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I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good sy

I think you are missing the point: Something like systemd has a good reason to exist. But the devil is in the creating team. We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Taking a step backward from Alsa is hard, and they managed to do it. Now that same team is messing with system critical stuff. We know from the kernel command line debug debacle they rather see the world burn down than admit they did something wrong. They are again creating a super-complicated incomprehensible half- documented mess, that puts it tentacles everywhere. But the stakes are a lot higher. I am not saying they are incompetent. At a low level, the code works. But at a high level, something is very wrong. Bugs can be fixed, but arrogant architecture astronauts not listening to their users, messing with core infrastructure, that's where systemd keeps failing.

orf 7y ago
> We know from the kernel command line debug debacle they rather see the world burn down than admit they did something wrong Can you expand? I've not heard of this.
- Tomte 7y ago
  IIRC, they printed more messages to the console when booting Linux with a debug parameter than Linux could handle. Systemd developers were like "nobody can tell us how much detail to print", until the kernel developers made clear that the boot console belongs to them and if systemd doesn't back down immediately they would take away all console access. Systemd then backed down.
  - turbinerneiter 7y ago
    So you are saying two teams maintaining two systems which are working together tightly had a conflict about how those systems are supposed to work together and resolved it after some heated discussion? Sounds like Open Source to me.
- hyperman1 7y ago
  Here is an overview: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza
  - 0lpbm 7y ago
    Here's a better[1] overview: https://lwn.net/Articles/593676/ https://lwn.net/Articles/593676/ [1] Less blog spam, less click bait, better reporting.
nickik 7y ago
The amount of features and stuff they add to systemd is seriously impressive. They have bugs sometimes, but I have been running it in production for years and years and never had a real issue. Its an incredibly stable system. Sometimes a new version has a bug because systemd has to work in so many context, those get fixed very quickly generally. I would challange anybody, to introduce a totally new system layer on linux with less issues. And Pulse Audio was started by Pottering but he quickly moved on and since then it literally has nothing to do with the people who work on systemd. Blaiming him for the persistence of issues with Pulse is simply unfair and would be done if he was not called Lennart Poettering.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  I think Poettering deserved his fair share of the blame for the problems in Pulse Audio. However, a guy writes an over ambitious project, has a lot of problems, has problems with interfacing with users, etc, etc, etc. This is the internet! Pick a random project an Github and you'll probably find similar issues. The real problem here was Red Hat -- and it was literally the same problem with systemd. They tied it so closely with the rest Gnome that you couldn't reasonably use Gnome without it. And since all of the distros were essentially riding on Red Hat's tail, everybody got strong armed into using this stuff before it was ready (to be fair, it was years and years and years before Pulse was stable at all). I am not a fan of Poettering's code or his attitude, but people have treated him exceptionally badly. He's just doing his job. If these projects were allowed to compete for mind share fairly there would be no problem. If Red Hat had made sure that Gnome could work with alternatives then there would be no problem. Pulse audio would have died a rightful death. Systemd? I suspect that it would still have succeeded.
  - windexh8er 7y ago
    > The real problem here was Red Hat... Agreed. This is Red Hat's mentality with a lot of it's product base. Poettering and Dan Walsh come to mind with regard to the elitist attitude in their respective corners. But just wait, this is going to get worse. Now that IBM owns them they will push this agenda even harder. The new game is controlling a majority of devs in well-known or strategic projects so the overarching enterprise can push an agenda. I don't think we're seeing the teeth quite yet, but give IBM a few years and my guess is it becomes very obvious.
geofft 7y ago
> We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. systemd has been out for so long that I'm pretty sure we can judge it by its own merits now. As someone who maintains a few thousand servers but only uses desktop Linux on one non-primary machine, I have a lot more well-informed opinions on the trustworthiness and stability of systemd than of PulseAudio. (And besides, my recent experience of PulseAudio has been that it's fine, and IIRC in the late '00s the primary problem with PulseAudio was that Ubuntu ran it in a non-recommended mode. I haven't actually had any problems with it recently, it just works.) It seems like the discussion would be more informative and less flamey if we talked about systemd itself. If the team is untrustworthy, there should be numerous examples of that about systemd itself by now.
- Quekid5 7y ago
  Very well put. IME talking with our sysadmins face-to-face, I think a lot of the initial hostility was caused by emotional reactions like: This is different, I don't like it! (Don't get me wrong, it's a behavioral pattern that makes sense up to a point.). I think everybody I've spoken to actually ends up appreciating a lot of things about systemd. (But in these situations, I happened to be their employer, so that definitely biases the conversation even if these conversations weren't really about anything related to their job situation, specifically.) I also get the impression that a big part of this is due to a lack of 'patterns' or easy recipes to get as much info as possible from the journal. Everybody can intuit the workings and benefits of a text file, but text files have drawbacks that are very subtle and hard to intuit at a visceral level. I think this is partially a lack of good defaults for journalctl. I think it would be better if it (by default) showed much more information and allowed users to turn off unwanted info.
eythian 7y ago
Pulse has been fine for ... I dunno, a decade or so now. I remember when it was problematic, and then one day I discovered I could do things like send sound to other computers, control different applications independently, turn on bluetooth headphones and just have them work. All the sort of things you'd expect a modern sound system (which ALSA certainly is not) to be able to do without having to edit configs or whatever. Pulseaudio is definitely better at what it does than ALSA, it is not a step backwards.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Unless you use your computer for more than just consumption and you find out that latency wise pulseaudio absolutely sucks. And then you install jack, a bridge from pulse to jack and a whole raft of other fixes to be able to use the same desktop for regular work and audio work. My main gripe with anything from that group of people is that they refuse to play nice with others, and by extension that their code refuses to work properly with code produced by others.
  - alex7o 7y ago
    When don't we just use jack without pulse audio, most programs support it (VLC,MPV).
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Firefox doesn't. They dropped all other audio systems except for pulse! Highly annoying.
      - degraafc 7y ago
        This is just my own experience, but sound works fine for me with just Alsa (no pulseaudio or apulse). Although even the Arch Wiki [1] says differently. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Multimedia_playback https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Multimedia_play...
api 7y ago
> And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Maybe that fits RedHat's business model.

