| 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 |