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by INTPenis 2 hours ago
Systemd resistance is silly to me. Systemd is what is turning Linux into a viable modern OS. You need something to tie all the parts of the OS together with a unified API, otherwise you'll be fighting fragmentation constantly.

I don't like the age verification thing either, but all systemd did was add a field for it, it's still up to your distro to use it.

2 comments

Fragmentation is what makes Linux great imo. I'm not against systemd per se but I am against monoculture.
And what are your thoughts on deploying software to a fragmented system?
Systemd does not solve the deployment problem, and will not unless it adds something like a systemd package manager.

It is interesting that Linux is far more widely used than alternatives that are not fragmented (e.g. FreeBSD) and has not standardised on one distro. Different people have different needs and preferences. People using Debian, Alpine, and NixOS are unlikely to agree on what they want.

If you want to get a good idea of how different modern Linux APIs are now compared to before. Look at cPanel vs. cockpit.

cPanel had to maintain its own unified API above a slew of other interfaces, while Cockpit benefits from a unified OS API. And we're only getting started, we still have a long way to go.

Yes I love the diversity of the open source ecosystem, I love that people are free to create their own distros without systemd. But I love my distros with systemd too much to switch.

Not the OP, but the historical answer was POSIX (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/2.56856).

That didn’t work perfectly, but it did work to some extent.

Just like it's done now, every distro having their own system. It containerization for people who like that.

What I have an issue with is apps making themselves dependent on systemd like KDE is doing. https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1qi9vo5/comment/o0pzvq...

You define the supported target and that's it. RHEL and Ubuntu LTS, kubernetes, docker/podman or flatpak are popular ones.
The Linux Kernel is a monolith.
The linux kernel is only the kernel though. MacOS is not XNU.
That's not what I mean.
Linux will still be viable when systemd is gone. There will always be a need for open software.