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Reinventing Home Directories

118 points by Schiphol 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago
Change for change's sake is the worst possible reason for change. All this systemd stuff can jump off a cliff as far as I'm concerned. The main reason why I chose for Linux on my desktop and laptop machines is because I like the stability of the platform, the lack of non-sensical change and the fact that it makes it much easier to switch between desktop and server environments. Not that I want my servers to be more like my desktop, but the other way around. Where Poetering & Co. get it completely wrong - just speaking for myself here - is that the lack of change in the Linux world to me is a good thing. It means that any investment in time will pay back over many years.
- excessive 7y ago
  I agree, but I think we're in the minority. In particular, I miss when you could easily access the sound card through /dev/audio or /dev/dsp. I'm also not eager to embrace the latest version of a programming language just because it's the latest.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  It's all free software. You bet there would be a distribution that continues to resist systemd and stick to the old ways of doing things. But wanting things to stay the same is obstructing progress; do you seriously think the UNIX forefathers had already once-and-for-all figured out everything and nothing needs to change? In the beginning of the talk he mentioned a few deficiencies of the status quo; while you might not need these use cases maybe other people do?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    The Unix way, on the off-chance that it needs to be spelled out on HN, which I can hardly imagine, is to have independent tools that communicate in simple ways. The systemd way is opaque globs that are shipped as one large interconnected and interdependent system, where you no longer have much choice except to buy in to the whole thing all at once. Unix has been able to adapt just fine and there is plenty of change over the years. But there has been very little 'change just to change', it usually was in order to tackle some concrete issue. If all systemd did was to supply optional components that you can choose to run on top of or instead of the older versions then I'd be fine with that. It's this whole game of landgrab and forced incompatibility that gets me, besides the low quality of what is produced. It is easy to point to 'deficiencies' and then use those for the next round of systemd landgrab, but I don't recall anybody actually complaining about this stuff to begin with.
- enneff 7y ago
  You might be happier with FreeBSD or OpenBSD which take a much more conservative approach to change (slow and predictable) and documentation (they have it and it is well written and accurate).
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  > Change for change's sake is the worst possible reason for change Which is not the case here. The slides outline what is currently lacking and why and how improvements are needed. Admittedly this seems more driven by enterprise needs (LDAP, encryption, yubikey support etc.). You can rightfully criticize the systemd project for many thinks, but "change for change's sake" is definitely not among them. > Not that I want my servers to be more like my desktop, but the other way around. In which way are managed, scriptable home directories not more like servers?
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Yes, you can always come up with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to justify that which you wanted to do anyway. That's how the whole systemd madness got going and it will continue until all of the system has been consumed. Take pulseaudio as a nice example: works for 95% of the trival cases, fails for 100% of the more complex cases. The more Linux is dumbed down the harder it gets to do real work. A desktop on top of a powerful multi-user system is far more capable than a trimmed down Unix under a slick, single person UI. We already had that, it's called Mac OS/X and those who want it have had that option since forever.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      I don't see how PA is "trimmed down" or "dumbed down". From what I can tell, it provides quite a few more features than ALSA+dmix, which was the solution typically used previously. For example, I can now route the output of mpv to HDMI so someone can watch a movie, while I route other applications to my bluetooth headphones. Was this possible with ALSA?
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        > Was this possible with ALSA? Sure, but truth be told ALSA required a bit of knowledge to set up properly. But instead of re-doing the whole audio system from the ground up and tossing away the good with the bad it could have been done just as well by making a proper ALSA auto-configurator. No need for all this re-invention in more buggy ways. Besides that, when PA came out you couldn't do any of that either, it was barely usable and the most frequent PA related activity was 'uninstall'.
- icebraining 7y ago
  If you value lack of change over all else, you can always use Slackware. Most other distros have introduced newfangled gizmos like "package managers with dependency resolution" which should have been a sign they don't value stability above all.
