From El Reg:
Lennart Poettering, creator of the systemd system management software for Linux, says the open-source world is "quite a sick place to be in."
He also said the Linux development community is "awful" – and he pins the blame for that on Linux supremo Linus Torvalds.
"A fish rots from the head down," Poettering said in a post to his Google+ feed on Sunday.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Linux systemd Dev Says Open Source is 'SICK', Kernel Community 'Awful'
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 189 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by CoolHand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:29AM
methinks maybe he needs to look inwards for problems instead of blaming everyone else.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:42AM
This topic was discussed at Slashdot yesterday and one comment [slashdot.org] there linked to this presentation video [youtube.com] that apparently involves Poettering.
It's an enlightening watch, to be sure!
Like the Slashdot commenter mentions, the most relevant parts start at around 12 minutes in, and then it really gets weird around 54 minutes in.
I've watched a lot of presentations, but I don't think any of them have had something like that happen!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:03PM
The HN discussion was pretty good a day or so ago, apparently some guy going by name "VLM" on HN is a freakin genius, who ever would have guessed.
The ideas in systemd are really old and don't fit unix philosophy so none of the previous one zillion attempts at getting them went anywhere. Its important to note the guys who wrote upstart are not exactly getting death threats because they're not jerks who do back room political dealing and extensive product tying to shove their product down everyones unwilling throats.
The whole thing will blow up soon enough as its all an "embrace extend extinguish" op anyway. Can't install GIMP to edit photos without installing the gnome libs which require systemd as init which EEE-style replaces DHCP, syslog, NTP, god only knows what else, so when the submarine patent surfaces and the license lawsuits start flying and we begin drowning in FUD PR releases, all the fools will have no choice but to pay up. Meanwhile I'll be laughing, I'm moving everything to freebsd in my spare time. Never thought this of all things is why I'd be leaving linux and moving to BSD. And freebsd is weird, man, really weird. Its like being abducted at night from one dorm room and being tossed into one across the country, some stuff is so similar its eerie and other stuff obviously came from space aliens and its a trip discovering and categorizing which is which. But, so far, so good and I haven't hit any real snags yet. Freebsd just works. It works differently than Debian or linux in general, but it does just work in its own way. Cool.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:10PM
I'm moving to FreeBSD, too. I've been a Debian user since 1997, but I refuse to use an operating system that includes, or will include, malware (which is what I think systemd qualifies as, due to its many technical and non-technical problems).
It isn't as much of a transition for me because I've also used FreeBSD and OpenBSD extensively, along with many commercial UNIX variants. But the fact that people are being driven away from Debian after nearly two decades of use, if not longer in some cases, because of systemd absolutely disgusts me.
If systemd and Debian must be combined, it should be done in a fork, separate from the Debian environment so many of us have come to appreciate. A contaminant like systemd must be isolated.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:11PM
"I'm moving to FreeBSD, too. I've been a Debian user since 1997"
Yes AC about the same here. I'm documenting my "adventures" in the conversion and will likely turn it into a blog post or article or wiki or free ebook when I'm done. AFAIK there isn't a Debian (or linux in general) to freebsd resource out there.
One annoyance with existing freebsd docs is they baby talk and assume you've never touched a unix-ish machine before, while glossing over the critical differences that really need to be emphasized by real world refugees. Don't gimmie three screenfulls on the concept of a CLI and then like two short lines on the almost identical to linux conceptually but completely different names for the freebsd kernel module system, and the weird (to me) way they spec modules to be loaded. How many freaking cascaded shell scripts and config files can you bsd guys have just to change a lightbulb, anyway?
Most of the fun isn't just syntax, but conceptual differences. Like instead of the one true apt-get to bind them all that does all upgrading on Debian, figuring out the whole "theres one app to upgrade the core bsd system" and pkg for some binary packages but not everything and ports to build from source, like WTF freebsd could you add more alternatives?
Speaking of alternatives, I know that system inside and out and love it on Debian so my vi is not nvi but is vim when I run vi, but conceptually what runs that on freebsd? I'll get something working eventually even if its more a work around than anything else.
I'm completely successful so far in what I've attempted although I've burned a lot of google time and still have a laundry list to complete.
Even if all the systemd stupidity blows over, I'm gaining valuable experience and perspective with another OS, just can't lose. For those reasons I should have played with freebsd a long time ago. Would strongly recommend everyone install freebsd on a spare drive / machine / partition and learn it a bit, just in general.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:16PM
I've been looking in that direction more lately also..
Have you tried Debian kFreeBSD? I'm looking into it now, and it seems a bit more mature than I'd thought. That gets rid of most of those nasty BSD packaging issues... :)
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:50PM
With the linuxisms in systemd and it being required as init and more and more software depending on it, I don't think that port or the hurd port have long left to live.
Based on my three or so hours of screwing around now making me a freebsd expert, you can pretty much search and replace "apt-get" with "pkg" and the rest of the command line and general behavior will be the same. With the minor exception that I keep being told that not everything is in "pkg" and sooner or later I'm going to get to experience the ports system.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:48PM
Debian is already making plans to drop kFreeBSD. I was going to submit this when it came out but got lazy:
http://lwn.net/Articles/614142/ [lwn.net]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:35PM
Slackware and gentoo both work great with no systemd.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:20PM
Yeah but I don't really care about the kernel as much as I care about emacs24 and apache and vim and perl and a jvm and a decent terminal and chrome(ium)
Also your two examples "could" at least theoretically be poisoned by systemd and even worse by systemd architecture / philosophy / culture / dev style but there's too much linux-ism in it to ever poison freebsd, so I don't have to worry as much.
