6 ms·

The fact that systemd continues to get hate, ~15 years after mass adoption, is a cultural phenomenon worth understanding. Benno Rice of freebsd gave a super int

The fact that systemd continues to get hate, ~15 years after mass adoption, is a cultural phenomenon worth understanding. Benno Rice of freebsd gave a super interesting talk about this: The Tragedy of systemd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

jeroenhd 1y ago
I can only imagine how long the Wayland haters will be writing blogs once LTS distro start shipping Wayland-first desktops. Looking at the whole upstart/systemd drama, I'm guessing we'll hit the 2k38 bug before they'll find something new to write about.
- jlarocco 1y ago
  It's gas lighting to equate the two at this point. Systemd is strictly better than what came before it, while Wayland still has missing functionality and breaks a lot of use cases.
  - miladyincontrol 1y ago
    Not only is systemd strictly better, they had really extended themselves to make migrating services as simple as possible rather than assert you have to follow a new status quo entirely. Allowing services to incrementally and optionally adopt features was the key part.
    - em-bee 1y ago
      but you can adopt incrementally, thanks to XWayland. sure it's not the same, but unlike systemd vs sysv-init, you can't run two windowing systems side by side with equal privileges unless maybe you have two monitors and graphic cards. one has to be the one that controls the screen. and the other must necessarily run as a client inside it. wayland-on-X may have been possible, but it would have limited waylands capabilities and development. i am willing to bet that there are systemd haters out there that love wayland and would make the exact reverse claim.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
        > but you can adopt incrementally, thanks to XWayland. Wayland's weakest point is a11y and automation tools, which XWayland doesn't work for. > sure it's not the same, but unlike systemd vs sysv-init, you can't run two windowing systems side by side with equal privileges unless maybe you have two monitors and graphic cards. one has to be the one that controls the screen. and the other must necessarily run as a client inside it. wayland-on-X may have been possible, but it would have limited waylands capabilities and development. You can do both, actually; XWayland can run an X server in a window, and many Wayland compositors will run in a window on top of an X11 server. It's not seamless, of course, but it does work.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    You don't understand. Everybody who doesn't like the things I like is the same: bad and stupid. Or maybe you do understand, because suddenly Wayland came up, and since you personally are annoyed by it, now this style of argument is "gaslighting." It's not "gaslighting" it's just name-calling and argument through insinuation about other people's characters, rather than substance. It's not even ad hominem, because you assume people are arguing in bad faith because of the positions they've taken, not because you know a thing about them.
- vidarh 1y ago
  As a systemd user but Wayland "hater", to me the big difference is that you can adopt systemd without losing functionality - e.g. you can configure systemd to run sysV init style init scripts if you insist and no functionality is lost. The "complaints" in the linked article, are minor and about options that can just be turned off and that are offering useful additional capabilities without taking away the old. Whereas with Wayland the effort to transition is significant and most compositors still have limitations X doesn't (and yes, I realise some of those means X is more vulnerable) - especially for people with non-standard setups. Like me. I use my own wm. I could start with ~40-50 lines of code and expand to add functionality. That made it viable. I was productively using my own wm within a few days, including to develop my wm. With Wayland, even if I start with an existing compositor, the barrier is far larger, and everything changes. I'm not going to do that. Instead I'll stick with X. The day an app I actually depend on stops supporting X, I'll just wrap those apps in a Wayland compositor running under X. And so I won't be writing blog posts about how much I hate Wayland, and hence the quotes around "hater" above. But maybe I will one day write some about how to avoid running Wayland system-wide. If Wayland gave me something I cared about, I'd take the pain and switch. It doesn't. Systemd did, so even if I hadn't liked it better than SysVinit, I'd still have just accepted the switch. If I one day give up Xorg, my expectation is that it'll be a passive-aggressive move to a custom franken-server that is enough-of-X to run modern X apps coupled to enough-of-Wayland to run the few non-X-apps I might care about directly (I suspect the first/only ones that will matter to me that might eventually drop X will be browsers), just because I'd get some of the more ardent Wayland proponents worked up.
  - r14c 1y ago
    wayback has you covered https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback the idea here is to make it easy for x-based wms to keep working like they always have!
    - vidarh 1y ago
      That's interesting, but I really would rather write something stripped down with X as the base, though. This might be a good intermediary step, though.
ziml77 1y ago
I haven't seen this before. It's very interesting so far!
egorfine 1y ago
systemd or systemd-* projects? systemd itself is metastatic. While the systemd-as-pid1 is great, IMO other parts of it grew up way too much.

