8 ms·

Systemd-free Devuan announces its first stable release candidate 'Jessie' 1.0.0

51 points by MilnerRoute 10y ago

faragon 10y ago
Systemd has cool things, but it is a monster. I'm glad this alternative exists.
- lomnakkus 10y ago
  Are you going to use it? Just curious.
  - faragon 10y ago
    I'll give a try.
  - aerique 10y ago
    I've been using Void Linux for a couple of weeks now on my new machine at work and I've been enjoying it a lot. It brings a BSD'ish elegance to Linux. No issues hardware-wise either so far: - Intel Core i7-7700K - MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G - Samsung 960 EVO 1TB (M.2, NVME)
    - lomnakkus 10y ago
      Did you expect hardware issues? AFAIK that's all handled by the kernel.
      - aerique 10y ago
        I had expected more issues getting the official Nvidia drivers to work but all it took was a package install and a reboot.
        lomnakkus 10y ago
        Ah, right, Nvidia is always... interesting.
    - slau 10y ago
      I've been a Void user for a year and some months now. It's a great system. Xbps (the package manager) is so ridiculously fast, it puts zypper, apt and dnf to shame. The base system is extremely light and nimble. Getting FDE up and running was a breeze, even with the fairly barebones installer, and it being a rolling release makes it very nice as well. It's maybe a bit too bleeding edge to run on servers, but as a workstation distribution, I can't fault it. Disclaimer: I'm donating monthly to the project, and am currently trying to contribute a few servers to the build farm, so I'm probably very biased.
      - mdekkers 10y ago
        this looks interesting. I have been looking to replace ubuntu as my weapon of choice for servers for some time now. I am hesitant of the rolling release idea though. I like the idea that my servers remain in a specific state, but remain up to date with security patches, and don't like the idea of spending time fixing update issues. How is that handled in Void?
  - tgragnato 10y ago
    Have been using it for more than a year... Excluding the absence of systemd it's an exact copy of Debian. The single issue I have had so far, is that backports weren't marked as non-automatic: easily solved with a manual pin-priority rule. I mailed them about it, so it could be solved now.
jwildeboer 10y ago
Oh? Took em that long?
- duskwuff 10y ago
  And why did they have to call it "Jessie"? That's the code name Debian used for their 8.0 release in 2015. Come on... if you're going to fork a distribution, use different release names.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - tgragnato 10y ago
    > https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/devuan-codenames https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/devuan-co... They call Jessie a "Matching release", I guess the intention is to stress the fact that you can safely migrate from Debian without a reinstall.
    - lomnakkus 10y ago
      They missed an opportunity there. Should have been "jessie-j". ... but I actually agree with duskwuff. It's hugely confusing and possibly even disingenuous to call it "jessie".
      - dane-pgp 10y ago
        Devuan "jessie" is designed to match Debian "jessie" as much as possible, and is a one-off copying of the release name in order to mark the branching point in the histories of the two distros as they diverge slightly over time. As the release announcement says: "Devuan is the Debian that was and could have been. Our goal is to provide a viable and sustainable alternative. It is a new path, nurtured with your help and support." so Devuan could be considered the true inheritor of the "jessie" name, and of the name "Debian", for that matter, although keeping that would obviously be too confusing.
INTPenis 10y ago
Actual announcement: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-042017 https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-... Reminds me of dragonfly bsd. Anyone still use that? I stayed on 4.x until 6.x came out and later Scott Long actually admitted that 5.x was a bad release. So Devuan now wants to continue Debian with tons of shell scripts to maintain while most other major distros move to systemd. That means package maintainers are moving to systemd. So Devuan will have to maintain separate init scripts for their distro mostly on their own. I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  "I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?" 27 lines is horribly optimistic. Complex services like Apache, MySQL, etc. could have initscripts hundreds of lines long, plus the library of support scripts that most distros ship to make the initscripts shorter and more manageable. Most initscripts are like 50%, or more, boilerplate that's the same across all services, but, it's still a pain in the ass to maintain them. I will not miss initscripts, even if I might have some occasional complaints about systemd.
  - JdeBP 10y ago