From about 15 yrs ago I remember the idea behind gentoo was academically fascinating but I didn't / don't feel it practical to always be compiling all the time on prod boxes. Dev box sure. Test box sure. Prod box probably shouldn't be compiling anything, ever. To each their own.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:05PM
You're entitled to your view but I doubt it is accurate. Gentoo allows systemd as a choice, and seems very unlikely to remove the other options, while Slack gets by just fine without systemd, or GNOME, or PAM, and has for years.
"From about 15 yrs ago I remember the idea behind gentoo was academically fascinating but I didn't / don't feel it practical to always be compiling all the time on prod boxes. Dev box sure. Test box sure. Prod box probably shouldn't be compiling anything, ever. To each their own"
There's no reason whatsoever you should be 'compiling all the time' with gentoo. You dont have to compile at all with it, in fact. If you WANT to recompile world with different options it makes it easy to do, but it's certainly not obligatory.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by boltronics on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:00AM
Question: Can you install Gentoo these days without a compiler? Ideally a compiler toolchain wouldn't even be installed on a production machine.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:19AM
Gentoo allows systemd as a choice, and seems very unlikely to remove the other options, while Slack gets by just fine without systemd, or GNOME, or PAM, and has for years.
Ah, but going forward is what we are concerned with, not what has been happening for years.
When Systemd gets it hooks in every piece of user space software, you will have nothing to run on Gentoo or Slack without a massive patch list to remove all the dependencies on systemd.
Not many people want JUST a terminal anymore. The want a desktop environment (or three) and the resources required to keep those working without systemd just do not exist. Gnome, KDE, et al are just not going to support alternative builds when all the money is coming from red hat and ubuntu.
systemd will extinguish everything that doesn't get in line.
Its ok for you to not think his opinion is right, but for god sake look around you. Its happening before your very eyes!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:22AM
How's that? I thought this was all open source stuff. It'll only extinguish things that let themselves be extinguished, things that simply roll over and die instead of creating alternatives.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:42AM
"Not many people want JUST a terminal anymore. The want a desktop environment"
No, they don't, thats the craziest part of the whole story.
99.9% of the population wants a web browser and the occasional full screen video viewer or full screen game, and the admins/devs want a terminal. Almost nobody wants a "desktop environment" or the features that come with it. Enormous amounts of code, unused.
At work one of my desktops runs windows 7 with all this desktop crap piled on top of it. All it does is firefox/chromium because the corporate world has been moving to the web since the mid 90s, and outlook because for no clear reason that has webmail disabled (security paranoia, probably). None of my coworkers use desktop applications either.
It never fails to amaze me how stuff that used a desktop app and GPIB or RS232 in the 90s, or USB and a desktop app in the 00s, is all moving to a web interface over ethernet in the 10s. You can see the lure for the devs. No software installation, no desktop support, no troubleshooting, its just a web page. Works fine on my phone, tablet, or desktop, as long as their web designers don't do stupid things.
Management uses Excel as their DBMS, word processor, report generator, numerical analysis platform, and well, frankly, their desktop environment. Personally all my spreadsheets are in google docs, but they aren't very important to me. So they need like one app. There are specialists who need like "one" application. Not a whole environment. The CAD blueprint lady, I know all prints come from exactly one app. The HR people used to use powerpoint for those boring PCI/DSS and harassment training but that all moved online. Higher level mgmt does occasionally still use powerpoint but that fad kinda peaked a decade or so ago. The receptionist used to have a desktop application that talked to the PBX for advanced fast call routing, but that all went online on a web page interface. I don't really know what the accounting people use. I can't think of any employee at work who uses more than 3 applications. You don't need an "environment" for that.
The desktop environment as a metaphor is dead and was buried a long time ago but people just keep flogging the horse. Its just a grease stain on the pavement now. "But we gotta change everything because without that nothing will ever work again, I order you to pay no attention to the horse that worked perfectly well before" and then they get all pissed off when someone points out horses are dead and its all cars now.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 10 2014, @03:50AM
The point I was trying to make, and with which I accidentally stepped on your bee's nest, was that nobody running linux wants just a shell account any more.
Hence, they will all want SOME FORM of desktop environment, or graphical environment. Which means that when ALL the graphical environment projects adopt systemd, those distros like slackware who want to avoid it will have to custom build of even the simplest graphical environment, backing out all the systemd hooks for sysVinit, or what ever.
But, I, still wondering, in a discussion of systemd, how did I get sandbagged with a windows rant?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 10 2014, @03:22PM
"how did I get sandbagged with a windows rant"
Because this mythical "they" that everyone has an opinion on but no data actually want a program launcher, not an "environment"
Trying to hyper-tightly couple everything together is a losing system design strategy. Your USB shoudn't have anything to do with your IRC client.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:20PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:21PM
Please do have fun with freebsd, but don't forget that the linux kernel developers are still working hard to create the best unix kernel they can make.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:46PM
A kernel alone does us no good, though. That's where FreeBSD shines. They do the kernel right, and they do the userspace right. Debian used to offer much of the same, but they're clearly fucking up the userland side thanks to the introduction of systemd. Unfortunately, we need both the kernel side and the userland side to be done properly. We can't just have one or the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:06AM
So then why is it that people are only bitching and whining about sytemd instead of getting together and making a better replacement? If its as bad as the extremely vocal group claims, then its in high demand and would be very welcome. The fact that nobody's working on an alternative suggests that its not really as bad as they're claiming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:20AM
Not this crap again.
