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by digi_owl 3451 days ago
More and more systemd is becoming symptomatic of deeper divide within the Linux "community".

The split being between those that embraced Linux for being a free, in both senses, _nix unburdened by AT&T and running on commodity hardware, and those that got to know it after the dot-com crash as the L in LAMP.

The former cares for Linux as a _nix, the latter could not care less about _nix and may see it as a vestigial appendage that should have been amputated long ago.
3 comments
teddyh 3450 days ago
Let me just say that I disagree: I am squarely in the former camp – I started with SunOS 4 in 1992, learned to use the Internet before the WWW, and am a long-time GNU advocate, and I am also a professional system administrator. I like systemd just fine. In fact, I started using it at home and at work just as soon as the package became available in Debian 7 (wheezy).

I think, however, that you have a point in that some people ascribe some mystical properties to the design of _nix and _nix-like systems. I have never done this, perhaps because I remember the early days of OS/platform wars (Amiga or Atari? PC or console? Unix or VMS?), first on BBSes, then on Usenet. I also, early on, read the Unix-Haters Handbook, and I found it enlightening, even though it is not always spot-on.

I leave all die-hard advocates with this quote:

“All Software Sucks, All Hardware Sucks”

(http://www.absurdnotions.org/an20010622.gif)

(Source: (http://www.absurdnotions.org/page75.html). Start of storyline: (http://www.absurdnotions.org/page74.html))

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vidarh 3450 days ago
No, it's symptomatic of most of the Linux community having embraced systemd, and the holdouts being few and far between.
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AnonymousPlanet 3451 days ago
I'm not so sure if it really has that much to do with heritage. A lot of us like the design principles you can see in Unix and that are pretty much absent in systems like Windows NT. They very much reflect the conclusions I came to after over fifteen years of building and debugging systems.

But, yes, I have the impression that a lot of Linux users would just as gladly use a modern BeOS or a ReactOS, regardless of the underlying design.

And a lot of systemd criticism comes from people who are just averse to any kind of change and maybe long for the bygone days of HP-UX and Irix.

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digi_owl 3451 days ago
There is change and there is change.
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