4 ms·

> D-Bus was introduced by GNOME folks about 20 years ago. For software made only 20 years ago, as opposed to 40 like X, it's surprisingly almost equally as bad.

> D-Bus was introduced by GNOME folks about 20 years ago. For software made only 20 years ago, as opposed to 40 like X, it's surprisingly almost equally as bad. That's not a surprise. The author of systemd, for instance, is working for Microsoft. Suddenly all those changes to the Linux ecosystem make a lot of sense. It became a corporate commodity, from A to Z. And when that is your objective, it kind of makes sense to have a unified system, even if it is crap.

awesome_dude 10mo ago
Wherever they might be working now.. isn't really relevant to the project > Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,[2] started a project to replace Linux's conventional System V init in 2010.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History
- the_why_of_y 10mo ago
  > Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd This is wrong, Kay Sievers was working for Novell/SuSE at that time, see https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs
  - awesome_dude 10mo ago
    A note about this conversation. and your improvements has been added to the "talk" page - Can I recommend that you make the appropriate change to the actual page? (Mostly because 1) I don't think that the talk page will be paid any attention during the next... millenia.. and 2) I think that you should make the change because you knew that it was incorrect, and have receipts)
    - the_why_of_y 10mo ago
      Thanks for adding a note, but I can't edit Wikipedia as I do not have an account. Let's hope it will be noticed.
bflesch 10mo ago
I'm vocal critic of microsoft but systemd/wayland was one of the best things to happen to linux. If you can improve upon it, then feel free to implement a better solution.
- ptx 10mo ago
  A solution to what? Aside from details of the implementation, one can also disagree with the framing of the problem and scope of the solution. Sure, we're free to implement an alternative solution for doing DNS resolution and IPC and logging and time synchronization and job scheduling and service monitoring and ... but should there be a single solution to all of these things at once?
  - bflesch 10mo ago
    All of the things you mention are interdependent, as resource and service management is the core of it all. I'm convinced that they set out to design somethign that has a scope which is as small as possible, but then noticed that interfacing with legacy-but-established open source software was extremely difficult. I'm very thankful for systemd covering more and more bases because the "common" alternatives for many problems might be stable but they are often really bad to configure, maintain and debug - the ergonomics in non-default use cases have a lot of potential for improvement. And what can you do if the maintainer is not responsive to the kind of improvements you would need to make the software ready for the next decades? Many times I have forked things and tried to refactor their technical debt so a new feature can be implemented without making it an even bigger hack, and after that you just want to delete it all and start from scratch with a "proper" setup. So I can understand the perspective of the systemd developers and the pain they had to go through simply on a technical level, not even thinking about the huge flamewars on mailing lists with some people. Open source has big social dynamics, and a certain type of person is attracted to being "leader" or maintainer even though they are not as technical as I would wish them to be. I've had the painful experience with having to explain security vulnerabilities to some of them and my idealistic illusion of open source project governance received a good grounding in reality. On top of this imo the documentation of systemd is really good.
  - 10mo ago

awesome_dude 10mo ago

Wherever they might be working now.. isn't really relevant to the project > Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,[2] started a project to replace Linux's conventional System V init in 2010.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History

the_why_of_y 10mo ago
> Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd This is wrong, Kay Sievers was working for Novell/SuSE at that time, see https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html#faqs
- awesome_dude 10mo ago
  A note about this conversation. and your improvements has been added to the "talk" page - Can I recommend that you make the appropriate change to the actual page? (Mostly because 1) I don't think that the talk page will be paid any attention during the next... millenia.. and 2) I think that you should make the change because you knew that it was incorrect, and have receipts)
  - the_why_of_y 10mo ago
    Thanks for adding a note, but I can't edit Wikipedia as I do not have an account. Let's hope it will be noticed.

bflesch 10mo ago

I'm vocal critic of microsoft but systemd/wayland was one of the best things to happen to linux. If you can improve upon it, then feel free to implement a better solution.

ptx 10mo ago
A solution to what? Aside from details of the implementation, one can also disagree with the framing of the problem and scope of the solution. Sure, we're free to implement an alternative solution for doing DNS resolution and IPC and logging and time synchronization and job scheduling and service monitoring and ... but should there be a single solution to all of these things at once?
- bflesch 10mo ago
  All of the things you mention are interdependent, as resource and service management is the core of it all. I'm convinced that they set out to design somethign that has a scope which is as small as possible, but then noticed that interfacing with legacy-but-established open source software was extremely difficult. I'm very thankful for systemd covering more and more bases because the "common" alternatives for many problems might be stable but they are often really bad to configure, maintain and debug - the ergonomics in non-default use cases have a lot of potential for improvement. And what can you do if the maintainer is not responsive to the kind of improvements you would need to make the software ready for the next decades? Many times I have forked things and tried to refactor their technical debt so a new feature can be implemented without making it an even bigger hack, and after that you just want to delete it all and start from scratch with a "proper" setup. So I can understand the perspective of the systemd developers and the pain they had to go through simply on a technical level, not even thinking about the huge flamewars on mailing lists with some people. Open source has big social dynamics, and a certain type of person is attracted to being "leader" or maintainer even though they are not as technical as I would wish them to be. I've had the painful experience with having to explain security vulnerabilities to some of them and my idealistic illusion of open source project governance received a good grounding in reality. On top of this imo the documentation of systemd is really good.
- 10mo ago