jeroenhd 1y ago

I can only imagine how long the Wayland haters will be writing blogs once LTS distro start shipping Wayland-first desktops. Looking at the whole upstart/systemd drama, I'm guessing we'll hit the 2k38 bug before they'll find something new to write about.

jlarocco 1y ago
It's gas lighting to equate the two at this point. Systemd is strictly better than what came before it, while Wayland still has missing functionality and breaks a lot of use cases.
- miladyincontrol 1y ago
  Not only is systemd strictly better, they had really extended themselves to make migrating services as simple as possible rather than assert you have to follow a new status quo entirely. Allowing services to incrementally and optionally adopt features was the key part.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    but you can adopt incrementally, thanks to XWayland. sure it's not the same, but unlike systemd vs sysv-init, you can't run two windowing systems side by side with equal privileges unless maybe you have two monitors and graphic cards. one has to be the one that controls the screen. and the other must necessarily run as a client inside it. wayland-on-X may have been possible, but it would have limited waylands capabilities and development. i am willing to bet that there are systemd haters out there that love wayland and would make the exact reverse claim.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      > but you can adopt incrementally, thanks to XWayland. Wayland's weakest point is a11y and automation tools, which XWayland doesn't work for. > sure it's not the same, but unlike systemd vs sysv-init, you can't run two windowing systems side by side with equal privileges unless maybe you have two monitors and graphic cards. one has to be the one that controls the screen. and the other must necessarily run as a client inside it. wayland-on-X may have been possible, but it would have limited waylands capabilities and development. You can do both, actually; XWayland can run an X server in a window, and many Wayland compositors will run in a window on top of an X11 server. It's not seamless, of course, but it does work.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  You don't understand. Everybody who doesn't like the things I like is the same: bad and stupid. Or maybe you do understand, because suddenly Wayland came up, and since you personally are annoyed by it, now this style of argument is "gaslighting." It's not "gaslighting" it's just name-calling and argument through insinuation about other people's characters, rather than substance. It's not even ad hominem, because you assume people are arguing in bad faith because of the positions they've taken, not because you know a thing about them.
vidarh 1y ago
As a systemd user but Wayland "hater", to me the big difference is that you can adopt systemd without losing functionality - e.g. you can configure systemd to run sysV init style init scripts if you insist and no functionality is lost. The "complaints" in the linked article, are minor and about options that can just be turned off and that are offering useful additional capabilities without taking away the old. Whereas with Wayland the effort to transition is significant and most compositors still have limitations X doesn't (and yes, I realise some of those means X is more vulnerable) - especially for people with non-standard setups. Like me. I use my own wm. I could start with ~40-50 lines of code and expand to add functionality. That made it viable. I was productively using my own wm within a few days, including to develop my wm. With Wayland, even if I start with an existing compositor, the barrier is far larger, and everything changes. I'm not going to do that. Instead I'll stick with X. The day an app I actually depend on stops supporting X, I'll just wrap those apps in a Wayland compositor running under X. And so I won't be writing blog posts about how much I hate Wayland, and hence the quotes around "hater" above. But maybe I will one day write some about how to avoid running Wayland system-wide. If Wayland gave me something I cared about, I'd take the pain and switch. It doesn't. Systemd did, so even if I hadn't liked it better than SysVinit, I'd still have just accepted the switch. If I one day give up Xorg, my expectation is that it'll be a passive-aggressive move to a custom franken-server that is enough-of-X to run modern X apps coupled to enough-of-Wayland to run the few non-X-apps I might care about directly (I suspect the first/only ones that will matter to me that might eventually drop X will be browsers), just because I'd get some of the more ardent Wayland proponents worked up.
- r14c 1y ago
  wayback has you covered https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback the idea here is to make it easy for x-based wms to keep working like they always have!
  - vidarh 1y ago
    That's interesting, but I really would rather write something stripped down with X as the base, though. This might be a good intermediary step, though.

ziml77 1y ago

I haven't seen this before. It's very interesting so far!

egorfine 1y ago

systemd or systemd-* projects? systemd itself is metastatic. While the systemd-as-pid1 is great, IMO other parts of it grew up way too much.