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Does anyone even use desktops anymore?
Who said Wayland was going to be the death? (Excluding canonical) Everyone knew X needed to be replaced and that the transition will be slow until its not.
And systemd is not that bad these days. I do think it’s more complex than it needs to be and startup is a bit slow, but that’s about it.
GNOME making the huge changes inspired the refugees to build Cinnamon and injected some sense into KDE development. Now even GNOME is getting more sensible.
systemd is not that bad these days
It never was bad, in fact it was better than the alternatives even in it’s beta releases.
I saw someone giving a talk either about Wayland and they said someone told them they “don’t like Wayland because it violates the Unix philosophy.” (Do one thing and do it well.) The speaker said they responded by asking “What one thing does X do well?”
I sure as f don’t miss x, but for the fing love of God can I get some access at the shell level to my input devices? The death of Autohotkey is killing me slowly.
It’s probably countered by the “year of the Linux desktop” claims. Keeps it in a limbo.
It’s the first time I hear systemd or wayland were spelling the death of the linux desktop (not even gonna mention gnome, it’s a choice).
There are controversies around these two, some extremely valid, some a bit over the top, but both do work adequately for the vast majority of common use cases. I’d even argue that systemd (the init process) is better as far as being user friendly. And I say “user”, not “poweruser” nor “sysadmin”. And wayland is an opportunity to clear some long-lasting backward stuff, and even though it is possible to find issue today, for regular (and new) users, it has no bearing on the usability of their system.
As a sysadmin I’ll say systemd is far better. No contest.
It’s the first time I hear systemd […] were spelling the death of […] linux
Where’ve you been? We’ve been expressing concern about its badly-built badly-architected metastatic creep for a decade of dwindling choice and competition as it slowly forced out dissent and clued concern.
Now it’s eaten autofs, DNS, cron, NTPd, and replaced them with shitty clones, and has carefully eroded our ability to recover from this mess.
Yes. But none of that is in the way of “the Linux desktop”. A more unified system with less modules and components (you know, like systemd being a solution to everything) is actually beneficial for wide spread adoption.
People hate systemd for design and philosophy but not because it keeps new people from adopting Linux.
a lot of people actually welcome wayland, systemd is the one they refuse to touch and I’ve seen less backlash against the Gnome/Systemd coupling than I anticipated!
I don’t quite get why massive Gnome changes would imply a death of Desktop Linux. There are so many great alternatives to it. It’s been many years that Gnome has been considered bad by many, and that many have used alternatives. I just think it’s positive that Gnome continue to get worse, because like that more distros may default to better alternatives to begin with.
I even liked Unity (so long as the icons weren’t on the side).
Hot take: the more Gnome shoots itself in the foot, the better for Linux.
I never understood it either. I was a user of Gnome until Gnome 3 showed up and I decided to nope out of there. It was a simple process of trying few different DE’s and I have settled on KDE and Cinnamon for when I want that old timey Gnome feeling.
It wasn’t hard to switch at all.
Tried KDE in the early days, it was all over the place. Switched to gnome when it was baked. I had been gnome for years. Every update broke and replaced plugins to make it work like I wanted. I’ve had Windows layout since’95, I have to go back and forth a lot, so muscle memory is key.
After fucking with gnome for the 90th time. I tried KDE again, it was just layed out like I wanted. No plugins, no fucking with it. The worst thing I have to do is set dolphin not to open on single click.
I see people here going well if you don’t take it as it comes you’re going to have a bad time. That’s pretty much the least Linux comment I’ve ever read. That’s OSX in a nutshell.
Yeah, really baffling direction. I ended up trying a version on gnome 3 on a Debian distro when I had a new job. It ran very slowly. Super weird. It used to be super smooth.
Gnome is awesome
I hated Gnome 3 when it came out, but it got better over the years. If you want to use it as a traditional KDE-style DE, you’re going to fight it and have a bad time. If you use it as intended, and that works for you, it’s good.
Interesting. I think they might have been my problem, I was just trying to use it tradicionally. I wonder how it’s different nowadays.
Kde is not traditional. It looks like disgusting microshit garbage. Same as cinnamon.
