[ale] for all you systemd haters...

[Alex Carver]

On 2018-02-16 13:31, Solomon Peachy wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 01:00:05PM -0800, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
>> Just remember that Pottering was primarily responsible for Pulse Audio
>> and, although perhaps it's working better now, he pushed it hard
>> claiming it was ready and it was not leading to a severe hatred for it.
>> He pushed hard enough that, in his very typical style, was calling out
>> any distribution that did not install it by default.  Later he
>> backtracked saying he never claimed it was ready.
> 
> That's fair to say.  
> 
> My personal experience with PA is that most of the end-user pain was due 
> to Ubuntu utterly botching its integration and not really doing anything 
> to improve things.  (Fedora, despite using what essentially amounted to 
> the same PA releases, suffered far fewer problems.)
> 
> Well, that and buggy drivers, buggy applications [often relying on 
> quirks of individual drivers], and bugs bugs bugs and even more bugs 
> everywhere.  Moral of the story: Linux Audio was a complete festering 
> mess before PA came along, and becoming an even greater mess until 
> everyone finally got serious about deploying bugfixes.  I'm personally 
> glad he pushed so hard, we all benefited in the end.  (And amazed he 
> keeps coming back for more.  He must have skin made of asbestos..)
> 
> (This situation paralleled NetworkManager and the multitude of wifi 
>  drivers that all behaved subtly or not so subtly differently...)

I remember having to deal with Pulse Audio early on.  ALSA happened to
work better and I stuck with it.

NetworkManager on the other hand tends to stick its nose into places
that make things impossible.  I think it's poorly implemented in some
respects and am very glad it's not a mandatory component because I rip
it out anytime I do a new installation.  I know I mentioned the
integration of EAP with the current session but I think the systemic
annoyances that NM causes for some other cases outweighed it for me.


>> I think if systemd had been spearheaded by anyone other than Pottering
>> it probably would have gotten an improved reputation or at minimum would
>> have had an opportunity to demonstrate itself and sell the idea on the
>> merits.  There are plenty of people that improve the things we use but
>> are not even remotely as sour as Pottering.  For systemd, Pottering's
>> previous actions with Pulse Audio basically guaranteed that he burned
>> the bridge before he crossed it.
> 
> A big difference is that systemd wasn't disruptive to the typical 
> end-user, could be incrementally utilized, and didn't require folks to 
> rewrite anything except muscle memory.  

I think it depended on the location of that end-user.  If it was the
end-user is the administrator, it did have somewhat of a disruptive
effect.  This became especially obvious when certain things got jammed
up due to systemd taking control of sockets for example (some
applications are not expecting that an entirely different and unrelated
piece of software is going to open and hold the socket).  Some of the
pain here is caused by package maintainers that blindly install every
last bit of systemd configuration (sockets, etc.) without checking what
the daemon actually expects or uses.  But that ends up reflecting poorly
on systemd because that was the "new thing" that appeared on the
end-user's machine and suddenly broke whatever was working.  And with
something new like that, it's hard to get a grasp of all the details to
unwind it.  For one machine that I had to use systemd due to a
dependency, it took me the better part of a day to figure out there was
a socket defined that shouldn't have been there, find it and remove it.

> 
> (It's worth noting that systemd paying attention to return codes rapidly 
>  demonstrated a whole ton of bugs in supposedly-mature-and-robust 
>  distro init scripts.  But guess who got blamed...)
> 
> The average joe wouldn't have noticed any outward difference beyond 
> faster boot times, distro writers and a decent chunk of their userbase 
> went "hell yeah this is better", a smaller subset of their userbase 
> still hasn't stopped screaming about ethics in init systems, and most 
> users were like "meh, whatever.."
> 
> Anyway.  Simulations finally about to finish.  I guess I'll have to go 
> off and be productive now.
> 
>  - Solomon
>