We had a better replacement 20 years ago. For some reason it's called sysv-init, even though it doesn't dictate sysv-style init scripts. On slackware it runs BSD-style init scripts just fine.
The problem is not the lack of an alternative, it's that more and more distros drop support for anything but systemd, due to Gnome (and probably soon KDE) dependencies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:58PM
...which is exactly why they need to be forked, instead of simply bitched about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:21PM
Hey, when you make that doc could you post it to Soylent/your SN journal/email me?
fox [ta] cyberfoxfirecom
I've wanted to build an apt-get -> pkg analog... Like, the FreeBSD equivalent of adding repos, purging packages, pinning packages, listing dependencies, etc... not just installation.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:23AM
Most of the fun isn't just syntax, but conceptual differences. Like instead of the one true apt-get to bind them all that does all upgrading on Debian, figuring out the whole "theres one app to upgrade the core bsd system" and pkg for some binary packages but not everything and ports to build from source, like WTF freebsd could you add more alternatives?
That's pretty standard on all the BSD's. Its almost impossible to avoid the three methods, and installing any BSD without going full hog on source tree is going to leave you with a pretty minimal (but secure system). Until someone finds a bug, which is rare.
Then they force you to compile the patches until the next major release, so my advice is don't even think about not installing all full source tree, and compile capable system.
Packages are somewhat easier to install, but they don't get updated very fast. BASH is not part of the normal Openbsd release, but it is often installed. And as of today, it is STILL vulnerable.
Ports? Good luck.
Stay away from ports if you can, because they are not very well checked out compared to the rest of the system.
I'm running OpenBSD (because they are security obsessed).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:12PM
Real men will move to GNU/HURD
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:05PM
So you should move to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD !
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:50PM
I am testing out sid without systemd. Debootstrap puts systemd in no matter what you exclude, so you remove it later. I login from the vt, start fluxbox, and have iceweasel. Gimp and mplayer need, apparently, libsystemd0. It is gonna be a long journey and I should have started from jessie and reported bugs when stuff is not compatible with sysvinit when it used to. wishlist bugs, whatever.
Else, gentoo here I come, IIRC it has a version with a static dev tree too.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:12PM
So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that it's already almost impossible to use modern Debian without it getting infected with systemd?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:29PM
If only all the people who thought that would get together and work on a systemd-free fork, instead of just throwing temper tentrums...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:04AM
The problem is that you'd need to fork an increasing number of packages. I'm not really sure that's going to be possible for anything much smaller than Red Hat used to be before it went public. So I think Gentoo and Slackware are probably only really temporary solutions.
My problem is that I really like ext4, and the BSDs don't currently handle it, so I'm planning to switch to Debian stable, and see if systemd blows over before I need to decide. By that time probably one of the BSDs will support large ext4 volumes, so I'll be able to do a staged transition. Or possibly systemd will be rejected by a major Linux distro. I really can't see it becoming a reasonable alternative, but maybe some other choice will appear. If all else fails, maybe I'll switch to Apple. (If my machines are going to be held hostage by software, it might as well be by elegant software.) Besides, there used to be a way to install a BSD system on top of an Apple system...I haven't looked at that in nearly a decade, but something similar may still exist.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:19AM
So? "Waaaah! Its too much work, its too hard!" is not a valid reason to not do something, even for children. If its really "teh edn of linux as we konw it!!1" then there'll be no shortage of people willing to work on it and wanting it as an option.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:57PM
Can't install GIMP to edit photos without installing the gnome libs which require systemd as init which EEE-style replaces DHCP, syslog, NTP, god only knows what else
What distribution has systemd as a gimp dependency? I've seen you mention this many times in this discussion, but others have stated that it's not the case for Slackware or Gentoo, and I'm using Debian testing (jessie) and it's not true here, either. That leaves OpenSUSE and Redhat. If you're not using either of those, or it's not an actual dependency there, then why do you keep making this incorrect assertion? Even if one of them does use it, it doesn't show that gimp has an actual dependency, just that that distro has incorrect and misleading dependencies.
I researched this for Debian not long ago when someone else made the same statement, and this is what I found:
---
The only tie I can see in Debian is that, if you follow recommended packages (apt-rdepends --follow Depends,PreDepends,Recommends gimp) you get a dependency for libsystemd-login0 by way of dbus. However, that is a recommendation, not requirement, and thus optional. It's also not systemd, it's a library for interfacing with systemd. Dbus, for example, doesn't require systemd itself, while udisks2 and policykit have direct ties to systemd and will not function without it (apt-rdepends --reverse systemd).
The curious one is udev. For a bit, Debian testing (jessie) wouldn't allow updating udev without also installing systemd because of a library it used requiring systemd. That doesn't seem to be the case currently, so it may have been a mistake. However, during that brief time, thanks to udev, nearly everything required systemd.