  - wott 7y ago
    Well... one may read this without irony, given that a large part of the problems users encounter actually comes from the package manager (and the applications packaging) of their distro, and a large part of the bloat is coming from their dependencies management that pulls everything it can pull even when it is not needed or wanted. After getting tired of the last years of constant updates of some packages triggering the pull a whole tree of updates of other dependent packages, I finally move back to the old way. No more package manager. I build or download stuff I want when I want it and axe the dependency tree as much as possible.
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ktpsns 7y ago
Slides: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/homed-asg2019.pdf https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/homed-asg2019.pdf Conference website: https://all-systems-go.io/ https://all-systems-go.io/ (September 20-22, 2019)
dschuetz 7y ago
This systemd train has to stop. Why isn't Poettering just forking the Linux kernel for his very own systemd-OS distribution? If any of the Linux distributions I'm using touches the home directory because of Poettering's say-so in that video I'll cease using and supporting them.
- teekert 7y ago
  Isn't anyone free do make what they want and see if the market takes it up? Anyway, this week's Linux Action News [0] has a nice breakdown of the features, I think it is better to discuss the merit and downsides of this that to just shouting: "Stop the systemd, pulse-audio, any-new-feature-that-scares-unix-natives -train." [0] https://linuxactionnews.com/ https://linuxactionnews.com/
  - dschuetz 7y ago
    No. Because this nonsense will break my systems. What is this? Some crazy guy makes significant changes to a standard, the distribution maintainers will just gobble it up (as per usual) and then I have to weigh the pros and cons instead of complaining and fixing/adapting my systems e.g. wasting time because of a crazy guy's ideas? There is no market in OSS. It's either use it or leave it. But even in OSS there are established standards which are relied upon! Poettering doesn't care about that, because he likes change.
    - Jonnax 7y ago
      Red hat and Ubuntu LTSs have 5 year's worth of support. Taking 5 year's to learn something new is your problem. This guy has become the bogeyman of OSS. Does he have some sort of mind control that makes distributions pick up systemd? Why is he crazy because he's suggesting change?
    - iamnotacrook 7y ago
      You missed out the step where the knowledgeable people who run and have to support most of the major distros adopted systemd. When's that going to backfire? Any day now, right? I don't understand your last paragraph. Did the guy behind systemd use OSS or leave it?
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ComodoHacker 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but why WebM video is larger than MP4? Isn't WebM standard more efficient?
- bscphil 7y ago
  WebM and MP4 are containers, not video codecs. You can't assume anything about the efficiency of the video just by knowing the container. In this case, the WebM files contain video encoded with the VP8 codec, which in my opinion is significantly less transparent at the same bitrate than the h264 codec that the MP4 file contains. But it's more likely that whoever encoded these files did so without trying to hit specific transparency targets, so you shouldn't really conclude anything from the file size.
codr7 7y ago
Listen to his voice and watch him bounce around for five minutes and that's all you need to know. He clearly needs help, not authority and encouragement. I vote for taking away his programming license before something worse happens. Systemd is a Trojan horse, that much should be obvious by now. They'll keep on adding whatever they feel the need to control until the whole thing comes crashing down or someone tells them to take a hike, whichever comes first.
- teekert 7y ago
  Wow the religious passion regarding the Unix philosophy is really strong in this thread! Where are the arguments people, we can do better than this.
moonbug 7y ago
oh great, Lennart's here to help again.
- teekert 7y ago
  Seems like his last 2 projects were pretty successful. What was your last contribution that was taken up at such scale?
  - effie 7y ago
    What is the point of such a question? Writing software that is successful in the sense it gets major adoption is not necessarily desired by power users. On the contrary, we have a well known example in systemd. That's why you see sarcasm here, people are afraid of what is yet to come. If the "successful software" is causing you only problems and upon inspection, you discover it is restricting your computing, you're likely to worry about next project of the author.
bscphil 7y ago
