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>XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. >An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart”[1] tries to install his malicious init system on v

• microcolonel 7y ago
  For clarity, Lennart Poettering is an extremely prolific guy that people somehow love to hate. At the end of the day, his critics either use his software begrudgingly, or use somebody else's to their own detriment, just to spite him. I take some time every year to thank Lennart for systemd and PulseAudio; I remember when the grass was parched brown on my side, green has been a welcome change!
  • coribuci 7y ago
    For clarity, Bill Gates is also a very prolific guy that people love to hate. I take some time every day to curse both of them for the amount of dispair that they cause with their offsprings.
    • vnorilo 7y ago
      I've always wondered about this sentiment about software you are free to use or not. Or is it the fact that a majority of others, or those that have the power, choose for you by making life harder if you deviate? Shouldn't you curse those people, instead of the creators of the software?
      • ejefz 7y ago
        Red Hat controls both gnome and systemd. They made systemd a hard dependency for gnome. That's the only reason systemd "won".
        • scrollaway 7y ago
          Seeing as gnome is/was nowhere near the top desktop environment, ubuntu had its own version of systemd at the time, and systemd had already garnered a huge amount of support across other distributions … no, it's not "the only reason" systemd won. systemd won on merits of practicality, because while the vocal minority hates some of the things it does (such as providing a bundled ecosystem of administrative software that all works together), it's also a big reason why it's popular across people who just want their computer to work.
      • BubRoss 7y ago
        A lot of software can feel like a bait and switch. To keep compatibility you have to use windows, but the quality goes up and down. Bundled IE, windows ME, then XP which people loved, then Vista, then windows 7 which people loved again, then windows 10. There isn't nearly as much freedom of choice when it is an all or nothing game and things are changing underneath you. Windows 10 reverts your settings after doing forced updates. It forces Cortana to be on and Microsoft has been found to have employees listening in on voice commands. This doesn't apply to bill gates any more, but it does illustrate why people end up using software they hate.
        • vnorilo 7y ago
          Bait and switch is a good reason for animosity, agreed.
        • Izkata 7y ago
          Also, Windows 8 (so bad you forgot it existed?)
  • raverbashing 7y ago
    I simply used to disable PulseAudio in favour of Alsa until it started working properly Out of the Box in a distro (which took, what, 3, 4, years?) Not saying it wasn't needed, but it was anything but stable or efficient at the beginning (and given said person's behaviour in dealing with bugs and vulnerabilities in systemd, it is not hard to see why)
    • nguoi 7y ago
      Well Fedora users are the beta testers, right?
      • zlynx 7y ago
        And somehow Fedora always seemed to do systemd and pulseaudio correctly. It's Debian and Ubuntu who somehow manage to make it into garbage. Is it intentional? Is it just because they use ancient, old versions? If indeed they want to be "stable" you'd think they'd update to incorporate the bug fixes.
    • microcolonel 7y ago
      > SystemD For those not attuned, writing systemd as "SystemD" is a dogwhistle which comes from a time when Lennart specified that it wasn't meant to be capitalized, and this crowd went the other way just to spite him. Top bantz here, kids.
  • craigsmansion 7y ago
    Don't forget to thank him for `avahi' too. Avahi is a fun whack-a-mole game where your computer hides the network connection. You win the game by remembering to kill processes and setting up stuff manually, like most games produced by LP studios. edit: Other popular games include: SystemD: hack your way through a blob of intractability. Try it on Nightmare mode, where you're only given access to a empty bootscreen, for a real challenge. Pulseaudio: Experience the sound of no hands clapping, in a forest where trees are falling with no one there to witness it. Also, the forest is on fire!
    • scrollaway 7y ago
      Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work. It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying "the software's broken it sucks!" like this is the Best Buy tech support line. I mean, seriously, if you're smart enough to "kill processes and [set] up stuff manually", you're smart enough to disable/remove software you don't like all on your own like a grown adult.
      • randolando 7y ago
        The problem is the fundamental shift away from the long accepted design philosophy of software doing one thing and doing it well. This means "grown adults" can't uninstall the software components that they like, because they aren't individual components anymore. Systemd would probably not be hated on as much if it was only a "better" init. But instead it is an opaque and centralized system that is replacing a growing list of tooling ( init, ntp, cron, syslog, network config, to name a few)
        • pjmlp 7y ago
          You mean the myth of the UNIX way, never followed upon commercial UNIXes and somehow became a cargo cult on FOSS community only thank to a book of UNIX idols?
