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by BuildTheRobots 3976 days ago
Well, the fact my window manager is now intrinsically linked to my systems boot process strikes me as somewhat obscene. There was the amusement with it reacting to debug being passed to the kernel which caused the system to never finish booting...

systemd is by no means alone; in the last month I've discovered that `yum` deliberately breaks its output when you try and pipe it to something else (I mean really, ffs, really?). The justification for this isn't even internally consistent which really winds me up too...

Whilst I pick on a couple, there's been innumerable packages, languages and platforms over the years that have had their share of what could politely be called idiosyncrasies. I highly recommend The Unix Haters Handbook [1] for plenty of historic examples -it's a lovely read -oh, and for years one of the *nix bullet points was always "all the power in the world and not a safety in sight" [2]

[1] The Unix Haters Handbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook || http://www.csf.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/BioComp/training/...

[2] The Hole Hawg: https://web.archive.org/web/20150214132948/http://www.team.n...
1 comments
RickHull 3976 days ago
> Well, the fact my window manager is now intrinsically linked to my systems boot process strikes me as somewhat obscene.

Gnome depends on logind, which is sensible. Yes, logind is part of a suite of system management tools which also includes tools to manage the boot process.

Your complaint would apply equally to your window manager being intrinsically linked to your serial port (via the Linux kernel).

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digi_owl 3976 days ago
Not just part of, logind will straight up not work if systemd is not running as pid1. As such, anything that depends on logind is dependent on a specific init sitting as pid1.
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BuildTheRobots 3976 days ago
As an honest question, could you explain _why_ it's sensible?

Until a couple of years ago, my linux box was nearly entirely modular letting me install any combination of boot-loader, kernel, init system userland tools and/or desktop. How is this better?

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