---
The gist of it is that, no, gimp does not require systemd. It doesn't even require any of the libsystemd* bits. One of its recommended packages recommends one of those libs, but that still isn't systemd itself, and doesn't run systemd on your system or try to install it.
I'm not a fan of systemd either, but using gimp as your strawman isn't helping anything. If it gets repeated back to someone pro-systemd, they're just going to shoot down that point and then use it as a reason to disregard anything else you said, regardless of merit. That's not helping those of us that don't like systemd.
Please pick a better example. Complain about policykit, upower, or the fact that udev has been folded into systemd. Anything is better than trotting out the gimp example that you keep using.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:20PM
Poor Wolfgang. Lennart and the rest are such "dbus dbags."
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:05PM
Is dbus also in the Poettering coding philosophy?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:35PM
I would say no, dbus is not have the legendary Pottering-Foo philosophy because:
1) Its a message passing library. It doesn't try to EEE into being a audio processing shim or a DHCP client or BGP routing speaker. Its a message passing library.
2) Its not exclusive. You can have and use a system that has dbus, sysv IPC, DCOP, and maybe ancient fat old CORBA and it'll "just work" all in parallel without having to uninstall the others. Installing dbus doesn't come with a kernel driver hook that catches IPC and does a kernel panic saying its politically incorrect to use anything but dbus. Shoudn't say it too loud or some jerk will probably put it in.
3) The architecture of dbus is not stupid AFAIK. It has legendarily been used in poorly architected systems doing "stupid dbus tricks" but in itself AFAIK its not badly designed. I heard about some audio thing in a car for android embedded in cars that did something mind boggling like embed CAN bus packets inside dbus messages, like I can smell the smoking crack from here, but thats not dbus's fault and may not even be true or the alternatives might have even been worse... yeah well, maybe.
It does have a faint odor of the philosophy because you get things like plain ole GUI text editors that speak dbus for rather dubious reasons. Like WTF dbus, you're drunk go home, after closing time you don't belong here. But dbus itself is not necessarily evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:23AM
It still doesn't shut down when it's not needed, which is reason enough for me to chmod a-x /usr/bin/dbus*
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:19PM
Lennart doesn't appear to be actually stupid, but he is unwilling to understand or to accept the main point Wolfgang makes: Interfaces need to be documented and standardized in order to be able to exchange components. And at the end of the video he made a complete ass of himself by stating "It's free" apparently in the sense of "free of charge" rather than freedom.
Please mod parent up, the video-link is great!
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:25AM
Oh, and did you miss all the "won't somebody please think of the blind people" appeals he made?
The guy is a total ass. I'm surprised someone hasn't handed him the pieces of the his own jaw.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:14AM
No, but while the way he communicated was total shit, he made some relevant points there (e.g. why it might make sense to include all the accessibility stuff for login; I think Wolfgang showed later that this doesn't work still because of wrongly set privileges, but that does not invalidate the point.) This behaviour provides reasons not to want to work with him (which I probably won't anyway, and lets face it: Linus also provides a couple of reasons not to want to work with him), while the point he made at the end of the presentation provided reasons not to want to get tied up with his projects.
Is there any credible free distribution without systemd left worth using? I currently use Fedora, and for most parts like it for providing up-to-date packages for most development tools etc. However, I have to concede the points Wolfgang Draxinger made, that the system gets more complicated to understand. There are more things you just have to magically know somehow instead of seeing it from debug output or in plain text config files. My impression is that systemd implements lots of great features, but it is either out of malice (gaining control) or out of time-constraints hacked together without clear interfaces and without separating the components.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by http on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:53PM
One of the more horrifying things about that presentation is that (in 2010) he pointed out that vital parts of consolekit's purported documentation were in a "To be written" stage . I just checked today, and some of them are, in fact, still "To be written".
"But consolekit is deprecated!" I hear some wag in the back shouting. If it is, then Poettering really needs to update stuff, because pulseaudio is documented as explicitly depending on consolekit (http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/Startup/) and pulseaudio is definitely not deprecated.
Poettering certainly makes an impression. Having the "think of the blind people!" card up his sleeve during that talk must have felt as reassuring as "terrorists! stop thinking!" feels to the US Government. It's a dishonest decoy, separate from the issues his software causes.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:39PM
This topic was discussed at Slashdot yesterday and one comment there linked to this presentation video that apparently involves Poettering.
It's an enlightening watch, to be sure!
Like the Slashdot commenter mentions, the most relevant parts start at around 12 minutes in, and then it really gets weird around 54 minutes in.
I'd say the best parts in that video are around 23:00 [youtube.com], when Lennart accuses the presenter of "hating handicapped people" as a way to shut down criticism of gdm, and from 50:48 [youtube.com] to the end of the video. The last five minutes consists of Lennart basically going "it's free stfu" and "if you don't like what I'm doing you're obsolete" to everything the presenter says while becoming increasingly hostile over it. Then he gets on the stage and continues to argue!