  • geggam 7y ago
    who happened to singlehandedly convince more people to switch to BSD than anyone ever before him
  • toast0 7y ago
    PulseAudio and systemd and avahi and probably other things he's been involved in solve problems I don't have, in intrusive ways, poorly and with much churn. It's not unreasonable to loathe someone who makes me wonder what exciting thing is going to break next in an exciting new way if i dare to update my system.
    • CameronNemo 7y ago
      Not to mention Lennart has abandoned both PA and Avahi.
  • arendtio 7y ago
    Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid. So I can understand that there were quite a few people angry at him and the way he was doing things. In addition, he is someone who can dish out to others too (I remember a (badly prepared) talk he attended and completely sabotaged by asking questions and make the speaker look like a total idiot). So yes, he is prolific, his software does great things and his critics were definitely going too far, but he isn't completely innocent in regard to what happened.
    • acdha 7y ago
      > Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid. Think about your second sentence a bit, and why it's true: major Linux distributions adopted systemd. Did they do that because it really caused a bunch of trouble or because a deliberative review process showed that it solved a number of hard problems? A small percentage of people having very loud emotional reactions doesn't mean that it actually caused large numbers of problems and at least in the enterprise space it's been really useful for cleaning up long-running reliability and security problems by removing thousands of lines of SysV kludge and manual work recovering from problems.
      • mongol 7y ago
        i think Lennart should be commended. Certain "projects" have such breadth in scope that they seem undermountable because they require an entire ecosystem to follow. Init was one of these. He managed to change it, it hurt, but it was for the better, all things considered.
        • ncmncm 7y ago
          It would be better if it did not eat 100MB, though. It is hard for me to imagine what it could be doing with so much RAM.
      • arendtio 7y ago
        I have thought about it and I did so for years. I know that those projects solved hard issues and I also know that there are many people who would not have been able to complete those projects successfully. In fact, in 2011 I considered holding a presentation about how great systemd is. But my point is a different one: If you manage such a project, you have to manage the change. And when you know that there are people who disagree with you on a fundamental level, it doesn't help driving your followers away by releasing breaking changes on a regular basis. As an end-user, I remember for PulseAudio and systemd at least one instance where I had built something with it and after an update, it didn't work anymore and I had to adapt it. So I don't believe that there was just a 'small percentage of people having very loud emotional reactions'. Instead, I think it was more like everybody had some problems adapting to systemd, but some saw the benefits it came with and others fought it as hard as they could (for various reasons). So the problem isn't what Lennart had done (which is great), but how he got there. And I think Lennart would be happier today if he didn't do it the way he did.
  • Sammi 7y ago
    Relevant talk: The Tragedy of systemd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo "systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. As a FreeBSD developer I decided I wanted to know why. I delved into the history of bootstrap systems, and even the history of UNIX and other contemporary operating systems, to try and work out why something like systemd was seem as necessary, if not desirable. I also tried to work out why so many people found it so upsetting, annoying, or otherwise rage-inducing. Join me on a journey through the bootstrap process, the history of init, the reasons why change can be scary, and the discovery of a part of your OS you may not even know existed."
    • liability 7y ago
      I've been using SystemD with little complaint since around 2011 or so when Fedora switched. I don't count myself among the systems haters, but that talk is hot garbage. It's just a big ad hominem that boils down to "people just hate change." But that lacks explanatory power. Lots of things change and don't receive backlash, even in the desktop Linux domain. Plenty of people are skeptical of Wayland for instance, but the conversations tend to stay relatively cool-headed. I think there are two things going on; the first and most significant is that most Linux desktop users (not sys admins or packagers, just desktop users) never had to know what a sysv init system was and never fucked with it, but then their distro switched, something broke (maybe their packagers' fault, maybe not!), they googled the problem and at the end of that Google dive they found out the answer involved a component they were previously unaware of, making itself known to them in a way that caused them hassle. Any upsides were washed out by this initial first bad experience. For me, I was using Fedora at the time so I knew I was getting bleeding edge shit and might get cut. That was exciting for me. It was my hobby, so I liked systemd. But that didn't blind me to the wants and desires of more typical desktop users who wanted the "just werks" experience. (The other factor is that Lennart has bad social skills and it seems to rub off on the people he works with. Some might argue that the critics started it, but I don't care who started it. Stop jabbing your little sister or I'm turning this car around!)
  • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    After his foolish use of alloca() in systemd was revealed, it's clear that the derision is well deserved. One would think that after cutting his teeth on PulseAudio he'd have learned how to write safe, system level C.
    • Avamander 7y ago
      Please, it's not like any single other component in Linux desktop is somehow more secure. If anything, most stuff on Linux desktops are majorly more buggier and unsafe, they're just less popular in most cases.
      • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
        Desktop code can be expected to fail sometimes. Core system components that orchestrate everything, should not. Ever. This requires disciplined programming that doesn't assume the stack is a limitless resource free to abuse and fill with tainted data.
        • Avamander 7y ago
          Even Linux kernel has had tons and tons of vulnerabilities and bugs. Not to mention non-systemd core system components and services have been found exploitable times and times again. You can't set higher standards for systemd than other core pieces of software, it's simply not fair.
          • kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
            The Linux kernel has high standards. Most of the bugs come from the drivers. If systemd wants to be the end all be all init replacement it should have known from the start that it needed to meet a high bar of code quality.
            • Avamander 7y ago
              It has high standards but the track record shows that standards isn't all it takes. We can always blame some subcomponent under someone else's control but the end result matters more. If you want to systemd to adhere to really high standards then you're a hypocrite if you don't apply the same standards to every subcomponent of a non-systemd system, be it upstart, logrotated, cron, chrony or whatever else. But it seems to me that you actually don't apply the same standards to the alternatives, they've all been hit with some vunerabilities, they all have bugs, they all have at least some terrible code, some lack maintenance or are just outdated. I wouldn't start throwing rocks from a glass house. Oh and let's not forget that based on a pure empirical observation of the Linux ecosystem we can see that it is a better choice. And no, noone has been forced to use it(, neither was anyone forced to use Pulseaudio).
  • cr0sh 7y ago
    From my understanding, and I may be wrong, the reason why systemd is..."controversial"...had mainly to do with the heavy-handed way it was incorporated. It was almost like it appeared out of nowhere, written by one person who "thought he knew better" (maybe he did? but that's not the point), without any community input or discussion, and yet despite all of this somehow it got crammed into a distro (I don't recall which) - in what seemed to be an almost unilateral manner. A "my way or the highway" attitude of sorts. It smacks of the whole "rockstar coder" mentality, where you have one guy on the team who forces everything to be his way, and he's begrudgingly recognised as probably right, and good for his work - but you still feel slighted as not having input on anything, because you're supposed to be a team (or a community). What I really don't understand is how systemd has been so "infectious" - it seems like every distro is or has switched over to it... ...whereas init was (from what I know) more organic in how it came about, which might also explain its warts and other pitfalls that systemd supposedly addresses. I haven't been so deep in the weeds of linux to really understand all of the arguments of this nature; while I sympathise with the init crowd, I am but mostly a mere user of the system, who occasionally throws on an admin hat, but has found over time this has become less of a need for me to do (ah, for the olden days of Turbo Linux 2.0 and kernel recompiling - though my first Linux experience was via Monkey). Had he introduced it in such a way to promote a discussion and dissemination of his ideas, maybe it wouldn't have turned out to be exactly like it is today, but it might have been more accepted (and maybe not as monolithic as I understand systemd to be - maybe it would have been more akin to a hybrid between his ideas and init?).
    • djur 7y ago
      SysV init, which was the traditional type used on Linux systems (with some exceptions like Slackware), was itself derided by critics as overcomplicated. And since it was part of the commercial distribution of UNIX released by AT&T, it was viewed by many as corporate contamination. Not "organic" at all. The BSD world never accepted it.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • Avamander 7y ago
    I do too thank him for actually manageable and nice-to-use service management and how much less it actually gets in my way than other inits, audio systems, logging and logrotating systems do. I instantly dismiss anyone's opinion who finds stuff like `rc-service $(name) status` or tracking down where the f* some garbage decides to log (turns out it's stdout >:|) even remotely acceptable.
• mbrumlow 7y ago
  Wait. So we had the prophecy of systemd and we still let it happen? Thats it. Back to the church or X for me.