[ale] systemd bad. Very bad - OT - Apple

[Lightner, Jeffrey]

Long ago I considered Apple evil and MS less so because MS products didn’t tie you to MS proprietary hardware for the most part.

UNIX flavors by and large did tie you to proprietary architectures but even as far back as 286 Xenix would run on Intel and by 386 AT&T was making UNIX for their own PCs.  SCO early on was available and was agnostic as to hardware maker.  I used it on 486 & Pentium (and AMD).  Of course SCO (the company not the OS) later became evil in its own right for other reasons.  I began thinking of MS as evil when they came out with NT because at the time Bill said they wanted to take over the UNIX market.   (That didn’t happen but they did kill Novell Netware for fileservers).

Nothing Apple has done with iPhone or MacBook or other products (other than bringing in a UNIX kernel) has made me think they are less evil than I did back in the 80s.

Having said that, I will note that I was impressed when they made a server called the Quadra 950(I think).  It ran System7 AND also ran their then new version of UNIX called A/UX.   Moreover it had a seamless overlap of the 2 that worked quite well.   I was able to run an interpreter for DB/C which we used for our code at one employer on the System7 side and run our actual database and files controlled by that code on the A/UX side.

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim Kinney
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2017 8:37 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!; Steve Litt
Subject: Re: [ale] systemd bad. Very bad.

Thanks for that link! It's reasoning I've surmised from watching what systemd does now but never saw the motivation so clearly.

This might fork/hijack the thread but...

Linux used to work hard hard to outdo Microsoft. The references to Apple made it clear I'm not the only person who sees Apple as a greater and more subtle threat to Linux than Microsoft. When OSX arrived, I was shocked at the number of macbooks that appeared at Linux conferences. It's good that good ideas from other OS environments are implemented into Linux. Let's be honest here - the goal of total world domination is really about making the best OS ever.

So systemd is sort of a "shot across the bow" of Apple. That's a good thing. Gnome implemented some design and function ideas from OSX as well. If Linux is going to ever be a viable desktop for the general masses, it will have to do better than than the perceived flagship standard of desktop environments: Apple.

Apple only works as well as it does because it's a closed loop, hardware to software to user, fully-controlled environment. Yes, Apple controls their users almost as tightly as their hardware supply chain. If Linux systems only had to run on 3 new laptops a year with varying ram and storage, I suspect the Linux UI would be a star in a field of flashlights. We already beat Apple in the server arena - they quit.

So, yeah. Systemd taking on Apple to make a better init is a big step forward. Maybe a shim library to run 3rd party software for OSX on Linux is next.

On Jun 29, 2017 10:22 PM, "Solomon Peachy" <pizza at shaftnet.org<mailto:pizza at shaftnet.org>> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 08:33:15PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> OK, I'll byte: Why was systemd written?

Becasue sysvinit (and the hack-upon-hack-upon-hack heaped on top to
compensate for its inadequacies) is a festering pile of swill?

But if you're actually serious about that question, here's the (very
long) answer direct from the horse's mouth:

  http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html

 - Solomon
--
Solomon Peachy                         pizza at shaftnet dot org
Delray Beach, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

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