5 ms·

Something odd is going on with FOSS scene in general, for some time. I really don't like seeing great apps like gedit getting unmaintained. Crap like systemd g

Something odd is going on with FOSS scene in general, for some time. I really don't like seeing great apps like gedit getting unmaintained. Crap like systemd gets ton of corporate funding, versus tens of really beautiful apps getting slowly neglected. Not a good direction in general.

Eridrus 9y ago
Corporate focus is almost certainly on Linux on servers rather than Linux desktops.
- binaryapparatus 9y ago
  That is common knowledge but I am no so sure it is entirely true. Red Hat is very interested in GNOME, much more than say in MariaDB.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Red Hat was one of the first Linux related companies to officially state that they were moving away from consumer market and focus on enterprise customers, as there is no money to be made trying to sell FOSS software to consumers.
- frik 9y ago
  Systemd is not good. It tries to solve too many things and tries to extend and replace more and more core functionality. So many security holes. In a year or two, we will look back and say it was a very bad timeframe and several bad decisions. Unfortunately both Debian and Redhat switched to systemd, meaning all distros based on them as well. Only a few distros are left, let's hope some sane people revert that hype.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    I've got no 'skin in the game' as I don't use Linux, but ask yourself, if systemd is so bad, why is it so popular amongst distro maintainers? There must be some things its doing right. Even if you don't like systemd it's still a good idea to understand those that do, if nothing else it'll make you more effective in a debate about it.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Bundling. Gnome > logind > systemd. Yeah yeah, Gnome can work without logind. But doing so is not easy and require ongoing patches as new versions of Gnome rolls out. And Gnome is THE gorilla in the Linux DE world.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        Systemd was popular with distro maintainers before GNOME started to be built around it. What was responsible for that initial surge of popularity (amongst distro maintainers)?
  - merb 9y ago
    systemd, i.e the init system is quite good. I mean compared to sysvinit and upsart it's a pleasure to write unit files. they are way more understood than any sysvinit script. I even think that just the declarative language is probably one of the best. it is better than windows services, where one need to use some kind of installer/wrapper that exactly uses what windows provides (and is unflexible in configuration), than upstart the syntax was a little bit wierd and sysvinit... well if you weren't a bash scripter it was really really hard to write a good init script. i also like journald, logging is a pleasure now, even to syslog, and other syslog servers. well what I don't get is timedatectl i.e systemd-timesync and many more. they are mostly not needed for init itself and already had a really really good counterpart.
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    As a sysadmin, I like systemd. The built-in service watchdog is really nice, and I like being able to override service file options without replacing the service entirely. I haven't seen many vulnerabilities in the PID 1 part of systemd that concerned me. The last vuln I recall was the UID parsing issue, which isn't really exploitable. The systemd-resolved vuln was pretty bad, but that's an optional component that I've never used anyway. (It's not used by default on Debian.)
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Crazy thing is that the starting point for systemd makes more sense on desktops than servers, unless one is redefining servers as cloud loads of containers rather than something sitting in a rack somewhere doing work (not to say that is not the ultimate destinies for containers as well, but there is a layer of isolation involved that lead container "admins" to not really consider the hardware side of things). Hell, it seems that only as systemd people started talking up nspawn as a way to do containers did the business side sit up and take notice. Before then it was mostly considered a bikesheding runaround between nerds.
CannisterFlux 9y ago
You've been downvoted for your tone - systemd isn't that bad, even if it did want to constantly kill my tmux server session ::shakes-fist:: - but I think your initial thoughts are spot on. I've often thought the same thing. Desktop Linux seems stale or abandoned all over the place. There are a lot of updates in some corners - desktop environments like Mate and Budgie and the developer side of things like git, cmake, vim, GCC, Clang... they all get regular updates. But overall I feel like 10 years ago things were more exciting and would change all the time with new features and functionality. I remember being really excited to install the next 6-month release of Ubuntu. Now I run Arch and the only updates I seem to see are to python-setuptools. Maybe it's the overall slowing down of the PC market. The people who should have grown into maintaining all this are doing something else. Like when the Mule messed up the Seldon Plan, smart phones have wrecked the Free Software plan. Everyone is too busy looking at Instagram or playing Candy Crush to write Free Software nowadays.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Where people see stale and abandonment, i see maturity. As i grow older i learn the value of mature software. Software that knows its place in the grander scheme of things. That do its job quietly and reliably, with clear information when something goes wrong. Yes, for a young newcomer said software may look boring, many not be utilizing their latest GPU to draw rectangles on screen, but said software has been doing what it has been doing reliably for a decade or more. Damn it, just look at systemd-resolved. It keeps pulling the trigger on footgun after footgun because someone decided that he could do DNS better than existing, battle tested, software, and lumped it in with the rest of the systemd shoggoth for good measure. What seems to happen with most of these projects is that the initial developer gets discouraged when he bumps into the 10% of remaining functionality of what he is replacing. The 10% that is hard, and that has lead to the large amount of gnarly code in the old and "stale" project he was gunning to replace in a caffeine fueled weekend. But sadly this threadmill that FOSS is saddled with will continue to spin, because as a culture software development has come to value LOCS pr hour over reliability. And we keep punting the old guard into middle management, and replace them with youngers that hammers out said LOCS rather than stop and consider what the old code is actually doing.
- 9y ago
CJefferson 9y ago
The problem with things like gedit is that the type of people who can maintain them almost certainly don't use them, so you don't get personal benefit from the maintence.

