[lmm]

The thing is, you used to be able to fix something and have it stay fixed. You used to be able to find a config that worked - which, sure, might have required some manual experimentation and customization - but then you could back it up and keep it.

Maybe pulseaudio and systemd only breaks 2% of the time rather than 3% of the time. But when they do break, you can't understand what's happened and you can't fix them, and even if they worked yesterday they won't necessarily work today. If that was tradeoff I was happy with I'd use windows or OSX.

[trabant00]

> you used to be able to fix something and have it stay fixed

No, I used to patch bash scripts, patch the deb package, deploy to prod, then have to do it all over again when the init script changed upstream in the distribution. Now I just have my configuration management change the options I need in the unit file and never touch it again, so now I sleep while unattended-upgrades works for me.

[rektide]

No idea what you are talking about. Pulseaudio nor systemd have wild crazy "it just stopped running" issues, like you suggest.

If something critical launched by your init system isnt coming up, I'd way way rather be using systemd. There's know wwys to inspect, check out what ran, what didnt, see what dependencies are failing. Check the common logging system. In the dark old days it was a nightmare of different daemons, each with their own custom init scripts, & little common reporting. Every problem was unique & required unique diagnosis.

I dont get what the complaints are. Things work great now. There's great diagnostic tools. Most of them with json/machine readible output. Distros sometimes do break various daemons but systemd and pulseaudio are pretty much bulletproof, and if they worked yesterday, i absolutely have faoth they'll work today. I detest so much that this kind of casual easy convenient Fear Uncertainty g Doubt shade throwing persists, that we so casually malign while making no assertions that could be refuted. There's a spectre of doubt that sabotages the good, that seeds disbelief, and it's never justified, never backed up by anything concrete or real or debateable: it's all just this haunting image that it's not going to work. It's seditious.

[kaba0]

That’s no good reason to ditch a superior solution. A modern combustion engine is pretty much impossible to fix with your ordinary tooling/knowledge, but it doesn’t make me want to use some old, weak/inefficient one instead.

Also, I could not do anything with a bug inside firefox, the kernel and a litany of other complex programs (mind that they are complex due to essential complexity) so I don’t see system booting an exception to that.

[zodiakzz]

Can you elaborate? Systemd also uses text based config files... how did you calculate the "breaks" percentage? I've been using Fedora with Systemd since a few years now. Nothing that broke was Systemd's fault in any way.