Lennart Poettering goes to Microsoft

mer said:
For me these two quotes are the crux of my problem with systemd. It's not just an init system. The biggest problem with an init system is the dependencies. What needs to wait on what, who needs to start first, who can start at any time. Provides and Depends. Determine that correctly and it just works. Muck that up and the system boots inconsistently.
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Yeah, their dependency semantics are a mess, and they're spread over several large man pages to make things extra special nice when you're trying to troubleshoot something or write a new unit file.

mer said:
From an init point of view, I don't think systemd unit files are any better or any worse than rc run scripts
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I disagree. They managed to make something worse than shell syntax. Golf claps.
 
The important thing to note here is, M$ is focused on the cloud. The cloud is built on docker and podman containers (mostly). (Sure there are Linux and FreeBSD VMs but they're nothing compared to the vast majority of the workload out there.)

Docker and podman containers are generally built using a Linux ABI. The big players, AWS, Google, and M$ are competing for cloud dollars. M$ is investing heavily in Azure. Pottering leaving says a lot less about him and a lot more about M$ and the big fight over cloud coming over the horizon. I'm in a comfortable position to simply grab popcorn and watch. I think others who are just beginning their careers or somewhere in the middle need to seriously consider their options to maintain long term employment. (Of course there are other economic, geopolitical, and global considerations but this certainly should weigh heavily on anyone in this business.)
 
Yeah, I've got sucked in to the cloud vortex. I hate it, and it's only going to get worse with the Kubernettes crapware bearing down on us. I still enjoy most of my job, but the systems stuff I have to do now is the reason why I hang out here.
 
mer said:
Thing I hate the most about systemd is binary logging. If you have a failure to boot you get some obscure message on the console then you need to know some magic decoder ring to figure out "Oh it's trying to mount a flash drive during boot that is not connected".
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If you're unfortunate to have a unproper shutdown and the journal gets corrupted, the entire log is lost, you have to delete the journal and start over. Being there, done that.
 
Discussing this with people at $JOB on Teams, at this point in my career I can simply grab popcorn and watch but if I was any younger I'd be working on a long term employment strategy. ($EMPLOYER is offering employees AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure courses. The AWS and Google Cloud courses are not free but the Azure courses are free of charge because M$ pays for them.)
 
Jose said:
Yeah, I've got sucked in to the cloud vortex. I hate it, and it's only going to get worse with the Kubernettes crapware bearing down on us. I still enjoy most of my job, but the systems stuff I have to do now is the reason why I hang out here.
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I understand. I started out doing kernel programming on MVS (IBM mainframe operating system), professionally. I had to move to UNIX, landing here at FreeBSD, while doing other UNIX/Linux work for a living. I hated it at first because it was not the same. The things I could do in S/370 assembler are not possible in C or C++ (like branch tables of instructions -- without if-then-else or case constructs -- or manipulating registers in a creative way). I still have dreams of IBM S/370 machine instructions. But rolling with the punches is the best strategy for maintaining employment in IT. Of my 45 year career I have only been unemployed for 30 days because I choose to take a month off between jobs. A strategy of flexibility works.
 
cy@ said:
Discussing this with people at $JOB on Teams, at this point in my career I can simply grab popcorn and watch but if I was any younger I'd be working on a long term employment strategy. ($EMPLOYER is offering employees AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure courses. The AWS and Google Cloud courses are not free but the Azure courses are free of charge because M$ pays for them.)
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I got paid by the hour to go to an Azure course. I was contracting, and there was some concern at the client's org that not enough people had signed up for it so I got paid to surf the Web at some M$ learning center. The center was super posh. M$ is pulling out all the stops to win this cloud thing.
 
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A lot of people, including me, forget that the internet is now run by and controlled by the big companies. Many of the things brought up are there because the big companies need them. This fools the individual into thinking, therefore, that they must learn and use those things for their tiny company of three and their personal web site.
 
hardworkingnewbie said:
The thing is: nobody forced Debian and many other Linux distributions to move over to systemd; they actively decided to do so. Only a few, like Slackware or Gentoo refused to do so. Devuan came into existance as Debian fork due to Debian embracing systemd.
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To understand how/why Debian moved to systemd, you only need to look into the corporate affiliatons / day jobs of those who voted to switch to systemd and where the project funding comes from, as well as the project's close ties to Canonical and the many developers/maintainers being Ubuntu/Debian co developers/maintainers.

