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> XLennart > XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart” tries to install his malicious init sys

> XLennart > XLennart is a modification of the arcade game XBill. An evil and unpopular computer hacker named “Lennart” tries to install his malicious init system on various BSD and Linux systems. Like in XBill, the player has to hit him and restore infected machines. Hah! Poor Poettering tho. He really gets a lot of hate '=(

supriyo-biswas 3y ago
The hate towards Lennart is truly regrettable. I like how systemd has enabled managing and securing daemons easy (Before=, After=, CPUQuota=, ProtectSystem=, ReadWritePaths= to name a few of them.)
- panzi 3y ago
  Never had any problem with systemd, but I did have problems with PulseAudio — the high latency audio server. (These days it seems to work good enough, still looking forward to PipeWire.)
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Pipewire is ready. Solved all my bluetooth headphone troubles too, I haven't had a single audio frustration since I switched. I believe pipewire is already the default in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora
    - yakubin 3y ago
      Yeah. It's actually funny how Pipewire and Wayland turned out. Wayland was supposed to be ready for general use "any day now" since 2011. It's 2023 and the situation looks thus: <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers>. Whereas Pipewire seemed to have scarcely any marketing, instead it just happened. I remember reading about it for the first time at some point and started wondering whether Debian, a conservative distro, turned it on or whether I should change a setting to opt into it. I looked at htop and lo and behold: Pipewire was there. So it happened before I even heard about it, without a single hiccup, so smoothly that I didn't even notice the sound system changed.
      - rcxdude 3y ago
        I think large part because pipewire was basically just going in with the attitude of fixing the underlying system while also supporting all the existing interfaces, which made it very much a drop-in replacement which could support pretty much all the common usecases. Wheras wayland is a big 'lets change the interface' deal (probably a good call actually) which didn't really seem to understand that it couldn't just punt on all the existing usecases for the old interface (I think there was some belief it could just be offloaded to compositor-specific APIs, which is a terrible idea guaranteed to make app developers hate you and irritate users when every combination of app and compositor acts differently), so you get a lot of breakage while people beg them to actually add standard interfaces for things.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    Back in the day I got into the habit of removing avahi and pulseaudio when I could because all they gave me were issues. Only later did I learn they were both by Poettering. When systemd was pushed, I started getting a whole new class of issues (due to renaming of drive and interface names - a problem systemd was designed to fix) which I never had in my entire Linux life. Nowadays it's not like that. Though I still get some systemd task running on a timer or indefinetely keeping the system from booting or shutting down. When the timer ends you realize it wasn't an essential thing after all. And from a few posts of his I had read when systemd was being introduced one thing struck me. All of the posts of his that I read where he was defending something of his, the post would be full of blatant straw man arguments. It was very odd.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  It's more about his personality than about his software I think. Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making gnome dependent on it was not cool. This made me dislike systemd and Poettering even though it's not bad as such. I just don't like to be forced into things. I don't hate him but I'm not exactly positive towards him either. I use FreeBSD now anyway because I think commercial influence over Linux is too great. So I'm admittedly an outlier.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    It's more about his personality than about his software I think. as someone who has met him in person, i have to reject that. there are arrogant and uncomfortable developers. he is not one of them.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making gnome dependent on it was not cool. Can anyone link me to a history of this? I've heard this a number of times but haven't seen anything factual (i.e: that answers "what were the technical benefits to gnome?"). It seems pretty reasonable to me that Gnome devs would see some nice features/integrations that they wanted to use, and decided it was worth it. It also seems plausible that they would have used gnome to strong-arm in systemd. My experience tells me that the former is a lot more likely, but I'd like to investigate the situation.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - always2slow 3y ago
