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A couple years ago, absolutely. To decide whether to generally hate systemd, and with what intensity, you should follow a curve that decreases proportionally wi

by tux3 4y ago

A couple years ago, absolutely. To decide whether to generally hate systemd, and with what intensity, you should follow a curve that decreases proportionally with how long ago the change was made, and that starts as high as the multiplication of how much churn it causes times how old the thing it replaced was, all of which is of course multiplied again against the buggyness curve When pipewire replaced pulse, despite pulse being well established and a core desktop component, there was very little churn and few bugs. People not impacted did not mind at all that a major component was changed, or that it did many things and bundled three completely different protocols into one, arguably not very reminiscent of Unix Philosophy™ I would confidently predict that a change as large as systemd, to a component as old, and that causes as much churn (rewriting, relearning) would follow a roughly similar hate curve, only distinguishing itself by whether it was more buggy or less buggy than the predecessor. It's churn people hate, not change. The lesson I learned is that you can make large changes to the system, it's only hated when it forces humans changes.

alxlaz 4y ago
It's worth remembering that much of the churn was caused not by having to rewrite configuration, but by the multitude of bugs that plagued systemd early on, and the way they were treated did not help. systemd upstream was extremely difficult to work with and made a lot of people reluctant to embrace change, because when something didn't work -- which we all understood was natural for software developed in the open -- you were pretty much screwed. Shell scripts and duct tape were bad but it could take less time to fix something than it took to get people "up there" to admit that they're really looking at a bug, not a feature. I ran systemd very early on because it gave me some things I liked from SMF but I completely understand why so many people hated it. It's a (suite of) program(s) with good ideas that was hampered by extremely poor maintainership and relation with other open source projects.
how_gauche 4y ago
Pipewire broke me lots of times during its development and rollout, and that's okay, because new software has bugs and in some of my other use cases "hey it's a lot better than Jack". What I'm not going to do is carry a grudge against the maintainer for decades? I've been using Linux since Slackware installed from a pile of floppy disks. I'm extremely happy with systemd (desktop and server) and view it as one of the most important UX advancements ever made in the Linux sysadmin space. It replaced a smorgasbord of broken nonsense with a unified and thoughtful system that is objectively superior to what it replaced. I suspect a lot of the extreme reaction to systemd is not just resistance to change, but based on an emotional attachment to the rag-tag heterogeneity it made obsolete.

by tux3 4y ago

alxlaz 4y ago

It's worth remembering that much of the churn was caused not by having to rewrite configuration, but by the multitude of bugs that plagued systemd early on, and the way they were treated did not help. systemd upstream was extremely difficult to work with and made a lot of people reluctant to embrace change, because when something didn't work -- which we all understood was natural for software developed in the open -- you were pretty much screwed. Shell scripts and duct tape were bad but it could take less time to fix something than it took to get people "up there" to admit that they're really looking at a bug, not a feature. I ran systemd very early on because it gave me some things I liked from SMF but I completely understand why so many people hated it. It's a (suite of) program(s) with good ideas that was hampered by extremely poor maintainership and relation with other open source projects.

how_gauche 4y ago

Pipewire broke me lots of times during its development and rollout, and that's okay, because new software has bugs and in some of my other use cases "hey it's a lot better than Jack". What I'm not going to do is carry a grudge against the maintainer for decades? I've been using Linux since Slackware installed from a pile of floppy disks. I'm extremely happy with systemd (desktop and server) and view it as one of the most important UX advancements ever made in the Linux sysadmin space. It replaced a smorgasbord of broken nonsense with a unified and thoughtful system that is objectively superior to what it replaced. I suspect a lot of the extreme reaction to systemd is not just resistance to change, but based on an emotional attachment to the rag-tag heterogeneity it made obsolete.