn't depend on systemd. See for instance a blogpost about it: http://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-loginds.... GNOME wants either logind (systemd) or ConsoleKit (freedesktop.org, unmaintained).

Calling people "guilty" is also not very constructive behaviour, IMO. Too emotional while you're already showing lack of knowledge about this subject.

  > Why are you so upset that people are using the avenue they have available 
  > to make their opinion known? The Linux community has far outgrown the days
  > where it was a developer only playground, so your proposed ideas of just 
  > write some code to solve everything is ridiculous.

The author has the ability to write code. So his suggestion is relevant. But instead of writing code, he's writing highly opinionated "articles" full of claims that distort what is really going on. Opinions stated as facts, suggesting things by the way things are written, etc.

That'll just get you nowhere. Constructive but harsh articles are good. This? No

"If you don't like it, write something yourself" is a perfectly legitimate answer, and people who have a problem with that answer are basically suggesting that we should just stop everything we are doing and write something just for them, which makes them entitled princesses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com