This is exactly the kind of shit that people complain about in regard to open source software. He's as guilty as anybody else, probably moreso, for claims of toxicity in open source with his attitude and how he interacts with others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:35AM
I think that very few open source participants act in that manner. I've been to hundreds of presentations and conferences in person, and watched thousands of videos, and I've only ever seen a small number of people act that way:
1. Rubyists
2. "Social Justice Warriors"
3. Poettering
The rest of the people in the open source community are generally good, decent people. At least the others who are borderline cases manage to just keep their outbursts confined to mailing lists. In real life, they don't act out like Poettering did.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:40AM
I wasn't implying that a majority act this way. Rather, I was implying that the person complaining about poor behaviour is one of the ones that help perpetuate the hostile open-source member stereotype.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:32PM
You mean Linus? Yes, I agree completely.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:09PM
Given that his autistic method is to blame everyone else for it bugs/mistakes, it is not surprising that he is not looking inwards for problems. He lives in a reality distortion field where he thinks folks actually want the crap he's turning out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:30AM
Yeah. This dev is intelligent but not wise. He does not appreciate the task which he is doing and is doing it wrong in places. He represents the dev who has not spent time talking to older *NIX guys and listen to what they have learned from years of hacking code.
Instead of listening to people's criticisms and growing as a person, he is crying 'fowl' and pointing fingers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:12PM
One doesn't need to listen to any oldtimer to know that binary log files are a terrible idea. Thinking about it for, oh, 15 seconds should result in that conclusion being reached.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:17PM
Yeah, what a chicken! He's just trying to duck being responsible by calling everyone else a bunch of turkeys!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:14PM
Moderation should be more that one dimensional. The parent comment deserves a +i punny.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:49PM
How old is he? He doesn't look very old from the photos I've seen of him.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:03PM
Intelligent? he is a freaking genius.
He spits paragraphs of unsubstantiated flow of consciousness bait in a public forum and says he won't discuss the topic anymore.
He says a fish rots from the head AND HIS PROJECT HAS PID 1
I can tell a good troll, guys, i indexed usenet in the nineties, trust me.
But why? Feeling omnipotent? Bah. The somehow disturbing hypothesis is that he's acting assholish to send a message "Do not use systemd, can't tell you directly because 21st century looks like east germany".
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:43PM
Billy: "The fish rots from the head, so they say. So I'm thinking, why not cut off the head?"
Penny: "...of the human race?"
Billy: "It's not a ... perfect ... metaphor."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:31AM
Nooo... not another one who slides the discrimination slope when things go stinky.
Mate, you don't like the style? Fork that damn'd kernel a start your own. You started a piece of... whatever... that wants to do everything, what's stopping you and really do everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:40AM
Lennart Poettering, creator of pulseaudio, systemd and SJW. Ugh. Threes trikes and you're out?
The main reason that there is such a skewed demographic in the Linux community is because of the early start many of us in the west had. There are still some parts of the world that don't have regular access to water let alone electricity and computers. Why doesn't Mr Poettering get a tan, a sex change and move to a location where life itself is a daily struggle. Then he can help improve the numbers he's complaining about.
BTW, the Linux community can also be viewed as dominated by assholes. ANother category Mr Poettering belongs to.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:45PM
I'm not sure it's that simple. Much of Asia had access to computers and internet well over a decade ago, and yet there hasn't been quite so much participation from them. While there is a flourishing Japanese software scene, its developers mainly keep to their own community, as the language barrier prevents them from participating in English-language mailing lists and bug trackers. Other countries had such widespread and normal use of pirated Windows software that developing Free Software alternatives didn't strike them as quite the same priority. ( I witnessed the latter firsthand living in Eastern Europe around the turn of the millennium: even nerds saw little use in Linux, because they could already use for free whatever Windows applications they wanted).
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:13PM
its developers mainly keep to their own community
Specifically with the Asians at a previous employer long before Rails I got to work with some .jp devs and they're all "ruby ruby ruby" and in .jp apparently Ruby was big and outside .jp, at least until Rails, no one had heard much about Ruby.
I started a rails app when rails was very new at work in '06 or so and it was pretty frustrating when I'd google something and the best explanation was in Japanese and no, one semester of college Japanese doesn't really prepare you for that.
Amusingly the first time I heard about Ruby it was described to me as object oriented Perl, and I accepted that as pretty accurate too.
I also worked with some .kr people (thats south korea not north) and AFAIK they did not have a national programming language like the .jp and their Ruby.
I wonder if there are other "national languages" out there or if the .jp and Ruby thing was an oddity. I guess most Indian devs do outsourced java so its kind of their national language, but that's not really what I'm looking for because they're just hired guns for .us megacorps.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:45PM
Pascal used to be taught quite intensively in Greece. While there is some merit in teaching a fast, safe language with a formal grammar, Greek students were definitely stuck in a procedural mindset and they were often flummoxed by object-oriented programming and functional programming.
1702845791×2
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:05PM
Here's what sure looks like Mr Poettering's plan going forward:
1. Expand systemd to the point where large swaths of everything depend on it, so that he is controlling as much of the code base as possible.
2. Insult Linus Torvalds for a while to try to undermine his authority.
3. Fork Linux, or demand that Linus give control of Linux over to him, or he will rage-quit and take his code with him.
His goal doesn't seem to be great code (given the number of times he's screwed up big time), or great design (given that he seems to ignore everything Thompson, Ritchie, etc said about how Unix should work). It sure seems to be about becoming the Grand High Poobah of the open source world, without any idea what that actually takes.
