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Comment by matthewmacleod | Hacker News Reader

Really bored of this nonsense at this point. Take this for example:

If you absolutely MUST run Linux, my recommendation is to minimize the interaction with the base distro as much as possible. CoreOS (when it’s finally baked and production ready) can bring you an LXC based ecosystem

Systemd is absolutely key to how CoreOS works. It's the basis for the distributed init system it provides — a major selling point.

Taking any of this blog's advice would be harmful. I'd suggest a better approach would be to accept that the majority of distributions have settled on systemd and that generally this decision has not been made by idiots. So it would be worth either understanding what their pain points are and how they can be solved with an alternative to Systemd, or to help solve the issues that are apparently in Systemd yourself.

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I agree with that specific advice (minimize the interaction with the base distro). I'm on a quest to isolate every major component of my user experience in containers (including things like browser etc.).

But not because I have anything against Systemd. I love Systemd so far.

It's hilarious that he's proposing CoreOS as an alternative, given that it's one of the most radical rethinks of a Linux distro out there.

For those with reading comprehension skills this isn't funny but rather a natural conclusion. The problem for you is that you're making assumptions about the author that you haven't verified.

The problem here isn't change, or re-thinking linux. The problem is re-inventing the wheel, and doing it poorly.

CoreOS uses systemd, but it's not a distribution in the classic sense -- rather it's a platform for containers. The narrow use-case for systemd here removes some (most? all?) of the concerns.

ah so you're saying that systemd is flexible because it was chosen for a distro where it has very limited remit? so you mean it wasn't some horrible octopus which tried to suck all of coreos into it before they rejected its entanglements?

Many large decisions have been made by idiots, badly. Blindly accepting consensus as a rational choice without a counterpoint had caused many years of suffering for the human race from wars to bad science to bad medicine.

Whilst I agree that the blog is probably hocum, there's nothing wrong with critical thinking.

I completely agree – but critical thinking involves something along the lines of "here are the things that I think are wrong, this is why I think they're wrong, this is how I think they could be solved."

The answer "let's throw everything out" isn't that useful; likewise, dismissing the considered opinion of lots of people who have been doing this sort of thing for a while needs to be done with some rationality. An empty, bandwagon-jumping appeal like this adds little value and just helps spread more misinformation.

Actually the answer is to be slightly more conservative with the approach. No one has to pick up systemd now for example. Leave it a year and see where it is. The technical merits will be obvious and the technical problems will also be.

Moving all the chess pieces at once, which is what is happening is not productive, professional or a sign of experience.

That's not the case though – systemd has been enabled by default by Fedora for three and a half years or so, and has been steadily adopted since then by most other major distros. Not everybody is moving at once, so why would waiting a year make any difference?

This bugzilla query against RHEL 7.0 systemd says otherwise:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_s...

A lot of the bug descriptions are quite scarily bad when you consider them in context such as "various loginctl commands not working" etc.

So what you mean is "Systemd still has serious bugs," which is nothing to do with whether or not everybody is moving at once.

That's the point – if systemd has important bugs they should be fixed. Clearly, the groups responsible for the decision have concluded that the tradeoff is worth it, and have accepted that a large, fundamental change will have issues. That's fine – there are a bunch of other distress you can use that have not adopted systemd, which you can use in the meantime if you disagree.

The two are related.

People are shipping production operating systems with systemd that is chock full of bugs.

An all consuming tentacle monster like systemd is fine if you want to dogfood it but to throw at paying customers and/or supporters of your distribution is a little off key.

Linux developers are generally very smart people in my experience. It's consensus of many experienced and smart people that makes it significant.

They are individually I agree, but as a group of people it's not such a good story. It's quite dysfunctional from what I've seen.

What does this comment even mean? What's wrong with them as a group?

To borrow a quote from a popular movie:

    A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.

I think this is trying to say you are as strong as the weakest link? Maybe it's trying to say something about group think.

I mean all these movie quotes are all cool sounding but are quite shallow.

Answer: Yes.

Just because some thought has to go into the interpretation does't make it shallow.

A large group is often dumber than its weakest link.

I can;t comment specifically on the Linux group, but in general you are absolutely correct. As a consultant, I see it daily in my practice. When I talk to people individually, they seem smart/knowledgeable, but as a group, they often make not-so-smart decisions.

That's exactly my point. It's not limited to the Linux core team. We divide into working groups of 2-3 people max to avoid this. Works quite well.

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