Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by HNDV 1321 days ago
>thought that systemd was generally hated?

If it was generally hated there would be a lot more support for the distros that don't have systemd. There isn't. Except for alpine, all of them are extremely niche, half of them are dead, the other half barely have enough people to stick around for a release a year. Even alpine is kinda niche, it's mostly used as a way to make lightweight docker containers, rather than as a distro that stands on its own, the fact it uses musl as its libc means you can't use it on a server that has nvidia gpus for machine learning, you can't use it on a desktop where you need a browser capable of DRM, you can't use it on a personal computer if you ever intend to install a video game etc.

I have -yet- to hear anyone in my life actually use something like Devuan, the systemd-less fork of Debian, in a production environment. Six years after their first release, instead of standing on their own as a distribution, they're still deeply angry and obsessed with systemd and this is the level of professionalism they exhibit on social media : https://twitter.com/DevuanOrg/status/1586963662295687169

Of course, one of the twitter comments underneath is "systemd macht frei".

One of the things the official devuan account retweets : https://twitter.com/jaromil/status/1544618996833583104 "It's 2022 and the master of systemd is now working for Micro$oft https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lennart-Poet... this the last bit @phoronix omits. This is a classic cybernetic strategy: to become the master of a feedback loop you create and continuously adjust the framework in which nodes interact."

I think that says enough about the sort of irrational people we're dealing with?

People who hate systemd are very, very vocal, and highly unproductive.

4 comments

I think that is an overstatement. I use systemd but there is legitimate criticism and even a questionable conflict of interest in the creator now working for the competition. People working against the best interest of the community is a real threat that shouldn't simply be ignored. However, so far systemd has worked out alright for me so I can't complain too much but the documentation is still lacking in certain areas and so doing things that are easy to understand with a traditional script based RC can become frustrating when you are trying to figure out the systemd-way to do things.
> creator now working for the competition

Microsoft hasn't been the competition for while. They might not be "part of the team", but they definitely have more to win by linux being alive than dead. I'd put them more along the lines of IBM or Oracle, huge corps trying to somewhat discreetly steer linux in a path that suits them.

Impressive. They have even a document that describes the problems with systemd. And not just any document, it's the most viewed research thesis of all time! Wow!

The Devuan founder is truly the most impressive person in the universe.

"The most viewed research thesis of all time published by Univ. Plymouth pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/… by Devuan's founder @jaromil" https://twitter.com/DevuanOrg/status/1587168838071816193

>Except for alpine, all of them are extremely niche, half of them are dead, the other half barely have enough people to stick around for a release a year.

FreeBSD & OpenBSD would happily disagree.

Those aren't linux distros
Void Linux doesn't use systemd because it doesn't build against musl libc. Void ships musl and glibc packages for multiple CPU architectures and has a very lively development team and update cycle. It's not dead, it's just not insanely huge, either.
Void Linux is also the only distro I know of to switch from systemd to something else (runit).