I haven't yet watched the video, but I'm pretty familiar with the concept from previous links, and I had the following thought about the controversy this project will probably create. Personally I've been consistently happy with Poettering's projects, especially PulseAudio and systemd. Systemd is just an infinitely better way of handling init and service configuration than anything else I've used on Linux (the weird amalgam of systemd and other service configuration tools you find on a lot of distributions these days strikes me as a particular abomination that hides how nice a cleanly configured systemd setup can be). I would be happy to use a Linux system designed entirely by LP (the infamous systemd/Linux); it would probably be a lot better designed than what we have now. (I'm not really familiar with what the BSDs are doing these days, so I can't comment on them.) My one complaint, which I think is behind many of the criticisms of systemd, is that I don't see why it needs to be so tightly integrated. I would prefer to see many of the projects under the systemd umbrella (Wikipedia describes systemd as a "software suite", which is telling) broken apart into individual programs that can be run entirely independently. Network management, logging, and container management seem like they could all be separate projects. This new one probably should be too. I get the nagging feeling that if Poettering created PulseAudio today, it would be systemd-audio, and therefore wouldn't be as useful to Linux users universally as PA is.
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- StreamBright 7y ago
  >> Systemd is just an infinitely better way of handling init and service configuration than anything else I've used on Linux What metric? Is it ok for systemd to take over logging, dns, ntp and bunch of services in order to provide a better init as you like it?
  - bscphil 7y ago
    Ease of configuration and maintenance is the metric. I specifically addressed the question you asked - I would prefer that the different parts of the systemd software suite be split into programs that can be installed and run (or not) as the user pleases. I'm happy to use systemd, however, because I like nearly every part of it.
dijit 7y ago
Full Disclosure: I am violently opposed to systemd and pulseaudio (before it was taken away from Poettering). However, I think I'm seeing a pattern, Poettering identifies real issues and actually tries to fix them. But it seems like his ambition is impeding his ability to consider those who do not want to approach the fix his way. It's never a measured approach, it /feels/ like a "lets write it now and figure out all the problems down the line and fix them" which, for core pieces of software is a dangerous mindset. After watching the intro here I agree with him, the current state of things is not ideal, and nobody _wants_ to touch user account management on Linux. On MacOS for example, it's much more thought out, and I think Linux could do it better. As much as I hate poetterings specific approaches (and, subsequent lockout) I have to give credit to him identifying these issues and actually trying to fix them, it's more than I do. Then again I am a lowly sysadmin type.
- teekert 7y ago
  I like the tone of your comment, unlike many others here. But to your remark: "But it seems like his ambition is impeding his ability to consider those who do not want to approach the fix his way. It's never a measured approach, it /feels/ like a "lets write it now and figure out all the problems down the line and fix them" which, for core pieces of software is a dangerous mindset." I'd like to say that he forces nobody and so we should not complain about his creative endeavors. The market will decide, and you, will decide.
  - dijit 7y ago
    I disagree, you can argue the semantics of if it's him specifically or if it's another project that decides it will only target systemd/pulseaudio. But the fact that if I want a stable distro for server usage in 2019 I _must_ use a systemd distro speaks to the fact that I am indeed forced to use it. Maybe that's just adoption though, typically the sysadmin community considers the "safe" options to be CentOS/RHEL or Debian Stable. Both of which default to systemd. (and no sysadmin is going to change the init system on production servers unless it presents some abject nightmare, short of eating 30% CPU/Mem-- it's core software, it wont be touched). Projects like Devuan are simply not considered safe choices by the majority of the sysadmin community, and there's no alternative for RHEL-esque sites. So, semantically: it's not poetterings fault. But at the same time, I'm still forced.
Jonnax 7y ago
Just copied the following from the slides. It all seems reasonable to me. Linux home directories are a bit of a mess and unportable. Can someone explain to me the hate for systemd other than: "It's trying to do too much" "I hate Poettering" "I prefer things to stay the same, that's why I use a ThinkPad from 2008" These are their identified problems: Needs writable /etc + Mixes State and Con guration UID assignments need to be propagated between systems No encryption (Or \mismatching" encryption) No modern authentication mechanisms Not extensible; plenty \Sidecar" databases (/etc/shadow, accounts-daemon, samba, SSH, pam limits) No resource management These are their stated goals: Migratable Home Directories (all the way to the point of \home-on-a-stick") Self Contained Home Directories (i.e. mere existance of a le /home/foobar.home synthesizes a user foobar) UID assignments as local artifact Unification of User Password and Encryption Key Extensible User Records Lock LUKS on System Suspend Yubikeys, from day #1 "Complications:* SSH Logins Disk Space Assignments UID Assignments (chown() on login) LUKS Locking They have two solutions: Concept A: JSON User Records (Superset of NSS records: struct passwd + struct group) Queriable via Varlink interface Convertible forth and back (lossy though, necessarily) Concept B Encrypted LUKS Home Directories in Loopback Files (/home/foobar.home with JSON records in ~/.identity) Managed by systemd-homed.service Concept A may be used without Concept B though