As with the Linux kernel itself Debian relies heavily on corporate sponsors.
 
cynwulf said:
As with the Linux kernel itself Debian relies heavily on corporate sponsors.
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Very true. And they are very good at bending an open-source project to their will. There is nothing really there to say that "is bad" which means it can't really be defended against. I guess the biggest influencers of FreeBSD are iXsystems and Klara. I get the feeling Netflix is a little bit smaller in terms of sway. If anything I am hoping these companies are able to block or prevent extortion from much larger vendors (unless they sell up to Microsoft like everyone seems quite happy to do recently).

Slightly related; I am a little cautious of the difference in budget of these two sites.

https://freebsdfoundation.org/
https://openbsdfoundation.org/

I just hope that the clear difference in funding that the FreeBSD foundation is receiving is responsibly distributed to things that matter to the widest spread of users rather than solely appeasing companies or being wasted on unreasonable outreach strategies to increase popularity (ultimately for monetisation).
 
The other part that contributed in pushing Ubuntu/Debian to switching to systemd, is that Gnome made systemd a hard requirement. In the end on Linux, KDE and Gnome are the big players that overwhelming is the main DE that most people use. In the end, Debian and other distros had little choice between switching to systemd(the least trouble), alienating half the users, or carrying patches that upstream won't accept and constantly break. Even Gentoo was constantly having trouble with this, and has eventually gave up.
 
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ct85711 said:
The other part that contributed in pushing Ubuntu/Debian to switching to systemd, is that Gnome made systemd a hard requirement. In the end on Linux, KDE and Gnome are the big players that overwhelming is the main DE that most people use. In the end, Debian and other distros had little choice between switching to systemd(the least trouble), alienating half the users, or carrying patches that upstream won't accept and constantly break. Even Gentoo was constantly having trouble with this, and has eventually gave up.
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Strange, Artix have the solution by 5 years already and they manage to support different inits in a rolling-release distribution. Not to mention you can rollback to arch if you want. And btw, the artix team is far smaller than debian team.
 
ct85711 said:
The other part that contributed in pushing Ubuntu/Debian to switching to systemd, is that Gnome made systemd a hard requirement. In the end on Linux, KDE and Gnome are the big players that overwhelming is the main DE that most people use.
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Indeed. I think that is why it is so important that FreeBSD defaults to no-graphical desktop in the default install. That way we will never standardize on a single desktop and be tied to its tyranny.
 
Bad choice on Debian's part. The GUI should be the absolute lowest of low priorities in a server operating system. I will never understand the obsession with making these open source systems so that any Joe off the street can use them. That is what Windows and MacOS are for.
 
There are probably books to be written supporting both viewpoints. I guess I'm a bit of a hypocrite, I like the fact that these days, X is usually automatically configured. (Linux and *BSD). I hate html mail, and miss the days when people would answer mail inline, instead of top posting to the point where, if you answer mail to a non-technical person properly, they'll write back, "You didn't answer me," because they don't look down. I guess I think it's better--to a point--that things are more accessible, but wish that I could stand over it all, saying, This accommodation is OK, but this one will turn everything into Windows and Mac. As kpedersen says, it's not based on merit. RH, not necessarily because it was the best, has, in the US at least, become the de facto standard. They decided to enable Poettering and so his way of doing things became the main way. RH becomes more and more Windows like with each iteration ,and it's not all Poettering's doing. I wonder what he'll be doing at MS, as they do spend a lot of effort on LInux, or shall we call it Poetteringux? (That was beneath me, but I'm not editing it out. I'm really immature for such an old man).
 
scottro said:
I hate html mail, and miss the days when people would answer mail inline, instead of top posting to the point where, if you answer mail to a non-technical person properly, they'll write back, "You didn't answer me," because they don't look down...
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A: Yes.
> Q: Are you sure?
>>A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
>>>Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
 
Greetings all,

since the thread has already deviated from the original topic and touched inter alia on systemd, could someone please explain in simple terms the problem with systemd?

As I understand it, and I may be wrong, it is an attempt to provide a management framework for managing daemons, processes, and scripts during both a startup and subsequent execution of Linux. The reason I do not understand is that other *NIX systems do have a similar facility, e.g., Solaris has Service Management Facility (SMF), Apple has launchd. If these OSs, especially Solaris, which was innovative, invested time and effort, surely they did not do so without reason(s) and; therefore, such a framework has utility.

Please don to turn the response into "systemd sucks" and "Poettering is na a$$". I have read those, but still to not understand what is the problem. Is it poor architecture, bad implementation?

Kindest regards,

M
 
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