[brokenparser]

It's quite an audacious release note. As if millions of users are suddenly going to forget about cat, head, tail, more, less, grep, awk, sed, fmt, etc. etc. that are only still useful if you learn how to journalctl and convert those binary logs back into plain text.

I'd like to install Fedora 20 and use it as my main desktop, but both systemd and journald will somehow have to be avoided and worked around because I don't want to touch those with a ten foot pole.

As far as mainstream Linux distributions go, it's like choosing between 2 evils nowadays:

* Ubuntu: decent base system, lousy desktop

* Fedora: lousy base system, decent desktop

The former is almost fixed by Elementary OS, but the latter I'm still looking for a spin or derivative that fixes it. What attracts me most to these mainstream distributions is the vast amount of available packages and their ease of maintenance.

[groks]

> As if millions of users are suddenly going to forget about cat, head, tail, more, less, grep...

    $ grep shiz /var/log/messages
    grep: /var/log/messages: No such file or directory

WTF?

    $ ls /var/log
    README    dnf.log wtmp Xorg.log.0    ...
    $ head /var/log/README
    You are looking for the traditional text log files in /var/log, and
    they are gone?
    
    Here's an explanation on what's going on:

Crisis averted!

[reidrac]

I don't usually have the need to check syslog in my desktop, unless I'm doing development, and in that case I will install syslog-ng (and systemctl enable syslog-ng). Not a big deal.

As for servers, I wouldn't use Fedora. Each release is supported for only 13 months and upgrades are not as seamless as in Debian.

So for me Fedora is a very decent desktop if you want the new shinies with ease of use. Most of the time works and it's great (even with the "Gnome 3 surprise factor", that keep _breaking_ things every now and then).

[cones688]

> As for servers, I wouldn't use Fedora.

That's what RedHat (or CentOS) is for...

[brokenparser]

Or Scientific Linux.

[gizzlon]

> * Ubuntu: decent base system, lousy desktop

You mean the unity stuff? I installed the KDE Desktop package and it's great and works great =)

[keithpeter]

Xubuntu is very nice as well (13.10). I'm dual booting with Debian 7 XCFE to try to reverse engineer the font rendering on Xubuntu which is much nicer to my eyes.

[rwmj]

You can do "yum install rsyslog". However I agree that it shouldn't have been removed.

[brokenparser]

That's nice, but can you "yum install upstart"?

[rwmj]

No. Why would you want to? Upstart is inferior to systemd in every way and if Fedora supported both then it would have to test every package that contained a daemon twice.

[rlpb]

> No. Why would you want to? Upstart is inferior to systemd in every way...

This is heavily disputed[1]. Please do not misrepresent your opinion as fact.

[1] Example: https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem

[brokenparser]

Because upstart is easy and systemd is difficult.

[astrodust]

Removing upstart is a feature.

systemd is not hard, it's just different. Those configuration files are a lot easier to generate and get working correctly.

[brokenparser]

As a user, I can't tell what service is started when by which config file and where it should go. multi-user.target.wants? default.target.wants? Why are there windows-style .ini files and why are they all symlinks to /usr? Is it forbidden to make changes now? Really, RedHat?

It just baffles me whenever I look at it.

[anonymouscowar1]

Linux is hard, let's go shopping!

[bkor]

Millions of users will have "Logs", an UI for the journal. Because journal logs more and allows more things, the UI will be more useful. Easy to do with journal (log attributes with each message), impossible with "/var/log/messages".

[darkarmani]

You mean a CLI-UI?

[bkor]

The original person (maybe you, too lazy to check) was worried about millions of users. So I talked about a GUI, not a CLI. The CLI has existed for a long time as mentioned by someone else.

[darkarmani]

Are you talking about this quote?

> As if millions of users are suddenly going to forget about cat, head, tail, more, less, grep, awk, sed, fmt, etc. etc. that are only still useful if you learn how to journalctl and convert those binary logs back into plain text.

How does one use a GUI with cat, head, tail, more, less, grep, awk, etc? If they are needing to use normal unix commands, why could you think they have access to a UI?

[hdevalence]

Yeah, it's got a really handy CLI interface, called journalctl.