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  Thanks a ton for this. I opened this thread curious about the ideas and the top N comments were just talking of systemd.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  > Can someone explain to me the hate for systemd other than: "It's trying to do too much" "I hate Poettering" "I prefer things to stay the same, that's why I use a ThinkPad from 2008" These are all perfectly valid reasons, you can't just hand-wave them away. The way you phrase them makes them semi-strawmen but they're just the equivalent of conventional wisdom: "do one thing well", "don't put all your eggs in one basket" and "don't fix what isn't broken". And also, my ThinkPad is from 2012, thank you very much.
cbhl 7y ago
I like the idea of logging in with a Yubikey, but this presentation seems out of touch with the requirements of the real world: folks needing to SSH into cloud machines without logging in to a physical console first; IT departments that need to reset a forgotten password or decrypt a hard drive for compliance reasons; people who have multiple Yubikeys; people who change passwords and don't want to spend hours re-keying the encryption on their USB key.
- lorenzhs 7y ago
  He starts the talk with something along the lines of: this is what I want for my laptop, not servers. It's explicitly meant for personal machines, not cloud machines. There is no reason why those should have to change, they're served pretty well by account management as it is today. Laptops are not, and he's trying to fix that. And by the way, LUKS has multiple authentication slots (you can have multiple passwords for the same volume, for example a long random password that the IT department keeps in a safe place if they ever need to access the volume) and it takes a second to re-key, not hours. This is all well-known. But Poettering brings out the worst knee-jerk reactions in people.
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    While for a laptop many of those problems he describes are non issues. I.e. configuration via LDAP doesn't happen on a laptop. That said: Integration with encryption and so on is definitely good. So maybe this goes too far in some direction, but too little I. The other?
    - db48x 7y ago
      Millions of laptops are configured via LDAP and Active Directory every day.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Windows laptops.
pnako 7y ago
Microsoft: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Lennart: Reject, Rewrite, Extend, Extend, Extend
phosphophyllite 7y ago
I actually appreciate Poettering's projects. But all his efforts are futile, because main linux-desktop problem is very complex fragmentation (someone religiously believes that it's linux-desktop main power, but we are not in 2003) — distros, DEs, widget toolkits (this mess with gtk or kde/qt look, not working gtk3-shadows in KDE because kwin developer is a child, gigantic controls in gtk3, and xfce as "alternative" to all this mess).
westurner 7y ago
Perhaps ironically, here's a link to the presentation PDF that was posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036020 And my comments there: > What a good idea. > Here's the hyperlinkified link to the {systemd-homed.service, systemd-userdbd.service, homectl, userdbctl} sources from the PDF: https://github.com/poettering/systemd/tree/homed https://github.com/poettering/systemd/tree/homed > Hadn't heard of varlink: https://varlink.org/ https://varlink.org/ > Is there a FIPS-like subset of the most-widely-available LUKS configs? Otherwise home directories won't work on systems that have a limited set of LUKS modules.
rswail 7y ago
The interesting thing here for me (aside from the actual ideas about home directories) was varlink. Is this the new D-Bus? It looks like yet another IDL and server/client. Aside from being JSON etc, what are the advantages of gRPC/protobuf, or even ONC RPC and XDR? Oh and full disclosure: I actually like the various systemd utilities and functions. Things like the resolver replacement can be a pain when you want to do weird split horizon and other things, or for bastions of VPNs, but as systemd has "settled" it compares reasonably well to Sun and Apple's equivalents.
ageofwant 7y ago
One thing that will need to be fixed is the ssh access that his current scheme does not allow. I cannot see how I should be logged into my machine on another continent before I can log into it again. Paradoxically this would mean moving the ssh keys, or equivalent, out of $HOME, which is the opposite of what he wants.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  Indeed. This seems like a very severe limitation. If the computer gets rebooted, either due to updates or power-loss, you effectively lose access to the machine until you can get to it physically. So for me, his solution only works for computers for which you want casual SSH access to. Which would be the minority of my computers.
  - knocte 7y ago
    Workstations, not servers.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      I routinely log on to my work computer remotely. I couldn't use a system which denied me that just because the computer rebooted for whatever reason.

