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The hatred for Systemd seems to come from those who see the unix philosophy of small, single use programs being thrown away in favour of a monolith. Back when

The hatred for Systemd seems to come from those who see the unix philosophy of small, single use programs being thrown away in favour of a monolith. Back when I had linux as a desktop (around the day of slackware 10) there were plenty of problems with simple stuff like mounting usbs, connecting to wifi etc--possible but a pain. I've hardly looked at systemd or linux in such a way for a long time, however.

kzrdude 5y ago
I'm not sure, it seems to me that the hatred for systemd seems to come from those that learned something else and don't want to learn systemd. My analysis would be that the "unix philosophy" is just a convenient argument against it.
Gigachad 5y ago
Linux users tend to come up with whatever "philosophy" suits their agenda of complaining about all change. The unix philosophy gets thrown out the window as soon as it comes to Wayland which took a huge, bloated, and buggy Xorg and broke it down to something more sane and manageable.
- hedora 5y ago
  Doesn’t wayland force window managers to be integrated into some behemoth bloated monolith? My preferred WM is evilwm. I read the entire source to it in a few hours, and occasionally edit the source when I want to customize it for my odd workflows. I don’t think that’s possible with wayland. Also, wayland forced a bunch of questionable security policies around screen capture and keyboard handling, and didn’t provide escape hatches required for basic functionality. Is that fixed yet? I stopped paying attention years ago, to be honest.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    What Wayland changed is that Wayland is not a piece of software like Xorg was. It is simply a specification. Which means you don't have potentially have a 100 line C program as your wm which just relies on xorg to do the heavy lifting. KDE and Gnome have their own wayland implementation but this isn't really a problem. You can still write you minimal WM because their is a project called WLRoots which does the same job as the old x11 package. It lets you trivially interact and be compatible with the wayland spec without having to implement it yourself. Screen capture and keyboard privacy is essential for the future of linux IMO. I don't know the exact state of it but I did not have any issues screen sharing with wayland compatible apps. There were some issues with x11 only apps but I think PipeWire solved that.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Doesn’t wayland force window managers to be integrated into some behemoth bloated monolith? Well, the wayland protocols are very poorly documented compared to X. But most WM's have to support a bunch of obscure X extensions to get a reasonable featureset, that bring in much the same complexity as Wayland.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Wayland is a protocol only. A wayland implementation may choose to incorporate the functionality of a window manager, or can create some way to outsource it to a separate executable. The security policies are not questionable. XServer is beyond fixable. A single rogue extension can screen share everything you do to a remote server, you would not even recognize that.
- eadmund 5y ago
  Plenty of us who appreciate Linux and Unix are very, very worried about Wayland, which breaks a lot of things we have relied on and used for literal decades, and also seems to have some dubious lacunæ and misfeatures. I am actually optimistic that in another dozen years or so Wayland might be pretty nice, but I certainly wouldn't consider it an examplar today.
dijit 5y ago
I don’t care about philosophy; I don’t like being forced and I don’t like opaque systems where they aren’t required. SystemD is essentially forced (for better or worse, not gonna argue) because it is a hard dependency for certain software and tightly integrated with other tools in the systemd ecosystem It is opaque because I cannot read, modify or understand what it’s doing without breaking out gdb, heaven forbid I want to alter its behavior in a less than approved way. This leads to weird situations like the MySQL unit executing a bash script to run: because systemd has limited preflight checking compared to alternatives. Before someone claims I want sysvinit back: No, I don’t want that. I would simply prefer systemd to be smaller so that we can replace it with something better or more tailored should the need arise. We’re locking ourselves in to prototype level software (which we best into working semi decently) with obstinate leadership team who deny any faults.
- eadmund 5y ago
  > It is opaque because I cannot read, modify or understand what it’s doing without breaking out gdb, heaven forbid I want to alter its behavior in a less than approved way. In this respect I think that systemd is really a victim of the Unix kernel/shell style, where 'kernel' is read expansively to mean 'everything in C' and 'shell' is read to mean '/bin/sh'. The problem is that where shell is easily examinable and understandable for most technical folks, compiled C simply isn't (yeah, yeah, we all know someone who can debug in assembler; that guy ain't me). It would have been nice to have had one system, with a typesafe compiled language. Scrutable, fast and safe. We have an example with emacs: one can always just M-. to a function's definition (even in the C core …). It's a real pity that systemd hadn't been written in Common Lisp or some similar language.

kzrdude 5y ago

I'm not sure, it seems to me that the hatred for systemd seems to come from those that learned something else and don't want to learn systemd. My analysis would be that the "unix philosophy" is just a convenient argument against it.