      https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ - I dunno if there's anything about GNOME in there but that's got a lot of info
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Lennart earned himself a reputation for thinking his own shit doesn't stink, closing bugs against his software as NOTABUG or WONTFIX even when his software was flagrantly at fault. Here is one particularly egregious and clearcut example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237 tl;dr: a systemd service configured to run as a user who's username started with a digit (e.g. the username '0day') would instead run as root. Lennart initially closes the bug report and refuses to fix it because he thought such usernames weren't acceptable, despite the kernel and most linux utilities permitting it and handling it gracefully. A good engineer with a shred of humility would take this report seriously, even if he thought other systems shouldn't be permitting the circumstance. To see the lead engineer of a project so important to linux take such a childish stance on a security-related bug was infuriating and demoralizing. This is just one example, which didn't take anybody by surprise. It's his modus operandi. May the gods have mercy on the Microsoft engineers who now have to call him a coworker.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  None of that required systemd's basic architecture. That is what is truly regrettable.
  - lmm 3y ago
    Forcing adoption probably did though. Better alternatives that played nice with a unix-style system (e.g. runit) existed for years, but since distributions weren't forcing them, services mostly didn't bother integrating with them.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      So what? If a distro doesn't feel any need to adopt runit, so what? But today, you essentially can't have a system without systemd, because it's no longer just a matter of "if you don't want it, don't use it" because all the upstream packages have now changed to depend on it, and now it's a huge job to artificially hack them all back to sysv-init. And as bad as that all is, what makes it all nuclear worse, is the complete disregard and inconsideration for anyone raising that objection.
      - account42 3y ago
        > But today, you essentially can't have a system without systemd Thankfully the Gentoo maintainers still make this easy.
      - always2slow 3y ago
        Void linux is based on runit and is by far the best distro I've ever used after 25 years of distro hopping. (FWIW I've used linux since slackware 3.0)
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  Those PascalCase keys are an unfortunate signal, and reminds one of the Windows registry. "Mixed plus case-sensitive" names are the worst of both worlds—hard to get right unless one uses copy/paste. Unix tradition (see AOUP) and perhaps supervisord precedent recommend names that need to be user-typeable should be lower/snake case: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/186313/lowercase-in-linux-file-names https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1863... Not a huge deal, and keys are not filenames. But it shows a lack of detail-orientation for someone working at such a fundamental level in the OS.
freedomben 3y ago
Ha! I saw XLennart also and came here to Ctrl+f and see if anyone else had commented. Indeed, it's wild to see the level of systemd hate that there is. Hopefully Lennart takes it in good humor. I would in his shoes. Can't take ourselves too seriously
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Last I heard, he now works for Microsoft.
  - eadmund 3y ago
    Some might wonder if he’s been effectively working for Microsoft all along. I don’t think that’s really fair. Both PulseAudio & Systemd are trying to do something really useful and make things better than they were before … but man some of the architecture & design choices along the way are regrettable.
    - hulitu 3y ago
      Pulseaudio was a program which, for some years, only worked, if you killed it. Start firefox, try to play a youtube video, does not play audio, kill pulseaudio, sound works.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]