118 points by Schiphol 7y ago

Change for change's sake is the worst possible reason for change. All this systemd stuff can jump off a cliff as far as I'm concerned. The main reason why I chose for Linux on my desktop and laptop machines is because I like the stability of the platform, the lack of non-sensical change and the fact that it makes it much easier to switch between desktop and server environments. Not that I want my servers to be more like my desktop, but the other way around. Where Poetering & Co. get it completely wrong - just speaking for myself here - is that the lack of change in the Linux world to me is a good thing. It means that any investment in time will pay back over many years.

excessive 7y ago
I agree, but I think we're in the minority. In particular, I miss when you could easily access the sound card through /dev/audio or /dev/dsp. I'm also not eager to embrace the latest version of a programming language just because it's the latest.
kccqzy 7y ago
It's all free software. You bet there would be a distribution that continues to resist systemd and stick to the old ways of doing things. But wanting things to stay the same is obstructing progress; do you seriously think the UNIX forefathers had already once-and-for-all figured out everything and nothing needs to change? In the beginning of the talk he mentioned a few deficiencies of the status quo; while you might not need these use cases maybe other people do?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  The Unix way, on the off-chance that it needs to be spelled out on HN, which I can hardly imagine, is to have independent tools that communicate in simple ways. The systemd way is opaque globs that are shipped as one large interconnected and interdependent system, where you no longer have much choice except to buy in to the whole thing all at once. Unix has been able to adapt just fine and there is plenty of change over the years. But there has been very little 'change just to change', it usually was in order to tackle some concrete issue. If all systemd did was to supply optional components that you can choose to run on top of or instead of the older versions then I'd be fine with that. It's this whole game of landgrab and forced incompatibility that gets me, besides the low quality of what is produced. It is easy to point to 'deficiencies' and then use those for the next round of systemd landgrab, but I don't recall anybody actually complaining about this stuff to begin with.
enneff 7y ago
You might be happier with FreeBSD or OpenBSD which take a much more conservative approach to change (slow and predictable) and documentation (they have it and it is well written and accurate).
diffeomorphism 7y ago
> Change for change's sake is the worst possible reason for change Which is not the case here. The slides outline what is currently lacking and why and how improvements are needed. Admittedly this seems more driven by enterprise needs (LDAP, encryption, yubikey support etc.). You can rightfully criticize the systemd project for many thinks, but "change for change's sake" is definitely not among them. > Not that I want my servers to be more like my desktop, but the other way around. In which way are managed, scriptable home directories not more like servers?
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Yes, you can always come up with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to justify that which you wanted to do anyway. That's how the whole systemd madness got going and it will continue until all of the system has been consumed. Take pulseaudio as a nice example: works for 95% of the trival cases, fails for 100% of the more complex cases. The more Linux is dumbed down the harder it gets to do real work. A desktop on top of a powerful multi-user system is far more capable than a trimmed down Unix under a slick, single person UI. We already had that, it's called Mac OS/X and those who want it have had that option since forever.
  - icebraining 7y ago
    I don't see how PA is "trimmed down" or "dumbed down". From what I can tell, it provides quite a few more features than ALSA+dmix, which was the solution typically used previously. For example, I can now route the output of mpv to HDMI so someone can watch a movie, while I route other applications to my bluetooth headphones. Was this possible with ALSA?
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      > Was this possible with ALSA? Sure, but truth be told ALSA required a bit of knowledge to set up properly. But instead of re-doing the whole audio system from the ground up and tossing away the good with the bad it could have been done just as well by making a proper ALSA auto-configurator. No need for all this re-invention in more buggy ways. Besides that, when PA came out you couldn't do any of that either, it was barely usable and the most frequent PA related activity was 'uninstall'.
icebraining 7y ago
If you value lack of change over all else, you can always use Slackware. Most other distros have introduced newfangled gizmos like "package managers with dependency resolution" which should have been a sign they don't value stability above all.
- wott 7y ago
  Well... one may read this without irony, given that a large part of the problems users encounter actually comes from the package manager (and the applications packaging) of their distro, and a large part of the bloat is coming from their dependencies management that pulls everything it can pull even when it is not needed or wanted. After getting tired of the last years of constant updates of some packages triggering the pull a whole tree of updates of other dependent packages, I finally move back to the old way. No more package manager. I build or download stuff I want when I want it and axe the dependency tree as much as possible.
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ktpsns 7y ago