    As I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169188 , there's a discussion of MySQL on the systemd-devel mailing list right now. Clearly some people in that discussion are not familiar with MySQL. Clearly some of the people in this discussion are not familiar with MySQL either. To help combat this ignorance, here are some actual systemd units: * https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/10.1/support-files/mariadb%40.service.in https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/10.1/support-files/ma... -- MariaDB's official systemd service unit, 173 lines long * https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/scripts/systemd/mysqld.service.in https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/scripts/syste... -- MySQL's official systemd service unit, 60 lines long * https://github.com/percona/percona-server/blob/5.7/scripts/systemd/mysqld.service.in https://github.com/percona/percona-server/blob/5.7/scripts/s... -- Percona's official systemd service unit, 61 lines long * https://sources.debian.net/src/apache2/2.4.25-3/debian/apache2.service/ https://sources.debian.net/src/apache2/2.4.25-3/debian/apach... -- Debian's third party systemd service unit for Apache2, 15 lines long So these figures that people are pulling out of thin air are erroneous by anywhere from half the actual length to an order of magnitude too small. And, ironically, the Apache systemd service unit is using a System 5 rc shell script under the covers to do all of the work. The apachectl program is in fact a System 5 rc script from 1997, complete with start/stop/restart/status verbs.
e12e 10y ago
Previous thread on link to actual announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14173666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14173666
dijit 10y ago
I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though. Sidenote- So far this is not necessary, debian still has pluggable init systems as long as you don't add something which hard depends on systemd (like gnome) I have done this one 5 of my own servers used for various things (including virtualhost/docker host) and it hasn't been an issue for over a year now. http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_syst...
- jnbiche 10y ago
  > I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though. It's not just debian/ubuntu/rhel, almost everyone has moved to systemd, even Arch Linux and Gentoo. As much as I agree with the ideas behind Devuan, knowing and understanding all the intricacies of systemd is now required knowledge for anyone doing Linux-based software development or devops. After putting it off for a while, I've moved on and have learned systemd. It's not the way I would have liked for the Linux ecosystem to have moved (I thought upstart was a decent base to build on), but I'm clearly in the minority here. What's bothering most at this point are the binary log formats. But that changes from week to week. But it's here to stay, so I'm getting used to it.
  - reddytowns 10y ago
    While Gentoo supports systemd, by default it will still use init scripts.
    - jnbiche 10y ago
      > While Gentoo supports systemd, by default it will still use init scripts. It's my understanding that notwithstanding the current accomodations, systemd is the future for Gentoo, is that incorrect? I'm not a Gentoo user, just what I've heard from people who are.
yladiz 10y ago
As someone out of the loop with any of this (I've always just been content with using Debian as-is, and I haven't done much work with systemd), can someone explain why systemd is as bad as it seems to be? As in, why is it so bad that an entire major Linux distro was forked and created with the seemingly sole purpose of removing this program?
- merk_ 10y ago
  I don't have issues with systemd myself, but from what I read in similar threads the problems come down to systemd being different from sysv init. Changing old init scripts to systemd scripts is un-asked for work for many. And it is made by a polarising figure, which leads to emotional refusal.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  This ground is covered in the duplicate Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167935
- anonbanker 10y ago
  > why do people hate it? Poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, half-baked ideas, legendary feature creep that presents a corollary to Zawinsky's Law, awful developers, clear political agendas in the devteam, Embrace-Extend-Extinguish tactics, against the basic UNIX concept of "many small apps that do one thing and do it well", an informal adoption of Windows service/logging techniques, political lobbying by the developers, and a literal RPC-based backdoor into the enforceability of the GPL.
  - mdekkers 10y ago
    a literal RPC-based backdoor into the enforceability of the GPL Oh, I didn't hear that one before - any more info?
    - ilwtekuysd 10y ago
      Some of the 4chan people trolling about systemd try to make people believe that communicating over tcp sockets, pipes or dbus with other processes is a "backdoor" around the GPL. Because a non-free program could talk to a GPL progam. Shocking!

