[ale] [Fwd: Advertising on ale.org] - OT MS vs Apple vs Linux/UNIX

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2015 19:00:54 +0000
"Lightner, Jeff" <JLightner at dsservices.com> wrote:

> Systemd is not just on RedHat style distributions – in fact RHEL
> itself is rather late in doing it.     (You can still do RHEL6 if it
> bothers you that much – it’s only on RHEL7 you see it.)
> 
> You can rail against systemd but you’re unlikely to avoid using it
> over time because most of the popular and commercial distros have
> adopted it:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Adoption_and_reception

PROPAGANDA ALERT: The systemd industry says they've won the battle and
you have no alternative but to use systemd.

* Devuan and Funtoo have committed to never using systemd
* Manjaro-OpenRC has very little systemd detrius, and its systemd
  vestiges are harmless
* PC-BSD has no systemd
* All the preceding can easily be set up to do the work of a Linux box.
* Devuan has created its own udev, which is the flagship of systemd
  vendor lock-in. So have Gentoo/Funtoo.


> 
> Personally I don’t find systemd as horrible as some would seem to
> suggest.
> 
> One of the first things I learned in Management class in college is
> “People are resistant to change”.    Most of the complaints I’ve seen
> about systemd boil down to “Why change, init worked for years?”.
> Despite the fact there are many reasons given for the “Why change”
> many who complain simply disregard them.

PROPAGANDA ALERT: The old "newer is better" argument. ISIS is new, but
not necessarily better. Ebola in cities is a new thing, but perhaps not
an improvement.

Now let's talk about change, complaints and reasons.

Name me one other change in the Linux world that generated even 1/10 of
the complaints of systemd. Yeah, I can't think of one either. If you
don't like Emacs, you use Vim, or Eclipse, or Bluefish, or whatever.
You can switch editors as easily as you can change clothes.

Don't like Gnome? No problem: use KDE, or Xfce, or LXDE, or OpenBox, or
any one of ten or twenty others. You can switch WM/DE as fast as
rearrange chairs in your living room.

Until very recently, if you didn't like sysvinit, you could have
effortlessly replaced it with s6, runit, or several others.

Now comes systemd, built from the ground up to prevent its own
replacement, because it promiscously interacts with as much as it can.
Replacing systemd requires not only the usual replacement of PID1 and
process manager, but also initramfs, udev, and now su, for gosh sakes.
Every month, systemd subsumes more of what was once the toolkit Linux
users used every day.

People didn't complain because it was new: They complained because it
was "my way or the highway."

And for what? 90% of use cases are for practical purposes init
agnostic. For this 90%, there is no "reason": They didn't ask for a
better init in the first place.

I could go on about systemd's architecture, but this response is
already long enough.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
August 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts
http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust