[arendtio]

Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid. So I can understand that there were quite a few people angry at him and the way he was doing things. In addition, he is someone who can dish out to others too (I remember a (badly prepared) talk he attended and completely sabotaged by asking questions and make the speaker look like a total idiot).

So yes, he is prolific, his software does great things and his critics were definitely going too far, but he isn't completely innocent in regard to what happened.

[acdha]

> Well, I think Lennart misjudged how much trouble his projects caused. And especially Systemd was nothing you could easily avoid.

Think about your second sentence a bit, and why it's true: major Linux distributions adopted systemd. Did they do that because it really caused a bunch of trouble or because a deliberative review process showed that it solved a number of hard problems?

A small percentage of people having very loud emotional reactions doesn't mean that it actually caused large numbers of problems and at least in the enterprise space it's been really useful for cleaning up long-running reliability and security problems by removing thousands of lines of SysV kludge and manual work recovering from problems.

[arendtio]

I have thought about it and I did so for years. I know that those projects solved hard issues and I also know that there are many people who would not have been able to complete those projects successfully. In fact, in 2011 I considered holding a presentation about how great systemd is.

But my point is a different one: If you manage such a project, you have to manage the change. And when you know that there are people who disagree with you on a fundamental level, it doesn't help driving your followers away by releasing breaking changes on a regular basis.

As an end-user, I remember for PulseAudio and systemd at least one instance where I had built something with it and after an update, it didn't work anymore and I had to adapt it.

So I don't believe that there was just a 'small percentage of people having very loud emotional reactions'. Instead, I think it was more like everybody had some problems adapting to systemd, but some saw the benefits it came with and others fought it as hard as they could (for various reasons).

So the problem isn't what Lennart had done (which is great), but how he got there. And I think Lennart would be happier today if he didn't do it the way he did.

[mongol]

i think Lennart should be commended. Certain "projects" have such breadth in scope that they seem undermountable because they require an entire ecosystem to follow. Init was one of these. He managed to change it, it hurt, but it was for the better, all things considered.

[ncmncm]

It would be better if it did not eat 100MB, though.

It is hard for me to imagine what it could be doing with so much RAM.

[microcolonel]

That is basically my position too, except the idea that Lennart has somehow caused people trouble with his projects, which is hilarious given how enthusiastically people adopt his software over the alternatives.

I really like systemd, though it has flaws. I was using Fedora at home, and Debian on servers when it was new. As soon as it was straightforward, I started using systemd on my Debian machines (building from source, when Debian was not systemd-based) and it solved a lot of issues I'd been having, made it dead simple to get new services up and running.

When Arch Linux switched to systemd, that was what convinced me to switch to Arch Linux on the desktop. I had been getting a lot of value out of systemd on Fedora, but I had wanted to try a proper rolling release.

I have a similar story with PulseAudio. I've owned many systems with no hardware mixer over the years, and the other options had been total trash.

PulseAudio actually worked. When I wanted a feature, it tended to be available on PulseAudio. In 2017, when I spent a lot of time between a laptop and a desktop (now I mostly just use a phone/PDA and a desktop), I liked being able to switch seamlessly between them.

I set up a network audio device as my second default sink (after local headphones) on both machines, so I could move my headphones between them, and whichever device was playing audio would play it through my headphones. It took hardly any fiddling about, thanks to Lennart's other project: Avahi.

Over the years, I hear a lot of people criticizing the software, but taking the functionality for granted. What systemd, PulseAudio, and Avahi do for ordinary people using GNU/Linux on the desktop is generally not possible with competing packages, which is why these packages are ubiquitous. It's not some grand conspiracy to take away your beloved OpenRC; systemd is just better (warts and all) than the alternatives, for the vast majority of users.

Obviously Lennart has personal issues with some people in some places, like any human being, but that has nothing to do with the software.

Richard Stallman may not have the best Spanish elocution, and GNU has flaws; does this tell you enough to know to choose a different libc, or a different core utilities package?

“Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options” — Thomas Sowell