Slides: https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/homed-asg2019.pdf https://cfp.all-systems-go.io/media/homed-asg2019.pdf Conference website: https://all-systems-go.io/ https://all-systems-go.io/ (September 20-22, 2019)

dschuetz 7y ago

This systemd train has to stop. Why isn't Poettering just forking the Linux kernel for his very own systemd-OS distribution? If any of the Linux distributions I'm using touches the home directory because of Poettering's say-so in that video I'll cease using and supporting them.

teekert 7y ago
Isn't anyone free do make what they want and see if the market takes it up? Anyway, this week's Linux Action News [0] has a nice breakdown of the features, I think it is better to discuss the merit and downsides of this that to just shouting: "Stop the systemd, pulse-audio, any-new-feature-that-scares-unix-natives -train." [0] https://linuxactionnews.com/ https://linuxactionnews.com/
- dschuetz 7y ago
  No. Because this nonsense will break my systems. What is this? Some crazy guy makes significant changes to a standard, the distribution maintainers will just gobble it up (as per usual) and then I have to weigh the pros and cons instead of complaining and fixing/adapting my systems e.g. wasting time because of a crazy guy's ideas? There is no market in OSS. It's either use it or leave it. But even in OSS there are established standards which are relied upon! Poettering doesn't care about that, because he likes change.
  - Jonnax 7y ago
    Red hat and Ubuntu LTSs have 5 year's worth of support. Taking 5 year's to learn something new is your problem. This guy has become the bogeyman of OSS. Does he have some sort of mind control that makes distributions pick up systemd? Why is he crazy because he's suggesting change?
  - iamnotacrook 7y ago
    You missed out the step where the knowledgeable people who run and have to support most of the major distros adopted systemd. When's that going to backfire? Any day now, right? I don't understand your last paragraph. Did the guy behind systemd use OSS or leave it?

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ComodoHacker 7y ago

Slightly off-topic, but why WebM video is larger than MP4? Isn't WebM standard more efficient?

bscphil 7y ago
WebM and MP4 are containers, not video codecs. You can't assume anything about the efficiency of the video just by knowing the container. In this case, the WebM files contain video encoded with the VP8 codec, which in my opinion is significantly less transparent at the same bitrate than the h264 codec that the MP4 file contains. But it's more likely that whoever encoded these files did so without trying to hit specific transparency targets, so you shouldn't really conclude anything from the file size.

codr7 7y ago

Listen to his voice and watch him bounce around for five minutes and that's all you need to know. He clearly needs help, not authority and encouragement. I vote for taking away his programming license before something worse happens. Systemd is a Trojan horse, that much should be obvious by now. They'll keep on adding whatever they feel the need to control until the whole thing comes crashing down or someone tells them to take a hike, whichever comes first.

teekert 7y ago
Wow the religious passion regarding the Unix philosophy is really strong in this thread! Where are the arguments people, we can do better than this.

moonbug 7y ago

oh great, Lennart's here to help again.

teekert 7y ago
Seems like his last 2 projects were pretty successful. What was your last contribution that was taken up at such scale?
- effie 7y ago
  What is the point of such a question? Writing software that is successful in the sense it gets major adoption is not necessarily desired by power users. On the contrary, we have a well known example in systemd. That's why you see sarcasm here, people are afraid of what is yet to come. If the "successful software" is causing you only problems and upon inspection, you discover it is restricting your computing, you're likely to worry about next project of the author.

bscphil 7y ago

I haven't yet watched the video, but I'm pretty familiar with the concept from previous links, and I had the following thought about the controversy this project will probably create. Personally I've been consistently happy with Poettering's projects, especially PulseAudio and systemd. Systemd is just an infinitely better way of handling init and service configuration than anything else I've used on Linux (the weird amalgam of systemd and other service configuration tools you find on a lot of distributions these days strikes me as a particular abomination that hides how nice a cleanly configured systemd setup can be). I would be happy to use a Linux system designed entirely by LP (the infamous systemd/Linux); it would probably be a lot better designed than what we have now. (I'm not really familiar with what the BSDs are doing these days, so I can't comment on them.) My one complaint, which I think is behind many of the criticisms of systemd, is that I don't see why it needs to be so tightly integrated. I would prefer to see many of the projects under the systemd umbrella (Wikipedia describes systemd as a "software suite", which is telling) broken apart into individual programs that can be run entirely independently. Network management, logging, and container management seem like they could all be separate projects. This new one probably should be too. I get the nagging feeling that if Poettering created PulseAudio today, it would be systemd-audio, and therefore wouldn't be as useful to Linux users universally as PA is.