supriyo-biswas 3y ago

The hate towards Lennart is truly regrettable. I like how systemd has enabled managing and securing daemons easy (Before=, After=, CPUQuota=, ProtectSystem=, ReadWritePaths= to name a few of them.)

panzi 3y ago
Never had any problem with systemd, but I did have problems with PulseAudio — the high latency audio server. (These days it seems to work good enough, still looking forward to PipeWire.)
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Pipewire is ready. Solved all my bluetooth headphone troubles too, I haven't had a single audio frustration since I switched. I believe pipewire is already the default in Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora
  - yakubin 3y ago
    Yeah. It's actually funny how Pipewire and Wayland turned out. Wayland was supposed to be ready for general use "any day now" since 2011. It's 2023 and the situation looks thus: <https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers>. Whereas Pipewire seemed to have scarcely any marketing, instead it just happened. I remember reading about it for the first time at some point and started wondering whether Debian, a conservative distro, turned it on or whether I should change a setting to opt into it. I looked at htop and lo and behold: Pipewire was there. So it happened before I even heard about it, without a single hiccup, so smoothly that I didn't even notice the sound system changed.
    - rcxdude 3y ago
      I think large part because pipewire was basically just going in with the attitude of fixing the underlying system while also supporting all the existing interfaces, which made it very much a drop-in replacement which could support pretty much all the common usecases. Wheras wayland is a big 'lets change the interface' deal (probably a good call actually) which didn't really seem to understand that it couldn't just punt on all the existing usecases for the old interface (I think there was some belief it could just be offloaded to compositor-specific APIs, which is a terrible idea guaranteed to make app developers hate you and irritate users when every combination of app and compositor acts differently), so you get a lot of breakage while people beg them to actually add standard interfaces for things.
- dizhn 3y ago
  Back in the day I got into the habit of removing avahi and pulseaudio when I could because all they gave me were issues. Only later did I learn they were both by Poettering. When systemd was pushed, I started getting a whole new class of issues (due to renaming of drive and interface names - a problem systemd was designed to fix) which I never had in my entire Linux life. Nowadays it's not like that. Though I still get some systemd task running on a timer or indefinetely keeping the system from booting or shutting down. When the timer ends you realize it wasn't an essential thing after all. And from a few posts of his I had read when systemd was being introduced one thing struck me. All of the posts of his that I read where he was defending something of his, the post would be full of blatant straw man arguments. It was very odd.
wkat4242 3y ago
It's more about his personality than about his software I think. Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making gnome dependent on it was not cool. This made me dislike systemd and Poettering even though it's not bad as such. I just don't like to be forced into things. I don't hate him but I'm not exactly positive towards him either. I use FreeBSD now anyway because I think commercial influence over Linux is too great. So I'm admittedly an outlier.
- em-bee 3y ago
  It's more about his personality than about his software I think. as someone who has met him in person, i have to reject that. there are arrogant and uncomfortable developers. he is not one of them.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Especially the way systemd was pushed through by making gnome dependent on it was not cool. Can anyone link me to a history of this? I've heard this a number of times but haven't seen anything factual (i.e: that answers "what were the technical benefits to gnome?"). It seems pretty reasonable to me that Gnome devs would see some nice features/integrations that they wanted to use, and decided it was worth it. It also seems plausible that they would have used gnome to strong-arm in systemd. My experience tells me that the former is a lot more likely, but I'd like to investigate the situation.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - always2slow 3y ago
    https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ - I dunno if there's anything about GNOME in there but that's got a lot of info
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Lennart earned himself a reputation for thinking his own shit doesn't stink, closing bugs against his software as NOTABUG or WONTFIX even when his software was flagrantly at fault. Here is one particularly egregious and clearcut example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237 tl;dr: a systemd service configured to run as a user who's username started with a digit (e.g. the username '0day') would instead run as root. Lennart initially closes the bug report and refuses to fix it because he thought such usernames weren't acceptable, despite the kernel and most linux utilities permitting it and handling it gracefully. A good engineer with a shred of humility would take this report seriously, even if he thought other systems shouldn't be permitting the circumstance. To see the lead engineer of a project so important to linux take such a childish stance on a security-related bug was infuriating and demoralizing. This is just one example, which didn't take anybody by surprise. It's his modus operandi. May the gods have mercy on the Microsoft engineers who now have to call him a coworker.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
None of that required systemd's basic architecture. That is what is truly regrettable.
- lmm 3y ago
  Forcing adoption probably did though. Better alternatives that played nice with a unix-style system (e.g. runit) existed for years, but since distributions weren't forcing them, services mostly didn't bother integrating with them.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    So what? If a distro doesn't feel any need to adopt runit, so what? But today, you essentially can't have a system without systemd, because it's no longer just a matter of "if you don't want it, don't use it" because all the upstream packages have now changed to depend on it, and now it's a huge job to artificially hack them all back to sysv-init. And as bad as that all is, what makes it all nuclear worse, is the complete disregard and inconsideration for anyone raising that objection.
    - account42 3y ago
      > But today, you essentially can't have a system without systemd Thankfully the Gentoo maintainers still make this easy.
    - always2slow 3y ago
      Void linux is based on runit and is by far the best distro I've ever used after 25 years of distro hopping. (FWIW I've used linux since slackware 3.0)
mixmastamyk 3y ago
Those PascalCase keys are an unfortunate signal, and reminds one of the Windows registry. "Mixed plus case-sensitive" names are the worst of both worlds—hard to get right unless one uses copy/paste. Unix tradition (see AOUP) and perhaps supervisord precedent recommend names that need to be user-typeable should be lower/snake case: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/186313/lowercase-in-linux-file-names https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1863... Not a huge deal, and keys are not filenames. But it shows a lack of detail-orientation for someone working at such a fundamental level in the OS.

freedomben 3y ago

Ha! I saw XLennart also and came here to Ctrl+f and see if anyone else had commented. Indeed, it's wild to see the level of systemd hate that there is. Hopefully Lennart takes it in good humor. I would in his shoes. Can't take ourselves too seriously

mcpackieh 3y ago
Last I heard, he now works for Microsoft.
- eadmund 3y ago
  Some might wonder if he’s been effectively working for Microsoft all along. I don’t think that’s really fair. Both PulseAudio & Systemd are trying to do something really useful and make things better than they were before … but man some of the architecture & design choices along the way are regrettable.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Pulseaudio was a program which, for some years, only worked, if you killed it. Start firefox, try to play a youtube video, does not play audio, kill pulseaudio, sound works.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]