[badsock]

Loose coupling allows the "shiny thing of the week" folk to not wreak havoc on the "good engineering" folk.

When DEs like Unity followed Microsoft down the disastrous blind alley of "desktops should act like tablets", that was OK because the loose coupling allowed by defined protocols like ICCCM meant that I could wait it out in XFCE.

The fact that practically every distro has gone with systemd, and that the couplings are tight, means that I have to leave Linux entirely to wait out this disaster.

[diltonm]

Agreed, the designers of X made some truly brilliant decisions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-Client_Communication_Conv...

Edit: I don't have a dog in the hunt on systemd but if it really is tight coupling then history might prove it was a bad decision. There was a lot of let's say strong opinions against Pulse Audio on Linux but I find (once we got through the growing pains) that it's a blessing. It's far superior to Windows 7's basic audio management in my opinion. I've no idea about Windows 8.

[nitrogen]

Everything PulseAudio does should have been implemented as part of ALSA though, not as another layer that only exposes a fraction of the libalsa functionality.

[Shish2k]

Wouldn't that imply putting a network-accessible server in the kernel? That seems a fair bit more risky than non-root userspace...

[nitrogen]

No, alsa actually does its most interesting stuff in userland.

[tom9729]

You clearly haven't used Unity; it's basically a clone of the OS X 10.6 interface (before they changed spaces) built on top of GTK3. It's got a useful set of standard key bindings (hold SUPER for a cheat sheet). It would actually be pretty awkward to use on a tablet.

Gnome 3 OTOH is as you describe: giant touch-friendly menus, swipe to unlock (with a mouse), etc.

Your position seems a little alarmist. How does systemd mean you need to stop using Linux? I'm sure XFCE will continue to work.

[badsock]

Agreed about Gnome 3, but from the Wikipedia article on Unity:

"In July 2012, at OSCON, Shuttleworth explained some of the historical reasoning behind Unity's development. The initial decision to develop a new interface in 2008 was driven by a desire to innovate and to pass Microsoft and Apple in user experience. This meant a family of unified interfaces that could be used across many device form factors, including desktop, laptop, tablet, smart phones and TV. Shuttleworth said "‘The old desktop would force your tablet or your phone into all kinds of crazy of funny postures. So we said: Screw it. We’re going to move the desktop to where it needs to be for the future. [This] turned out to be a deeply unpopular process.”"

In answer to your question, systemd is in an excellent position to inject non-determinism into the functioning of the OS at all kinds of levels. I've got a hair-trigger response to things breaking and fixing themselves randomly, courtesy of a couple of years working with Windows. systemd has already demonstrated this behaviour, and I feel fairly safe in predicting that this will increase as systemd gains in complexity. Never to the point of being a major problem, just enough to be a persistent annoyance.

Major point being, however, that if it does turn out as I expect, there's going to be no avoiding it while still using the mainstream Linux distros.