What he doesn't understand is that Linus is in charge because other open source developers genuinely respect his judgment. If Linus was doing a lousy job in his role, there would be calls for Alan Cox or someone else who's been in the inner circle forever to take over, and Linus might actually step aside. If, on the other hand, you're running around insulting everyone for no good reason, you're not going to have the respect of other developers, and they will quite happily shunt you aside, forking systemd if necessary to get rid of you, and life will go on.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:28PM
I don't completely agree with you theoretical plan although I could see something like that unfolding. I think whats about to come down is classic embrace extend extinguish to get the tentacles un-removable from all distros then a submarine patent will "surprisingly" surface and we'll see a legal and FUD storm like has never been seen before. The legal and fud and licensing storm will look much like that intro scene to "gladiator" where he says "unleash hell". I aim to be completely transitioned to freebsd and sit out that fight completely, LOLing all the way.
Remember one of the defining characteristics of the architecture and philosophy of the whole systemd project is not being compatible with or tolerating any existing software or any existing standards or tolerating any alternative implementations. About as non-unix like as you can get, culturally, but he's rammed it thru this way for a reason, presumably. And it fits the submarine theory.
Anyway, I'd add in support of your theory of what happens when everyone gets pissed off enough with him, recall Linus and his best friends at Bitkeeper. Oh no, it would take decades to create your own DVCS I guess the kernel is inseparably tied to the commercial bitkeeper product for all time and that commercial software will be an eternal tax upon anyone who ever does kernel dev work for all time. And then Linus gets pissed off and two weeks of furious typing later the world is given "git". I suspect this will be what the last two weeks of systemd look like, Linus getting distracted from kernel development to wipe the floor with something superior to systemd in about two weeks of coding.
What ever happened to bitkeeper inc and the dude who wrote it anyway?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:51PM
See, I was figuring Poettering was playing the game on his own behalf, not on behalf of some company that's paying him off. That's a somewhat more charitable view than your patent scenario.
If he's playing on his own behalf, then the goal is to make himself so indispensable to the Linux community he hates so much that Red Hat or some other employer will acquiesce to whatever demands he makes, plus he gets a large ego boost.
Either way, it's no good for the open source community, and if I were in charge of a project I would be really suspicious of someone coming in and saying "You should really attach a dependency on my library, just because!"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:05PM
Some people climb mountains because they're there. Some people add dependencies because they're there.
1702845791×2
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:51PM
Some people want to suck my dick because it is here. Not enough of a reason to let them have it, tho
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:50PM
Does the phrase useful idiot [wikipedia.org] mean anything to you? :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:06PM
We think we're relatively patent-proof and copyright proof WRT "unix like philosophy" stuff. Nobody has made a really successful attack anyway, not yet.
There are so many patents on ridiculous things that implementing something totally "non-unix" like he's doing, unless its totally an out of this world never seen before acid trip, means it'll probably infringe something somewhere.
He doesn't have to know he's basically stumbling right into violating IBMs patent on how VTAM initializes from zOS/MVS. Or someone buys the smoking remains of HP which still has a residual DEC patent on how VMS stored binary logs or whatever.
Don't have to understand land mines or know where each individual one is buried, to step on one.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:45PM
IANAL but I think patents don't work if you invent the patent then sneak it into code you give away for free and then one day turn around and say "omg you are all infringing on my patent!". There are other words for this - fraud, entrapment, extortion, etc. Of course US patent law is so absolutely bat-shit crazy that this might actually be a viable business model.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:55PM
You can make a lot of money selling licenses and FUD like crazy before the case gets thrown out of court.
What linux relation situation reminds me of this... hmm.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:56PM
You might have missed Rambus' patent ambush [wikipedia.org].
1702845791×2
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:04AM
You can buy their stuff from here: http://www.bitkeeper.com/ [bitkeeper.com]
Shockingly, losing a single pro-bono client they made the software available to purely as a goodwill gesture didn't bring down the company.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:47AM
In terms of number of human beings using that software, linux must have been about 90% of the userbase at that time, all disappearing at once that's going to leave a mark.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:29PM
If you really believe what you just wrote (I'm doubtful, its that absurd), then you have no f*cking clue of what an software project is, and how does it work.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:12PM
I assumed that Lennart Poettering would proceed to a bug-ridden video chat system which just happens to use the bug-ridden telephony and PulseAudio integration in systemd. And if you have any problem with the implementation, it'll be blamed on PEBCAK [wikipedia.org] or driver issues.
1702845791×2
(Score: 2) by velex on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:08PM
You all know which demographic I keep saying I belong to.
His white knighting is neither needed nor appreciated.
Frankly, like most white knights, he comes across as a creep.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hash14 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:37PM
The quote you posted is very indicative of the way he tries to curry sympathy. He is the master of strawman attacks and revs it up from 0-100 before you can say "extinguish."
Just look at this presentation [youtube.com], where a presenter dares to suggest that some people don't want Gnome, and then Lennart construes this (immediately) as an attack on handicapped people or people who don't speak English. I'm not exaggerating at all - as soon as someone even suggests doing things a different way, he'll just jump up and say, 'you must hate handicapped people.'
In fact, this is exactly how Debian has turned now that it's been taken over by his cronies. Anyone who even dares to go against him and Gnome gets insta-banned.