Eridrus 9y ago

Corporate focus is almost certainly on Linux on servers rather than Linux desktops.

binaryapparatus 9y ago
That is common knowledge but I am no so sure it is entirely true. Red Hat is very interested in GNOME, much more than say in MariaDB.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Red Hat was one of the first Linux related companies to officially state that they were moving away from consumer market and focus on enterprise customers, as there is no money to be made trying to sell FOSS software to consumers.
frik 9y ago
Systemd is not good. It tries to solve too many things and tries to extend and replace more and more core functionality. So many security holes. In a year or two, we will look back and say it was a very bad timeframe and several bad decisions. Unfortunately both Debian and Redhat switched to systemd, meaning all distros based on them as well. Only a few distros are left, let's hope some sane people revert that hype.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I've got no 'skin in the game' as I don't use Linux, but ask yourself, if systemd is so bad, why is it so popular amongst distro maintainers? There must be some things its doing right. Even if you don't like systemd it's still a good idea to understand those that do, if nothing else it'll make you more effective in a debate about it.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Bundling. Gnome > logind > systemd. Yeah yeah, Gnome can work without logind. But doing so is not easy and require ongoing patches as new versions of Gnome rolls out. And Gnome is THE gorilla in the Linux DE world.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      Systemd was popular with distro maintainers before GNOME started to be built around it. What was responsible for that initial surge of popularity (amongst distro maintainers)?
- merb 9y ago
  systemd, i.e the init system is quite good. I mean compared to sysvinit and upsart it's a pleasure to write unit files. they are way more understood than any sysvinit script. I even think that just the declarative language is probably one of the best. it is better than windows services, where one need to use some kind of installer/wrapper that exactly uses what windows provides (and is unflexible in configuration), than upstart the syntax was a little bit wierd and sysvinit... well if you weren't a bash scripter it was really really hard to write a good init script. i also like journald, logging is a pleasure now, even to syslog, and other syslog servers. well what I don't get is timedatectl i.e systemd-timesync and many more. they are mostly not needed for init itself and already had a really really good counterpart.
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  As a sysadmin, I like systemd. The built-in service watchdog is really nice, and I like being able to override service file options without replacing the service entirely. I haven't seen many vulnerabilities in the PID 1 part of systemd that concerned me. The last vuln I recall was the UID parsing issue, which isn't really exploitable. The systemd-resolved vuln was pretty bad, but that's an optional component that I've never used anyway. (It's not used by default on Debian.)
digi_owl 9y ago
Crazy thing is that the starting point for systemd makes more sense on desktops than servers, unless one is redefining servers as cloud loads of containers rather than something sitting in a rack somewhere doing work (not to say that is not the ultimate destinies for containers as well, but there is a layer of isolation involved that lead container "admins" to not really consider the hardware side of things). Hell, it seems that only as systemd people started talking up nspawn as a way to do containers did the business side sit up and take notice. Before then it was mostly considered a bikesheding runaround between nerds.

CannisterFlux 9y ago

You've been downvoted for your tone - systemd isn't that bad, even if it did want to constantly kill my tmux server session ::shakes-fist:: - but I think your initial thoughts are spot on. I've often thought the same thing. Desktop Linux seems stale or abandoned all over the place. There are a lot of updates in some corners - desktop environments like Mate and Budgie and the developer side of things like git, cmake, vim, GCC, Clang... they all get regular updates. But overall I feel like 10 years ago things were more exciting and would change all the time with new features and functionality. I remember being really excited to install the next 6-month release of Ubuntu. Now I run Arch and the only updates I seem to see are to python-setuptools. Maybe it's the overall slowing down of the PC market. The people who should have grown into maintaining all this are doing something else. Like when the Mule messed up the Seldon Plan, smart phones have wrecked the Free Software plan. Everyone is too busy looking at Instagram or playing Candy Crush to write Free Software nowadays.

digi_owl 9y ago
Where people see stale and abandonment, i see maturity. As i grow older i learn the value of mature software. Software that knows its place in the grander scheme of things. That do its job quietly and reliably, with clear information when something goes wrong. Yes, for a young newcomer said software may look boring, many not be utilizing their latest GPU to draw rectangles on screen, but said software has been doing what it has been doing reliably for a decade or more. Damn it, just look at systemd-resolved. It keeps pulling the trigger on footgun after footgun because someone decided that he could do DNS better than existing, battle tested, software, and lumped it in with the rest of the systemd shoggoth for good measure. What seems to happen with most of these projects is that the initial developer gets discouraged when he bumps into the 10% of remaining functionality of what he is replacing. The 10% that is hard, and that has lead to the large amount of gnarly code in the old and "stale" project he was gunning to replace in a caffeine fueled weekend. But sadly this threadmill that FOSS is saddled with will continue to spin, because as a culture software development has come to value LOCS pr hour over reliability. And we keep punting the old guard into middle management, and replace them with youngers that hammers out said LOCS rather than stop and consider what the old code is actually doing.
9y ago

CJefferson 9y ago

The problem with things like gedit is that the type of people who can maintain them almost certainly don't use them, so you don't get personal benefit from the maintence.