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I think this is as good a time as any to reread "The Rise of Worse is Better". https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/R

I think this is as good a time as any to reread "The Rise of Worse is Better". https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html The article compares the Unix/C philosophy with the Lisp philosophy and concludes that Lisp is "better" (it is The Right Thing), but that Unix/C will probably end up dominating. Obviously, he was right. The article is pretty famous around the suckless, minimalist, crowd. But I think everyone who reads it takes a slightly wrong lesson from that article. The point isn't that Unix/C won because it was simple. The point is that Unix/C was simple enough to use, simple enough to implement on most available hardware and that it did everything you needed it to do. The minimalist people have turned software simplicity into the modern version of The Right Thing, and are surprised when they found out that the "worse" (more complex) thing wins. But The Right Thing will never win. The Good Enough always wins. Is Linux better than *BSD? Well *BSDs are more simple, easier to understand and reason about etc. But, at least OpenBSD, doesn't have mount --bind, so I can't use it. Case closed. And I think that's the case for most people. Linux has thing X which I need so I will use Linux, even if ideologically *BSD is imo better. Is D-Bus The Right Thing? No; but it is The Good Enough. polkit, selinux, ACLs, and so on. The most recent example I can think of is Hyprland. It is basically the only viable Wayland window manager (aside from sway). Not because it is the best designed or the simplest, or anything like that. But simply because it is the only one Good Enough to use. SystemV init was not good enough for complex service management. systemd is. systemd simply does everything you need it to do well enough. So systemd wins. Simple as. It will only be replaced when it is no longer Good Enough.