It's just a simple and very extreme case of playing the victim: pretending he's done nothing wrong and claiming all kinds of discrimination and personal attacks when people criticize him, even if they're just saying that they don't want to use systemd or whatever clusterfuckery he's come up with most recently.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - Poettering and Co. are the new Steve Jobs Klan of open source, and we need immediate action to get rid of his influence. Everything he's doing for the Free Software community is bad and he should be excommunicated permanently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:02AM
Poettering is another prima donna like Torvalds himself - "my way or the highway". They would have fit better into Ballmer's chair-throwing Windows culture than Linux. The Linux devs turn out some genius code, but often make some p1ss-poor decisions on UI or changes.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Horse With Stripes on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:35AM
Hey Lenny Poetter, please use some of your magic and make yourself disappear, mm'kay?
This guy seems to be set on riling up and dividing the Linux community without any concern for the potential damage he might do. What damage? Chasing away those who volunteer their time to write open source software from the small scripts, to the tools & utilities, the package managers and all the way up to the kernel maintainers.
Someone needs to give this guy a 'time out' by making him use a Window ME box for a few years. If he's good, and I mean very good then maybe he can upgrade straight to Windows 8.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:09PM
This guy is the single reason that I'm making the transition over to FreeBSD, too.
He can whine all he wants about the problems of the antiquated (yet perfectly functional and superior) ways of POSIX standardization etc etc, but in the end it's THIS MAN who is leaving the Linux world fragmented and utterly poisoned by his bothersome software.
The fact that pulseaudio, avahi, and systemd are actually being adopted by a big majority of the mainstream distros has left a very unsettling feeling with me. It's seriously enough to make me feel unhappy and a bit queasy when I realize that years and years of well-thought-out, functional, perfectly planned software is being "obsoleted" in favor of untested, monolithic pieces of non-compliant garbage.
It's the same feeling I have when I think of ALSA vs OSS, when the kernel abandoned a beautiful sound architecture in favor of some (at the time) poorly documented, confusing API that didn't seem to accomplish anything other than to "be different". -That- debacle resulted in the perceived "need" for pulse audio (at least as far as I understand) and prior to it, a million other little sound daemons. Meanwhile, FreeBSD kept with OSS, advanced with it, and now it is an entirely superior architecture with superb documentation and a terrific track record for producing pristine audio with features that I still can't even get with ALSA or pulseaudio.
I truly wish this very annoying man would go away, or that nobody would pay any attention to him. He is literally a nut job whose sole intention seems to be to fuck everyone over in one way or another, whining about the evils of the software we prefer to use while doing so.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:13PM
As I remember it, Linux OSS existed in two versions - a free and a closed (and paid for) version. The free version was limited to two channels with no DMA support, while the closed version could to multi-channel and DMA.
ALSA was designed to do what the free version of OSS couldn't. Why a new design rather than building on the free version of OSS? NIH syndrome, I suspect, though there might have been some license stuff involved.
I'm not sure whether the BSD OSS is a different code base, or the OSS people gave up and open sourced the full version once it became clear that they'd lost the Linux market.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:40PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:39AM
n/t
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdanel on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:44AM
"The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days I perfectly fit in that pattern, and the rubbish they pour over me is awful. I can only imagine that it is much worse for members of minorities, or people from different cultural backgrounds, in particular ones where losing face is a major issue."
Key words: "I can only imagine". Interpretation: Poettering doesn't have the slightest bit of proof, not even a single anecdote, but feels like slinging mud anyway.
If Linus had showed signs of racism, it would have been big news long ago, given how the press likes to report on the acerbic things he says.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:10PM
For the most part, how can most of these tell what race, gender, or sexual orientation each of the others is? It's not relevant, why would it even come up? Has it come up, or is he guessing?
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:57PM
I CAN ONLY IMAGINE he can't tell and just tried hitting the easy button for generating strife and self-righteous bullshit rage.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:12PM
Oh, I don't know about you, but the first thing I do when I decide what to think about someone in an online forum is to check the "age, race, and gender" flag on their e-mail address.
Oh, wait...
(Yes, I suppose one can usually a person's gender from their name. But beyond that...)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:48AM
What was the question from AOL chat rooms (I bailed out in 1991, so I'm digging deep into my recollection here)? ... ASL (age sex location).
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:01PM
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:47PM
> If Linus had showed signs of racism
Linus himself has been on-the-record neutral about systemd. I think soylent even ran the story about it a week or two ago.
> Key words: "I can only imagine".
What he's trying to do is to co-opt the dis-empowerment of others for his own defense. Kind of like that hedge fund billionaire who claimed that eliminating a tax loophole the hedge fund managers uniquely benefit from was like when "hitler invaded poland" [fortune.com] or that other billionaire who said that Occupy were like the nazis. [firedoglake.com]
People who are on top always try to portray themselves as victims because everybody likes to root for the underdog.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:53AM
Linus often phrases his criticism along the lines of "That's a terrible idea and you're a moron for suggesting it."
The former might not be fun to hear, but it is useful: if Linus considers something a bad idea, it is not going to get merged into the kernel. So you can either come up with good reasons why it is not a terrible idea or look for a different way to solve the same problem. Sugar-coating the criticism might lead the developer to spending time refining something that has no chance of getting merged.
The latter however is completely unnecessary. Linus' job is to guard the quality of the kernel code, not to scare people out of contributing. And by attacking people instead of code, he sets a bad example.
Similarly, if you don't like systemd (and there are certainly valid reasons to), then blog about it, contribute to an alternative init system, fork Debian etc. But don't harass the coder.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:17PM
May I say I think systemd is a piece of shit without Lenny feeling offended? If not, then it's his problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:55PM
May I say I think systemd is a piece of shit without Lenny feeling offended? If not, then it's his problem.