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StreamBright 7y ago
>> Systemd is just an infinitely better way of handling init and service configuration than anything else I've used on Linux What metric? Is it ok for systemd to take over logging, dns, ntp and bunch of services in order to provide a better init as you like it?
- bscphil 7y ago
  Ease of configuration and maintenance is the metric. I specifically addressed the question you asked - I would prefer that the different parts of the systemd software suite be split into programs that can be installed and run (or not) as the user pleases. I'm happy to use systemd, however, because I like nearly every part of it.

dijit 7y ago

Full Disclosure: I am violently opposed to systemd and pulseaudio (before it was taken away from Poettering). However, I think I'm seeing a pattern, Poettering identifies real issues and actually tries to fix them. But it seems like his ambition is impeding his ability to consider those who do not want to approach the fix his way. It's never a measured approach, it /feels/ like a "lets write it now and figure out all the problems down the line and fix them" which, for core pieces of software is a dangerous mindset. After watching the intro here I agree with him, the current state of things is not ideal, and nobody _wants_ to touch user account management on Linux. On MacOS for example, it's much more thought out, and I think Linux could do it better. As much as I hate poetterings specific approaches (and, subsequent lockout) I have to give credit to him identifying these issues and actually trying to fix them, it's more than I do. Then again I am a lowly sysadmin type.

teekert 7y ago
I like the tone of your comment, unlike many others here. But to your remark: "But it seems like his ambition is impeding his ability to consider those who do not want to approach the fix his way. It's never a measured approach, it /feels/ like a "lets write it now and figure out all the problems down the line and fix them" which, for core pieces of software is a dangerous mindset." I'd like to say that he forces nobody and so we should not complain about his creative endeavors. The market will decide, and you, will decide.
- dijit 7y ago
  I disagree, you can argue the semantics of if it's him specifically or if it's another project that decides it will only target systemd/pulseaudio. But the fact that if I want a stable distro for server usage in 2019 I _must_ use a systemd distro speaks to the fact that I am indeed forced to use it. Maybe that's just adoption though, typically the sysadmin community considers the "safe" options to be CentOS/RHEL or Debian Stable. Both of which default to systemd. (and no sysadmin is going to change the init system on production servers unless it presents some abject nightmare, short of eating 30% CPU/Mem-- it's core software, it wont be touched). Projects like Devuan are simply not considered safe choices by the majority of the sysadmin community, and there's no alternative for RHEL-esque sites. So, semantically: it's not poetterings fault. But at the same time, I'm still forced.

Jonnax 7y ago

Just copied the following from the slides. It all seems reasonable to me. Linux home directories are a bit of a mess and unportable. Can someone explain to me the hate for systemd other than: "It's trying to do too much" "I hate Poettering" "I prefer things to stay the same, that's why I use a ThinkPad from 2008" These are their identified problems: Needs writable /etc + Mixes State and Con guration UID assignments need to be propagated between systems No encryption (Or \mismatching" encryption) No modern authentication mechanisms Not extensible; plenty \Sidecar" databases (/etc/shadow, accounts-daemon, samba, SSH, pam limits) No resource management These are their stated goals: Migratable Home Directories (all the way to the point of \home-on-a-stick") Self Contained Home Directories (i.e. mere existance of a le /home/foobar.home synthesizes a user foobar) UID assignments as local artifact Unification of User Password and Encryption Key Extensible User Records Lock LUKS on System Suspend Yubikeys, from day #1 "Complications:* SSH Logins Disk Space Assignments UID Assignments (chown() on login) LUKS Locking They have two solutions: Concept A: JSON User Records (Superset of NSS records: struct passwd + struct group) Queriable via Varlink interface Convertible forth and back (lossy though, necessarily) Concept B Encrypted LUKS Home Directories in Loopback Files (/home/foobar.home with JSON records in ~/.identity) Managed by systemd-homed.service Concept A may be used without Concept B though

