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by TacticalCoder 857 days ago
> Sad to see these type quirks will go away when Linux moves completely to Wayland.

I started using Linux when I was 25 or so. I'm 51 now. I do believe there's a far from zero probability that X is going to outlast me... Even if I live until 80!

P.S: and the day X dies, in decades, I do also think it's possible that, at long last, Wayland shall be as customizable and allows to do all the amazing thing X allows to do.

2 comments

The customizability is possible, but not the ease of it

Because with wayland you don't write "just" a window manager - you write also the gorilla and most of the jungle, because a "WM" also has to be full Window Server with handling of input, rendering, display configuration, possibly linking extra virtual displays (still haven't figured exactly what part of the protocol handles it, but apparently pipewire can create virtual display that can be used for example by OBS)

Unfortunately, I don't share your optimism. Judging by the fiasco that systemd is and how it managed to completely win over init scripts, even the opensource world is not immune to fashion / politics / ...
I miss writing sysvinit scripts exactly never.

Even if you were building a system for which init stages would be immutable, forever sealed and unchanging, determining the correct ordering means understanding every daemon and all their associated quirks and their dependencies and the quirks associated with their dependencies and so on...

I will never get the hours spent being a human SAT solver trying to safely order hundreds of lexicographically ordered start and stop scripts that may or may not be present in an unbelievable number of permutations.

The reason sysvinit is extinct is neither fashion or politics, but evolution.

Given my experience writing systemd units and then trying to figure out why they don't behave as the documentation says that they should, this suggests that being miserable to work with must be an adaptively neutral trait in init systems, thus selected neither for nor against.
> human SAT solver trying to safely order hundreds of lexicographically ordered start and stop scripts

Your doing it wrong. You don't want too many services on a single server.

Where did I mention anything about servers? The scenario I was referring to involved maintaining a large set of packages for a distribution, each of which may or may not be installed.
except writing systemd unit file hacks are just as bad. but with the added offense that things don't work as promised.

eg. if your sshd is set after initRandom, but unit random is set after timesync, and timesync depends on network because ntp... if you only have lan and your ntp servers aren't reachable (or offline) you don't get any log out user visible hint at all of why start sshd just hangs there forever.

no matter how bad init hacks were, nothing was this shitty. zero logs. zero hints. just wait there forever.

if you like systemd, it just means you're sheltered and too green.

> if you like systemd, it just means you're sheltered and too green.

Says the green name.

People can like whatever, but most of the time people like sysvinit less than systemd init.

I shouldn't be responding to flamebait but alas.

No, they are not just as bad. The scenario you describe is obviously broken, but the entire system can be inspected and easily debugged. With a flick of the wrist you can at your leisure summon a graph of the entire known universe. If you only have LAN then, typically, your host is physically accessible so this should be easy to debug.

Nothing about the scenario you describe is inherently worse because of systemd. The same scenario with sysvinit is literally a nightmare. This is literally and practically infinitely less of a head scratcher with systemd than anything else in existence.

I'm not sure how anyone can defend sysvinit -- you're certainly not even trying -- but shitting on systemd because you had a bad time is about the least productive way to participate here. It's no one's fault but your own if you don't understand your tools or the ramifications of letting yourself use them in ignorance.

Besides, at least at the time of this comment, your username is the one that is literally green.

what part of no logs and dependencies of dependencies not showing up you missed?
Systemd has taken over most popular Linux distributions, but Linux isn't the whole of the opensource world.

I suspect X servers will die out at some point, but you could probably just run XWayland right? I've not messed with Wayland yet, because it doesn't address my use cases (mythtv frontends which is one X program with no window manager, and running programs on freebsd/linux for display on Windows).

Systemd has not took over the world. Slackware is still doing fine without it.