51 points by MilnerRoute 10y ago

faragon 10y ago

Systemd has cool things, but it is a monster. I'm glad this alternative exists.

lomnakkus 10y ago
Are you going to use it? Just curious.
- faragon 10y ago
  I'll give a try.
- aerique 10y ago
  I've been using Void Linux for a couple of weeks now on my new machine at work and I've been enjoying it a lot. It brings a BSD'ish elegance to Linux. No issues hardware-wise either so far: - Intel Core i7-7700K - MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 WINDFORCE OC 6G - Samsung 960 EVO 1TB (M.2, NVME)
  - lomnakkus 10y ago
    Did you expect hardware issues? AFAIK that's all handled by the kernel.
    - aerique 10y ago
      I had expected more issues getting the official Nvidia drivers to work but all it took was a package install and a reboot.
      - lomnakkus 10y ago
        Ah, right, Nvidia is always... interesting.
  - slau 10y ago
    I've been a Void user for a year and some months now. It's a great system. Xbps (the package manager) is so ridiculously fast, it puts zypper, apt and dnf to shame. The base system is extremely light and nimble. Getting FDE up and running was a breeze, even with the fairly barebones installer, and it being a rolling release makes it very nice as well. It's maybe a bit too bleeding edge to run on servers, but as a workstation distribution, I can't fault it. Disclaimer: I'm donating monthly to the project, and am currently trying to contribute a few servers to the build farm, so I'm probably very biased.
    - mdekkers 10y ago
      this looks interesting. I have been looking to replace ubuntu as my weapon of choice for servers for some time now. I am hesitant of the rolling release idea though. I like the idea that my servers remain in a specific state, but remain up to date with security patches, and don't like the idea of spending time fixing update issues. How is that handled in Void?
- tgragnato 10y ago
  Have been using it for more than a year... Excluding the absence of systemd it's an exact copy of Debian. The single issue I have had so far, is that backports weren't marked as non-automatic: easily solved with a manual pin-priority rule. I mailed them about it, so it could be solved now.

jwildeboer 10y ago

Oh? Took em that long?

duskwuff 10y ago
And why did they have to call it "Jessie"? That's the code name Debian used for their 8.0 release in 2015. Come on... if you're going to fork a distribution, use different release names.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tgragnato 10y ago
  > https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/devuan-codenames https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/devuan-co... They call Jessie a "Matching release", I guess the intention is to stress the fact that you can safely migrate from Debian without a reinstall.
  - lomnakkus 10y ago
    They missed an opportunity there. Should have been "jessie-j". ... but I actually agree with duskwuff. It's hugely confusing and possibly even disingenuous to call it "jessie".
    - dane-pgp 10y ago
      Devuan "jessie" is designed to match Debian "jessie" as much as possible, and is a one-off copying of the release name in order to mark the branching point in the histories of the two distros as they diverge slightly over time. As the release announcement says: "Devuan is the Debian that was and could have been. Our goal is to provide a viable and sustainable alternative. It is a new path, nurtured with your help and support." so Devuan could be considered the true inheritor of the "jessie" name, and of the name "Debian", for that matter, although keeping that would obviously be too confusing.

INTPenis 10y ago

Actual announcement: https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-042017 https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/stable-candidate-announce-... Reminds me of dragonfly bsd. Anyone still use that? I stayed on 4.x until 6.x came out and later Scott Long actually admitted that 5.x was a bad release. So Devuan now wants to continue Debian with tons of shell scripts to maintain while most other major distros move to systemd. That means package maintainers are moving to systemd. So Devuan will have to maintain separate init scripts for their distro mostly on their own. I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?

