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Gnome's part of the play to make it painful for other distros to avoid Systemd, which does concern ~all enterprise customers. And I'm sure some of those enterpr
by bamfly 3y ago
Gnome's part of the play to make it painful for other distros to avoid Systemd, which does concern ~all enterprise customers. And I'm sure some of those enterprise customers are paying for graphical workstations, besides, even if it's a minority.
[EDIT] If I'm not communicating this well, consider: if Red Hat steers several key projects that basically all other serious distros are stuck with (in no small part due to Red Hat maneuvering that sure looks like it was designed to bring this situation about on purpose), how can another vendor ever be anything more than a knock-off of Red Hat? Ubuntu tried to fight them on each of these points, and others, and lost every time. Result: if you're running Ubuntu, much of your system is defined by, and the future development of it steered by, Red Hat. You're practically running a Red Hat knock-off, aside from their dead-man-walking FlatPack competitor, Snap. May as well just pay for support from a budget RHEL vendor... oh, wait, those just got cut off, guess you'll be paying Red Hat. It dramatically increases their moat and the cost of building a credible competitor that's not basically just off-brand Red Hat with less ability to steer the future of the platform.
- charcircuit 3y agosystemd makes enterprise customer's lives easier. It's more reliable and it's easier to write your own units and timers than what came before.
- bamfly 3y agoSystemd's a lot more than an init system, and that's no accident. Red Hat now determines where Linux goes in some very important ways, and I think they believe they've finally got a solid lock on that, after years of effort, if they're making this move. Why go with a competitor (if you're a paying customer, which is who matters) that's just following in Red Hat's wake? And now, the options for RHEL-in-a-different-label will be gone. Who's left? Nobody, you're gonna pay Red Hat or eat extra (perceived, if not actual) risk. [EDIT] Nb that for the above it doesn't even matter if Systemd's better than the pile of interchangeable daemons and programs it replaced. I have opinions on that, but it's irrelevant to Red Hat's market maneuvers, aside from that it was important to them that it not be easy & safe to cleanly replace, in part or whole.
- sho_hn 3y agoHave you looked at 2022/23 commit logs for systemd and matched those authors to employers? (Preview: It's mostly Microsoft, Meta and Suse.)
- progmetaldev 3y agoI think that's why this current issue is more relevant than ever. Red Hat is burning goodwill they had, which is going to eventually start to cut into the types of decisions they used to be able to make when they had more community "power". I've always enjoyed using Debian (or Debian-based) systems than Red Hat (or Red Hat-based) systems, and was unhappy when I had to re-learn init scripts, but at this point in time Systemd just seems to be easier with some features being "free" to restart or figure out systems that don't restart automatically.
- _ea1k 3y agoThe funny thing is that it looks like most of the decisions leading to that outcome have been overwhelmingly coincidental.
- bamfly 3y agoI would be very surprised if it's a coincidence that Systemd's as difficult to avoid, if you're building a Linux distro, as it now is, nor a coincidence that it's been going NIH all over the rest of the system ever since Gnome was leveraged to speed up its adoption. The point is to make it difficult to offer a credible enterprise Linux distro that's not full of Red Hat-steered software in key places, turning you into a cheap knock-off of Red Hat with little say in what happens to the software you're providing, in terms of future development. It now costs a lot more money to get out of Red Hat's shadow & control, as a would-be Red Hat competitor—they're not just another distro among many, they run the damn show.