orf 7y ago

> We know from the kernel command line debug debacle they rather see the world burn down than admit they did something wrong Can you expand? I've not heard of this.

Tomte 7y ago
IIRC, they printed more messages to the console when booting Linux with a debug parameter than Linux could handle. Systemd developers were like "nobody can tell us how much detail to print", until the kernel developers made clear that the boot console belongs to them and if systemd doesn't back down immediately they would take away all console access. Systemd then backed down.
- turbinerneiter 7y ago
  So you are saying two teams maintaining two systems which are working together tightly had a conflict about how those systems are supposed to work together and resolved it after some heated discussion? Sounds like Open Source to me.
hyperman1 7y ago
Here is an overview: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza
- 0lpbm 7y ago
  Here's a better[1] overview: https://lwn.net/Articles/593676/ https://lwn.net/Articles/593676/ [1] Less blog spam, less click bait, better reporting.

nickik 7y ago

The amount of features and stuff they add to systemd is seriously impressive. They have bugs sometimes, but I have been running it in production for years and years and never had a real issue. Its an incredibly stable system. Sometimes a new version has a bug because systemd has to work in so many context, those get fixed very quickly generally. I would challange anybody, to introduce a totally new system layer on linux with less issues. And Pulse Audio was started by Pottering but he quickly moved on and since then it literally has nothing to do with the people who work on systemd. Blaiming him for the persistence of issues with Pulse is simply unfair and would be done if he was not called Lennart Poettering.