I don’t know why people would want to sue desktop environments that like that like garbage product made by billy gats
It was somewhat of a special situation back when Gnome 3 dropped. Ubuntu & flavours of it was still regarded as the go-to distro by many and KDE still had a somewhat damaged reputation due to KDE 3 (even though 4 was already available, however that also had some issues). Many environments we know today didn’t exist yet, so lots of people were rather distraught when Gnome broke with a lot of concepts and dropped what arguably was a horrendous DE.
Many of our current DEs are Gnome 2 or 3 forks (MATE, Cinnamon, Budgie, and back then also Unity), made exactly because of this whole debacle.
In my experience it was KDE 3 that was praised, while 4 was shunned for being too bloated, and trying to be too much like Windows Aero
Yeah, it’s been interesting seeing all the alternatives popping up. I think I’ve met a lot of people who really liked MATE.
I’ve mostly kept using XFCE. But before I had i3 only.
All is better than the shit MS is pulling, from mass surveilance on their “business” apps to making an OS with ads included that you have to spent hours to make it useful.
While Linux has many flavors that just works for 80% of the people that dont have super specific use cases.
I like systemd
Systemdeez nuts
Most people do
There are places I wouldn’t use it but for most systems it makes things simpler
OOL: what’s the beef with systemd?
I’ll just copy my comment from the other day.
Some people think it handles too many low-level systems. It’s a valid concern because if systemd itself were to become compromised (like Xz Utils was) or a serious bug was introduced, all of the userland processes would be affected. People who are stuck in the 90s and think that the Unix philosophy is still relevant will also point out that it’s a needlessly complex software suite and we should all go back to writing initscripts in bash. The truth is, it’s complex because it needs to solve a complex problem.
Red Hat, the owner of systemd, has also had its fair share of controversies. It’s a company that many distrust.
Ultimately, those whose opinion mattered the most decided that systemd’s benefits outweigh the risks and drawbacks. Debian held a vote to determine the project’s future regarding init systems. Arch Linux replaced initscripts because systemd was simply better, and replicating and maintaining its features (like starting services once their dependencies are running) with initscripts would’ve been unjustifiably complicated.
it does too many things, thus going against the unix philosopy of “do one thing and do it well”
Systemd does one thing, it manages services, and does so reliably, without messing around with spagettified shell scripts, with a fuckload of options, and all of that easily is configurable by dropping in files without editing stuff that arrived from the package manager. Seems pretti “do one (complex) thing and do it well”
If you add other things built around it, it can do more. For example, if you install systemd-nspawn it can start and stop containers like it starts and stops services.
Other things that you think of as systemd are entirely separate things (like systemd-networkd) that are just built around systemd. You don’t have to use them if you don’t like.
On the other hand, you know what does not follow the Unix philosophy? The Xserver, which manages screens, graphic acceleration, input devices, printers, remoting, etc. And it doesn’t even do it well
I need systemd-run to start a process in my startup scripts (that are a systemd oneshot service) so that the process won’t get killed when the startup scripts have run (subshells, nohup, … still keep the same systemd cgroup so get killed with the tree).
I need journalctl to get output from services, so basically every system and user process I didn’t explicitly start in a console. I don’t even know how to get info from systemd stuff in any other way, as they don’t have alternate logging facilities to my knowledge.
Systemd also ate my fstab at some point and translates mounts into services, but I haven’t really looked into that.I think there were a few more components packed into this systemd core. Without the init system/servixe manager, logging, … you can’t really use systemd stuff including parts of that core.
Past that, things like networkd, resolved, … are very modular in my experience.
I can imagine running resolved under a different init system, and I have migrated both to and from resolved on systemd systems. They do still change old paradigms, resolved replaces a file not a service for example, but they do provide adequate translation layers and backwards compatibility in most cases (Though the mounts for example has lead to me getting 5 “run daemon-reload” info messages on every execution of mount before). An issue here might be when something only supports the new systemd interface not the old stuff, say a program directly calling resolved instead of looking at resolv.conf. But I haven’t seen that, and most of those interfaces seem decent enough to implement into systemd-alternatives.Maybe someome who actually tried cherrypicking some systemd stuff into their system can provide some more experience?
Fstabs gets converted into temporary unit files every time systems reloads config files (reboot or daemon-reload) so you can just keep using it like you always did. Actually it’s the systemd suggested way to manage mountpoints unless you need something advanced that fstabs can’t do.
My problem is 1) how do I revert to dedicated mount, and 2) mainly that I want to edit fstab, and mount without having to reload systemd. Dedicated mount doesn’t need a reload, it simply pulls config from fstab at time of call.
I also don’t see why you would ever want to reload service files due to editing fstab, it seems dumb in both directions. Those two systems should just be decoupled.
Fstab is still there untouched, it’s the temporary units files that get replaced at reload.
The mount program works as normally, if you edit fstab and then
mount -ait will work as expected, it will just warn you that systemd is not aware of the change. It will reload it anyway at the next boot.daemon-reload is not daemon-restart, it just makes systemd re-read the configuration to make it aware of the changes, but the services don’t get restarted. Some services (e.g. nginx) can re-read their confuration without restarting, those services are also made aware of the changes when reloading and can be reloaded individually.
You can edit any systemd units using
systemctl editso you don’t need to reload (fstab is not a systemd unit)
See also: the Linux Kernel
Shouldn’t init systems control services and processes?
There is no such philosophy and it was never practiced.
Unix is where the model of linux commands originates, and those commands absolutely embody the unix philosophy.
Systemd is a bit like busybox in that many formerly standalone comands turn into symlinks to systemctl.
Take a look at shutdown for example.That’s not true at all? I don’t think they use multicall binaries and both systemd-boot and udev (I don’t remember any other util that became part of systemd) are still separate. And every other utility under systemd umbrella is separate as well.
As for philosophy, no unix ever even tried in any way to embody this.
shutdown, reboot, … are symlinks on multiple different systemd repos, I have no reason to believe that is not the systemd standard.
systemd is not moving all it does into a single binary, obviously. Others already mentioned that and a bit further up I mentioned some systemd components that can be isolated too.
GNU posix is one extreme, and busybox the other, and the accusation is that the core of systemd sits too close to busybox, and the other projects might too group together things into fewer binaries that used to be multiple independent commands.
As for the core, I think that constitutes: services, logging (journald), cron+anacron (timers), blocking (systemd-inhibit), and mount.
I am probably missing some there. Timers does not interfere with other cron, but it is there whether you like it or not. Those components also come bundled with otherwise optional linux features like cgroup which do complicate using other posix tools with systemd, as you get unexpected results (like nohup not working).
It’s definitely a thing.
I don’t disagree that term itself exists of course. But it was and is bullshit that those philosophers themselves never actually followed.
It’s impressive how much hatred linux gets, by people who generally try to say it’s insignificant and unnoticeable.
But eh, better them say that it’s going to die, than with Windows where everyone agreed to say that it was dead after 7 and stopped having any expectations.
It’s even more impressive how much hate Linux gets from people that love it
We call that “Star Wars Syndrome.”
ayo this the bigger than sign
ok came back im stupid
Not only that but also while those changes were mostly received well in the end you can still use a no systemd, x11, MATE distro if you’re genuinely unhappy with them
Death is just a feeling.
Love, too.
Linux is made of death. It is The Death.
woah michael jackson is looking kinda goofy these days
and who was saying those things were going to kill the linux desktop? i only ever saw anyone talking about how that stuff would mean the year of the linux desktop
A loud part of the community don’t like change or having to learn new things. Well regurgitate negative points from 15 years ago not based on their own exspirences.Have issues with small projects popping up all over due to it being open source. Weird for Linux users I know almost as if you don’t have to use anything you don’t want to in your own system.
What’s with the crackhead? I would think a picture of a zombie (or SOME member of the undead, anyway) would be a better fit.
That’s Michael Jackson from the Thriller music video as a zombie.
Ah, ok. He was a middle-aged elf by the time I ever saw him. Also the lack of necrosis doesn’t exactly scream “zombie”.
Yeah he was supposed to still look good for the ladies…