Gigachad 5y ago

Linux users tend to come up with whatever "philosophy" suits their agenda of complaining about all change. The unix philosophy gets thrown out the window as soon as it comes to Wayland which took a huge, bloated, and buggy Xorg and broke it down to something more sane and manageable.

hedora 5y ago
Doesn’t wayland force window managers to be integrated into some behemoth bloated monolith? My preferred WM is evilwm. I read the entire source to it in a few hours, and occasionally edit the source when I want to customize it for my odd workflows. I don’t think that’s possible with wayland. Also, wayland forced a bunch of questionable security policies around screen capture and keyboard handling, and didn’t provide escape hatches required for basic functionality. Is that fixed yet? I stopped paying attention years ago, to be honest.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  What Wayland changed is that Wayland is not a piece of software like Xorg was. It is simply a specification. Which means you don't have potentially have a 100 line C program as your wm which just relies on xorg to do the heavy lifting. KDE and Gnome have their own wayland implementation but this isn't really a problem. You can still write you minimal WM because their is a project called WLRoots which does the same job as the old x11 package. It lets you trivially interact and be compatible with the wayland spec without having to implement it yourself. Screen capture and keyboard privacy is essential for the future of linux IMO. I don't know the exact state of it but I did not have any issues screen sharing with wayland compatible apps. There were some issues with x11 only apps but I think PipeWire solved that.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Doesn’t wayland force window managers to be integrated into some behemoth bloated monolith? Well, the wayland protocols are very poorly documented compared to X. But most WM's have to support a bunch of obscure X extensions to get a reasonable featureset, that bring in much the same complexity as Wayland.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Wayland is a protocol only. A wayland implementation may choose to incorporate the functionality of a window manager, or can create some way to outsource it to a separate executable. The security policies are not questionable. XServer is beyond fixable. A single rogue extension can screen share everything you do to a remote server, you would not even recognize that.
eadmund 5y ago
Plenty of us who appreciate Linux and Unix are very, very worried about Wayland, which breaks a lot of things we have relied on and used for literal decades, and also seems to have some dubious lacunæ and misfeatures. I am actually optimistic that in another dozen years or so Wayland might be pretty nice, but I certainly wouldn't consider it an examplar today.

dijit 5y ago

I don’t care about philosophy; I don’t like being forced and I don’t like opaque systems where they aren’t required. SystemD is essentially forced (for better or worse, not gonna argue) because it is a hard dependency for certain software and tightly integrated with other tools in the systemd ecosystem It is opaque because I cannot read, modify or understand what it’s doing without breaking out gdb, heaven forbid I want to alter its behavior in a less than approved way. This leads to weird situations like the MySQL unit executing a bash script to run: because systemd has limited preflight checking compared to alternatives. Before someone claims I want sysvinit back: No, I don’t want that. I would simply prefer systemd to be smaller so that we can replace it with something better or more tailored should the need arise. We’re locking ourselves in to prototype level software (which we best into working semi decently) with obstinate leadership team who deny any faults.

eadmund 5y ago
> It is opaque because I cannot read, modify or understand what it’s doing without breaking out gdb, heaven forbid I want to alter its behavior in a less than approved way. In this respect I think that systemd is really a victim of the Unix kernel/shell style, where 'kernel' is read expansively to mean 'everything in C' and 'shell' is read to mean '/bin/sh'. The problem is that where shell is easily examinable and understandable for most technical folks, compiled C simply isn't (yeah, yeah, we all know someone who can debug in assembler; that guy ain't me). It would have been nice to have had one system, with a typesafe compiled language. Scrutable, fast and safe. We have an example with emacs: one can always just M-. to a function's definition (even in the C core …). It's a real pity that systemd hadn't been written in Common Lisp or some similar language.