mikekchar 7y ago
I think Poettering deserved his fair share of the blame for the problems in Pulse Audio. However, a guy writes an over ambitious project, has a lot of problems, has problems with interfacing with users, etc, etc, etc. This is the internet! Pick a random project an Github and you'll probably find similar issues. The real problem here was Red Hat -- and it was literally the same problem with systemd. They tied it so closely with the rest Gnome that you couldn't reasonably use Gnome without it. And since all of the distros were essentially riding on Red Hat's tail, everybody got strong armed into using this stuff before it was ready (to be fair, it was years and years and years before Pulse was stable at all). I am not a fan of Poettering's code or his attitude, but people have treated him exceptionally badly. He's just doing his job. If these projects were allowed to compete for mind share fairly there would be no problem. If Red Hat had made sure that Gnome could work with alternatives then there would be no problem. Pulse audio would have died a rightful death. Systemd? I suspect that it would still have succeeded.
- windexh8er 7y ago
  > The real problem here was Red Hat... Agreed. This is Red Hat's mentality with a lot of it's product base. Poettering and Dan Walsh come to mind with regard to the elitist attitude in their respective corners. But just wait, this is going to get worse. Now that IBM owns them they will push this agenda even harder. The new game is controlling a majority of devs in well-known or strategic projects so the overarching enterprise can push an agenda. I don't think we're seeing the teeth quite yet, but give IBM a few years and my guess is it becomes very obvious.

geofft 7y ago

> We've seen pulseaudio, a good system in theory, but an untrustworthy unstable system in practice. systemd has been out for so long that I'm pretty sure we can judge it by its own merits now. As someone who maintains a few thousand servers but only uses desktop Linux on one non-primary machine, I have a lot more well-informed opinions on the trustworthiness and stability of systemd than of PulseAudio. (And besides, my recent experience of PulseAudio has been that it's fine, and IIRC in the late '00s the primary problem with PulseAudio was that Ubuntu ran it in a non-recommended mode. I haven't actually had any problems with it recently, it just works.) It seems like the discussion would be more informative and less flamey if we talked about systemd itself. If the team is untrustworthy, there should be numerous examples of that about systemd itself by now.

Quekid5 7y ago
Very well put. IME talking with our sysadmins face-to-face, I think a lot of the initial hostility was caused by emotional reactions like: This is different, I don't like it! (Don't get me wrong, it's a behavioral pattern that makes sense up to a point.). I think everybody I've spoken to actually ends up appreciating a lot of things about systemd. (But in these situations, I happened to be their employer, so that definitely biases the conversation even if these conversations weren't really about anything related to their job situation, specifically.) I also get the impression that a big part of this is due to a lack of 'patterns' or easy recipes to get as much info as possible from the journal. Everybody can intuit the workings and benefits of a text file, but text files have drawbacks that are very subtle and hard to intuit at a visceral level. I think this is partially a lack of good defaults for journalctl. I think it would be better if it (by default) showed much more information and allowed users to turn off unwanted info.

eythian 7y ago

Pulse has been fine for ... I dunno, a decade or so now. I remember when it was problematic, and then one day I discovered I could do things like send sound to other computers, control different applications independently, turn on bluetooth headphones and just have them work. All the sort of things you'd expect a modern sound system (which ALSA certainly is not) to be able to do without having to edit configs or whatever. Pulseaudio is definitely better at what it does than ALSA, it is not a step backwards.

jacquesm 7y ago
Unless you use your computer for more than just consumption and you find out that latency wise pulseaudio absolutely sucks. And then you install jack, a bridge from pulse to jack and a whole raft of other fixes to be able to use the same desktop for regular work and audio work. My main gripe with anything from that group of people is that they refuse to play nice with others, and by extension that their code refuses to work properly with code produced by others.
- alex7o 7y ago
  When don't we just use jack without pulse audio, most programs support it (VLC,MPV).
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Firefox doesn't. They dropped all other audio systems except for pulse! Highly annoying.
    - degraafc 7y ago
      This is just my own experience, but sound works fine for me with just Alsa (no pulseaudio or apulse). Although even the Arch Wiki [1] says differently. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Multimedia_playback https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox#Multimedia_play...

api 7y ago

> And if it wont work, it is so complicated and non-transparent that you need a specialist. Maybe that fits RedHat's business model.