[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.

[astrodust]

What else would you wish for? A registry that can get randomly corrupted, complete with nonsensical keys?

It's baffling, but there's reasoning. systemd is actually pretty slick at the core. A lot of the complexity comes from how flexible it is.

[brokenparser]

What else would you wish for? A registry that can get randomly corrupted, complete with nonsensical keys?

That makes no sense. We had a perfectly working init called System V init. That's an alternative here, you may be looking at the wrong operating system.

A lot of the complexity comes from how flexible it is.

I think the complexity comes from trying to do too much at once. It's an init, but also cron. It's still an init, but also inetd. But it is still init, yet also acpid. Although it is in fact, still init, it's also atd.

And all of its functionality is available as a DBUS API. The only users are developers writing programs, not anyone banging their keyboards at the commandline prompt. That flies into the face of everything that made GNU/Linux great. Dbus is the death of GNU as we know it. The *sh oneliner that uses pipes and plain works is much better than the far more efficient C (or programming language du jour) program, even if it's only 10 lines of code.

[astrodust]

System V init was decent enough for the time, but today it's relatively garbage compared to the alternatives.

Services die? Oh well, I guess they'll just stay dead. At least systemd has a wrapper that restarts them.

Also the "write a shell script with magical comments in it and lots of low-level bash" is not an elegant solution to any problem.

Fedora's been pretty good about supporting legacy sysvinit style scripts and there will always be a way to use them.

[brokenparser]

System V init could restart a service, that's how you got to log in after logging out. Even so, you actually need init to restart your important service process that should never die in the first place? Now that's just sloppy ;)

[darkarmani]

> Services die? Oh well, I guess they'll just stay dead. At least systemd has a wrapper that restarts them.

If services dies, there is a problem that is still going to exist after restarting.

[astrodust]

I've had named blow out and it doesn't get restarted, it just stays dead. Rebooting the server is a heavy handed fix.

systemd will kick it back into gear if it drops.

[brokenparser]

Use nsd and/or unbound, they're more robust and faster than bind.

[bkor]

You're just grasping at straws.

[brokenparser]

Not really, I just prefer the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. I hated upstart when it was introduced too, it broke stuff so I had to replace it with the unsupported (but fully functional) sysvinit every time. I still don't like the fact that it obsoleted /etc/inittab and that it has both old fashioned /etc/init.d and a /etc/init, because I have to look in 2 places to find a config or script. But it does give me a getty on whatever I set as console on the kernel commandline and it's definitely not broken out of the box any more, so I'm game.

You might think of a tiling window manager as being the greatest invention since sliced bread, but having to configure it in Haskell FFS (I'm looking at you, xmonad) just doesn't jive with me. Nor does any other tiling window manager except WindowMaker (oh, pardon me, that's a tiled window manager). KDE is just as bad because it has too many bells and whistles, it doesn't follow KISS principles. Is that a straw man to you?

Gnome managed to create a nice iteration of gnome-shell with 3.6, but it was riddled with bugs (it still is, albeit to a lesser extent). Then they had to ruin it in 3.8. Categories are for losers, right? Let's remove that. And no one ever needs accessibility, right? Let's git rid of that, too. And what's with all these keyboard layout options? Can't have that, way too useful! Yeah we put some of them back in gnome-tweak-tool but not all because obviously no one ever used them for anything. The final straw for Gnome (for me) was when shell extensions that were never meant to appear in the lock screen, did in fact, appear in the lock screen. The gnome-screensaver they got rid of did one thing really well, but they couldn't find a way to let it display notifications so they axed it.

I'll do my best to make Fedora 20 work because it offers the option of installing MATE, which is Gnome 2.x based. So it packages all of the latest gizmo's (for better or worse) and presents it with a friendly face without an identity crisis (it knows it's a PC, not a tablet). Though I'm on my 3rd install now, at some point the installer stops working resulting in a blinking cursor when I turn it off and on. It works perfectly in a VM, but I want the real deal. (It did pass verification.)

[bkor]

Right, so Bash is Unix right? Bash does tcp connections. Oops!

Anyway, blindly following some theory is a bit strange. Systemd is several different components. Maybe you're heard of coreutils, kind of important on any Linux system. It doesn't do just one thing. I guess you think coreutils should be removed as well?

Anyway, no clue what GNOME has to do with systemd. As said: seems you're grasping at straws. Haters gonna hate :P

[brokenparser]

I just got off on a tangent and ranted away. Coreutils is a package, you're comparing apples and oranges. Fedora works as a baus now and it's very usable out of the box, it even packs the latest version of Eclipse! Except for a few forbidden items, it's pretty much a laid back (feet on desk, cigar locked in fingers) operating system (to use that is, the devs are probably working tediously).