formerly_proven 2y ago
> The most recent example I can think of is Hyprland. It is basically the only viable Wayland window manager (aside from sway). Not because it is the best designed or the simplest, or anything like that. But simply because it is the only one Good Enough to use. I'd wager the vast majority of (non-embedded / single-purpose) Wayland deployments are gnome and KDE.
- serbuvlad 2y ago
  Obviously, but I'm talking about bare window managers, not DEs. Alternatives to i3, awesomewm etc. Different niche.
  - flkiwi 2y ago
    River is very good but a niche in a niche. Telling that ive been using hyprland though. Part of the problem with all of them is less the wm and more knowing what parts you need. Not so much bars as portals. I'm vaguely surprised hyprland doesn't have a "good enough" batteries included config and documentation.
    - serbuvlad 2y ago
      Hyprland does have an extremely useful "Useful Utilities"[1] section on the wiki. You simply install everything from the "Must-Have" page, then go through the other pages and install everything you want and by the end you have a complete and functional desktop. For every component, there is a good description of how to use it in Hyprland. I simply followed that guide, remapped some shortcuts, copied some guy's waybar config from GitHub, and, well, did little else, and had a perfectly functional Hyprland desktop that I used virtually unchanged for ~six months. Only recently got into ricing it more, and only to the extent that now all my components (app launcher, notification manager, waybar etc.) use the same color theme. [1]: https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/ https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/
- t43562 2y ago
  They might be Raspberry Pi which doesn't use gnome or kde! :-)
actionfromafar 2y ago
Exactly, for some values of "good enough". (Unfortunately IMNSHO) Systemd cannot be toppled by all-out assault. It must be subverted. Looking forward to reimplementations and/or shims which provide the Systemd API but are reimplementations. Something like Wine, where in the analogy systemd is the Microsoft Win32 API and we want to be able to run systemd "enabled" software on something else. Or at least re-compile it. Wine also started with an incredible amount of stubs which did nothing, but that was often enough for many programs to work anyway.
- serbuvlad 2y ago
  Yeah. Exactly. It's also how Wayland and Pipewire managed to win: by being backwards compatible with X and Pulseaudio, while also overcoming their shortcomings. The problem is that if the only complaint with systemd is that it's too complex, any backwards compatible alternative will necessarily be as complex as systemd + the new thing (at least in terms of complexity of interface). If there are actual technical deficiencies of systemd, then sure, maybe such a backwards compatible alternative might be in order. Also, everything expands in time. Wine may have started out with many stubs, but now we're at the point of implementing Windows-y APIs in the kernel with the sole goal of improving wine performance (NTSYNC).
  - CRConrad 2y ago
    > The problem is that if the only complaint with systemd is that it's too complex As I understand it, that isn't the only, nor even the main, complaint with systemd. On the contrary, the main complaint with systemd is that, like strangler vine (kudzu?), it's spreading everywhere, taking over functions that it originally had nothing to do with, and forcing ever more unrelated things to adapt to systemd -- thereby making them much less portable away from systemd; to something that doesn't use it. It's like the old debate about "BTW, you should call it GNU/Linux, because..." is sooo yesterday: Nowadays it's systemd/Linux -- and well on its way to becoming systemd-OS, with the kernel a mere afterthought, soon to be if not replaced at least easily replacable. Sure, that may not bother you or most systemd fans, but one can't help wonder: Do you even realise that this is what you're condoning, or even actively advocating? Maybe it would bother you, if you realised it. (Also, the whole "strangler vine" thing, when deliberately applied, used to have a name: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Now, I can't really swear that it is being deliberately applied here... But do we really dare to blithely assume it's just a coincidence that the creator of systemd so naturally found a home at the company the expression was coined for?)
einpoklum 2y ago
D-Bus is good enough for all sorts of things. But you absolutely don't need a behemoth like systemd to use D-Bus. A D-Bus communication option can be added to existing programs and utilities, or new ones could be fashioned for which it is a central mode of operation; and still there would have been no an ever-growing pile of centrally-maintained and inter-dependent artifacts. As for SystemV... as I mentioned in another comment - in hindsight, that was not the issue. There were and are SystemV alternatives [1]. One can even write one that uses D-Bus in an opt-in fashion, to foster other facilities' use of it. The init system excuse is very much like the stone in the fable of the stone soup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup - it's what gets the vagabond's foot in the door, and is the first ingredient for the soup. But actually, the stone carried no significance, and the resulting soup is pretty much the same thing as without the stone part. [1] : ruint, OpenRC, launchd, s6, nosh, finit, procd, upstart etc. See brief description and links at https://alternativeto.net/software/sysvinit/ https://alternativeto.net/software/sysvinit/ for example.
- einpoklum 2y ago
  s/SystemV/sysvinit/ and one more thing about that: For PC users and "vanilla" machine setups - sysvinit, weirdly, still works fine. Startup is quick, and developers don't live in pain making it work. Of course it is kind of lame design-wise, but it's not even that we just _had_ to replace it - we've still not reached even that point.
EasyMark 2y ago
cosmic is going to be a great wayland windows manager.

formerly_proven 2y ago

> The most recent example I can think of is Hyprland. It is basically the only viable Wayland window manager (aside from sway). Not because it is the best designed or the simplest, or anything like that. But simply because it is the only one Good Enough to use. I'd wager the vast majority of (non-embedded / single-purpose) Wayland deployments are gnome and KDE.

serbuvlad 2y ago
Obviously, but I'm talking about bare window managers, not DEs. Alternatives to i3, awesomewm etc. Different niche.
- flkiwi 2y ago
  River is very good but a niche in a niche. Telling that ive been using hyprland though. Part of the problem with all of them is less the wm and more knowing what parts you need. Not so much bars as portals. I'm vaguely surprised hyprland doesn't have a "good enough" batteries included config and documentation.
  - serbuvlad 2y ago
    Hyprland does have an extremely useful "Useful Utilities"[1] section on the wiki. You simply install everything from the "Must-Have" page, then go through the other pages and install everything you want and by the end you have a complete and functional desktop. For every component, there is a good description of how to use it in Hyprland. I simply followed that guide, remapped some shortcuts, copied some guy's waybar config from GitHub, and, well, did little else, and had a perfectly functional Hyprland desktop that I used virtually unchanged for ~six months. Only recently got into ricing it more, and only to the extent that now all my components (app launcher, notification manager, waybar etc.) use the same color theme. [1]: https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/ https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/
t43562 2y ago
They might be Raspberry Pi which doesn't use gnome or kde! :-)