TACIXAT 7y ago
Thanks a ton for this. I opened this thread curious about the ideas and the top N comments were just talking of systemd.
Smithalicious 7y ago
> Can someone explain to me the hate for systemd other than: "It's trying to do too much" "I hate Poettering" "I prefer things to stay the same, that's why I use a ThinkPad from 2008" These are all perfectly valid reasons, you can't just hand-wave them away. The way you phrase them makes them semi-strawmen but they're just the equivalent of conventional wisdom: "do one thing well", "don't put all your eggs in one basket" and "don't fix what isn't broken". And also, my ThinkPad is from 2012, thank you very much.

cbhl 7y ago

I like the idea of logging in with a Yubikey, but this presentation seems out of touch with the requirements of the real world: folks needing to SSH into cloud machines without logging in to a physical console first; IT departments that need to reset a forgotten password or decrypt a hard drive for compliance reasons; people who have multiple Yubikeys; people who change passwords and don't want to spend hours re-keying the encryption on their USB key.

lorenzhs 7y ago
He starts the talk with something along the lines of: this is what I want for my laptop, not servers. It's explicitly meant for personal machines, not cloud machines. There is no reason why those should have to change, they're served pretty well by account management as it is today. Laptops are not, and he's trying to fix that. And by the way, LUKS has multiple authentication slots (you can have multiple passwords for the same volume, for example a long random password that the IT department keeps in a safe place if they ever need to access the volume) and it takes a second to re-key, not hours. This is all well-known. But Poettering brings out the worst knee-jerk reactions in people.
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  While for a laptop many of those problems he describes are non issues. I.e. configuration via LDAP doesn't happen on a laptop. That said: Integration with encryption and so on is definitely good. So maybe this goes too far in some direction, but too little I. The other?
  - db48x 7y ago
    Millions of laptops are configured via LDAP and Active Directory every day.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Windows laptops.

pnako 7y ago

Microsoft: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish Lennart: Reject, Rewrite, Extend, Extend, Extend

phosphophyllite 7y ago

I actually appreciate Poettering's projects. But all his efforts are futile, because main linux-desktop problem is very complex fragmentation (someone religiously believes that it's linux-desktop main power, but we are not in 2003) — distros, DEs, widget toolkits (this mess with gtk or kde/qt look, not working gtk3-shadows in KDE because kwin developer is a child, gigantic controls in gtk3, and xfce as "alternative" to all this mess).

westurner 7y ago

Perhaps ironically, here's a link to the presentation PDF that was posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21036020 And my comments there: > What a good idea. > Here's the hyperlinkified link to the {systemd-homed.service, systemd-userdbd.service, homectl, userdbctl} sources from the PDF: https://github.com/poettering/systemd/tree/homed https://github.com/poettering/systemd/tree/homed > Hadn't heard of varlink: https://varlink.org/ https://varlink.org/ > Is there a FIPS-like subset of the most-widely-available LUKS configs? Otherwise home directories won't work on systems that have a limited set of LUKS modules.

rswail 7y ago

The interesting thing here for me (aside from the actual ideas about home directories) was varlink. Is this the new D-Bus? It looks like yet another IDL and server/client. Aside from being JSON etc, what are the advantages of gRPC/protobuf, or even ONC RPC and XDR? Oh and full disclosure: I actually like the various systemd utilities and functions. Things like the resolver replacement can be a pain when you want to do weird split horizon and other things, or for bastions of VPNs, but as systemd has "settled" it compares reasonably well to Sun and Apple's equivalents.

ageofwant 7y ago

One thing that will need to be fixed is the ssh access that his current scheme does not allow. I cannot see how I should be logged into my machine on another continent before I can log into it again. Paradoxically this would mean moving the ssh keys, or equivalent, out of $HOME, which is the opposite of what he wants.

magicalhippo 7y ago
Indeed. This seems like a very severe limitation. If the computer gets rebooted, either due to updates or power-loss, you effectively lose access to the machine until you can get to it physically. So for me, his solution only works for computers for which you want casual SSH access to. Which would be the minority of my computers.
- knocte 7y ago
  Workstations, not servers.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    I routinely log on to my work computer remotely. I couldn't use a system which denied me that just because the computer rebooted for whatever reason.