SwellJoe 10y ago
"I mean who in their right mind would write a 27 line init script when they could write a 7 line systemd unit?" 27 lines is horribly optimistic. Complex services like Apache, MySQL, etc. could have initscripts hundreds of lines long, plus the library of support scripts that most distros ship to make the initscripts shorter and more manageable. Most initscripts are like 50%, or more, boilerplate that's the same across all services, but, it's still a pain in the ass to maintain them. I will not miss initscripts, even if I might have some occasional complaints about systemd.
- JdeBP 10y ago
  As I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14169188 , there's a discussion of MySQL on the systemd-devel mailing list right now. Clearly some people in that discussion are not familiar with MySQL. Clearly some of the people in this discussion are not familiar with MySQL either. To help combat this ignorance, here are some actual systemd units: * https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/10.1/support-files/mariadb%40.service.in https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/10.1/support-files/ma... -- MariaDB's official systemd service unit, 173 lines long * https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/scripts/systemd/mysqld.service.in https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/scripts/syste... -- MySQL's official systemd service unit, 60 lines long * https://github.com/percona/percona-server/blob/5.7/scripts/systemd/mysqld.service.in https://github.com/percona/percona-server/blob/5.7/scripts/s... -- Percona's official systemd service unit, 61 lines long * https://sources.debian.net/src/apache2/2.4.25-3/debian/apache2.service/ https://sources.debian.net/src/apache2/2.4.25-3/debian/apach... -- Debian's third party systemd service unit for Apache2, 15 lines long So these figures that people are pulling out of thin air are erroneous by anywhere from half the actual length to an order of magnitude too small. And, ironically, the Apache systemd service unit is using a System 5 rc shell script under the covers to do all of the work. The apachectl program is in fact a System 5 rc script from 1997, complete with start/stop/restart/status verbs.

e12e 10y ago

Previous thread on link to actual announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14173666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14173666

dijit 10y ago

I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though. Sidenote- So far this is not necessary, debian still has pluggable init systems as long as you don't add something which hard depends on systemd (like gnome) I have done this one 5 of my own servers used for various things (including virtualhost/docker host) and it hasn't been an issue for over a year now. http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_systemd_from_a_Debian_jessie/sid_installation http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/How_to_remove_syst...

jnbiche 10y ago
> I'm glad the project exists and I hope it's stable enough to be adopted by companies in the future - my fear is that debian/rhel are entrenched now though. It's not just debian/ubuntu/rhel, almost everyone has moved to systemd, even Arch Linux and Gentoo. As much as I agree with the ideas behind Devuan, knowing and understanding all the intricacies of systemd is now required knowledge for anyone doing Linux-based software development or devops. After putting it off for a while, I've moved on and have learned systemd. It's not the way I would have liked for the Linux ecosystem to have moved (I thought upstart was a decent base to build on), but I'm clearly in the minority here. What's bothering most at this point are the binary log formats. But that changes from week to week. But it's here to stay, so I'm getting used to it.
- reddytowns 10y ago
  While Gentoo supports systemd, by default it will still use init scripts.
  - jnbiche 10y ago
    > While Gentoo supports systemd, by default it will still use init scripts. It's my understanding that notwithstanding the current accomodations, systemd is the future for Gentoo, is that incorrect? I'm not a Gentoo user, just what I've heard from people who are.

yladiz 10y ago

As someone out of the loop with any of this (I've always just been content with using Debian as-is, and I haven't done much work with systemd), can someone explain why systemd is as bad as it seems to be? As in, why is it so bad that an entire major Linux distro was forked and created with the seemingly sole purpose of removing this program?

merk_ 10y ago
I don't have issues with systemd myself, but from what I read in similar threads the problems come down to systemd being different from sysv init. Changing old init scripts to systemd scripts is un-asked for work for many. And it is made by a polarising figure, which leads to emotional refusal.
JdeBP 10y ago
This ground is covered in the duplicate Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167935
anonbanker 10y ago
> why do people hate it? Poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, half-baked ideas, legendary feature creep that presents a corollary to Zawinsky's Law, awful developers, clear political agendas in the devteam, Embrace-Extend-Extinguish tactics, against the basic UNIX concept of "many small apps that do one thing and do it well", an informal adoption of Windows service/logging techniques, political lobbying by the developers, and a literal RPC-based backdoor into the enforceability of the GPL.
- mdekkers 10y ago
  a literal RPC-based backdoor into the enforceability of the GPL Oh, I didn't hear that one before - any more info?
  - ilwtekuysd 10y ago
    Some of the 4chan people trolling about systemd try to make people believe that communicating over tcp sockets, pipes or dbus with other processes is a "backdoor" around the GPL. Because a non-free program could talk to a GPL progam. Shocking!