actionfromafar 2y ago

Exactly, for some values of "good enough". (Unfortunately IMNSHO) Systemd cannot be toppled by all-out assault. It must be subverted. Looking forward to reimplementations and/or shims which provide the Systemd API but are reimplementations. Something like Wine, where in the analogy systemd is the Microsoft Win32 API and we want to be able to run systemd "enabled" software on something else. Or at least re-compile it. Wine also started with an incredible amount of stubs which did nothing, but that was often enough for many programs to work anyway.

serbuvlad 2y ago
Yeah. Exactly. It's also how Wayland and Pipewire managed to win: by being backwards compatible with X and Pulseaudio, while also overcoming their shortcomings. The problem is that if the only complaint with systemd is that it's too complex, any backwards compatible alternative will necessarily be as complex as systemd + the new thing (at least in terms of complexity of interface). If there are actual technical deficiencies of systemd, then sure, maybe such a backwards compatible alternative might be in order. Also, everything expands in time. Wine may have started out with many stubs, but now we're at the point of implementing Windows-y APIs in the kernel with the sole goal of improving wine performance (NTSYNC).
- CRConrad 2y ago
  > The problem is that if the only complaint with systemd is that it's too complex As I understand it, that isn't the only, nor even the main, complaint with systemd. On the contrary, the main complaint with systemd is that, like strangler vine (kudzu?), it's spreading everywhere, taking over functions that it originally had nothing to do with, and forcing ever more unrelated things to adapt to systemd -- thereby making them much less portable away from systemd; to something that doesn't use it. It's like the old debate about "BTW, you should call it GNU/Linux, because..." is sooo yesterday: Nowadays it's systemd/Linux -- and well on its way to becoming systemd-OS, with the kernel a mere afterthought, soon to be if not replaced at least easily replacable. Sure, that may not bother you or most systemd fans, but one can't help wonder: Do you even realise that this is what you're condoning, or even actively advocating? Maybe it would bother you, if you realised it. (Also, the whole "strangler vine" thing, when deliberately applied, used to have a name: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Now, I can't really swear that it is being deliberately applied here... But do we really dare to blithely assume it's just a coincidence that the creator of systemd so naturally found a home at the company the expression was coined for?)

einpoklum 2y ago

D-Bus is good enough for all sorts of things. But you absolutely don't need a behemoth like systemd to use D-Bus. A D-Bus communication option can be added to existing programs and utilities, or new ones could be fashioned for which it is a central mode of operation; and still there would have been no an ever-growing pile of centrally-maintained and inter-dependent artifacts. As for SystemV... as I mentioned in another comment - in hindsight, that was not the issue. There were and are SystemV alternatives [1]. One can even write one that uses D-Bus in an opt-in fashion, to foster other facilities' use of it. The init system excuse is very much like the stone in the fable of the stone soup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup - it's what gets the vagabond's foot in the door, and is the first ingredient for the soup. But actually, the stone carried no significance, and the resulting soup is pretty much the same thing as without the stone part. [1] : ruint, OpenRC, launchd, s6, nosh, finit, procd, upstart etc. See brief description and links at https://alternativeto.net/software/sysvinit/ https://alternativeto.net/software/sysvinit/ for example.

einpoklum 2y ago
s/SystemV/sysvinit/ and one more thing about that: For PC users and "vanilla" machine setups - sysvinit, weirdly, still works fine. Startup is quick, and developers don't live in pain making it work. Of course it is kind of lame design-wise, but it's not even that we just _had_ to replace it - we've still not reached even that point.

EasyMark 2y ago

cosmic is going to be a great wayland windows manager.