Fine with me. People who feel offended by criticism of their work should either not publish it or get over it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:23PM
So Debian has been going along just fine without systemd for over 20 years. Then systemd comes along, with its many problems [boycottsystemd.org], and gets forced into Debian thanks to rotten politics. And yet it should be those who don't want systemd integrated who should be forking Debian?!
Cut the crap. Those who want systemd in Debian are the ones who should be creating the fork. Let them prove that systemd and Debian are a good match first. If they really are that good of a pairing, then that distro will win out over Debian in short order. If not, then it dies out and the rest of the Debian community remains unaffected by systemd and its idiocy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:48PM
That is true, the ones who want the massive change should be the ones who create the fork. But that's not what happened, due to crappy governance. From a practical standpoint, that ship has sailed and if there is going to be a Debian-like system without systemd, then there must be a fork and it must be created by the people who want such a system. Recriminations alone won't change the reality.
I suppose it is theoretically possible to stage a coup and take over governance of Debian, then reverse systemd adoption. A fork sounds easier.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:31PM
I suppose it is theoretically possible to stage a coup and take over governance of Debian, then reverse systemd adoption. A fork sounds easier.
As far as I know, Debian has leadership elections in which their developers can vote. This could be made into an election issue if many Debian developers feel the systemd decision was wrong. The existence of a working systemd-less fork would then help in demonstrating that there is no operational reason not to reverse the decision.
Note that it is the critical mass of developers that determines what the "main" project is. In the XFree86/Xorg split, the active developers joined Xorg and XFree86 was discontinued a few years later. In the OpenOffice/LibreOffice split, it seems that the corporate developers stayed in OpenOffice while the community developers moved to LibreOffice. Debian's main asset is their developers: if they decide to leave, the organisation that is left is not going to produce any more releases.
On the other hand, if the Debian developers support the systemd decision, but end users do not, then those end users switching distros is the way to go.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:31PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:58PM
Part of what goes down is a lot of devs want Gnome. (No end users actually want Gnome because it sucks, but thats a different story)
You have to toss out gnome if your tossing out systemd. No gnome means no GIMP.
There are effects all thru the system because of the whole product tying thing.
Personally I don't think incredibly tight coupling such that a photo editor eventually thru a cause and effect chain restricts your selection of boot time logging fits the overall unix philosophy or Debians quoted but usually not enforced social contract of helping their users. You're doin it wrong on a very wide scale view if this kind of product tying is the result.
So a fork is more than just "change the default installed and call it good". Like if you removed nano as the default editor and put in vim or emacs.
As example, once you can only use systemd's binary only logging system the existing syslog systems and packages will disappear from debian, maybe not officially but practically. You need to re-implement the whole "syslog stack" from the beginning. Including recompiling all services / apps that support syslog.
Eventually, unless you have a reason to really like the linux kernel more than the bsd kernel, just ... install a BSD and be done with it? "we" seem to all be moving to freebsd although I'm open to debating the other ports.
Another option to move to is Gentoo, which at least so far as I know isn't "infected" (yet?).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:20PM
What's so bad about Gnome? I have some memory of it being a low footprint on CPU and memory?
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:22PM
That must be a very old memory.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:56PM
The part where they massively shot themselves in the foot in the UI department with Unity. I haven't actually tried out GNOME 3 (how many branches do they have? Unity, GNOME 3, GNOMEshell...)...but that's before we even get into all this systemd stuff.
Or are you thinking of XFCE? What I've ever heard is GNOME and KDE are heaviest, XFCE slightly less so, then all the light ones like Fluxbox etc.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:04PM
I think it was about choosing software adapted for Gnome or KDE. And I knew KDE is a CPU and memory hog. So the choice was easy.
Raw X11 for the win! :P ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:26PM
Some memory is right; Gnome 1.x was actually pretty cool -- I used it way back when (what was that, slackware 8 or 9?), and I liked it. When Gnome 2 came out, it was tolerable, but annoying enough (both for increased footprint and decreased configurability) it encouraged me to look at other options, and I was long gone before the abomination that is Gnome 3 came around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:35PM
They stopped optimizing for "Power Users" and started making the OS more approachable for everyone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:53PM
Which in turn made it unusable for everyone.
I don't think that their quest to make it "easier to use" has brought in one new GNOME user. In fact, it has probably driven away so many more existing GNOME users that there will always be a net loss.
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:22PM
no gnome means no GIMP
I've seen this plenty of times. I should point out that I can run gimp 2.8.14, which should be the latest (or close to it) version, on my (GNU plus) Linux system just fine without gnome. It requires gtk, yes, but not all of gnome. I don't have nautilus installed, I don't have gnome-common installed, I don't have gnome-core-apps installed, I don't have gnome-desktop, gnome-panel, gconf, gnome-vfs, gnome-session, libgnome, gdm, etc. installed.
Sure, distributions may only ship GIMP with dependencies on some or all of those things, but that's the problem of the distro maintainers. They don't ``have'' to throw out GIMP if they remove systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @06:37PM
GTK was the GimpToolKit
as of gtk3 the gnome people stole it.
Gimp was first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @06:35PM
Why not just stay with gnome2 and gtk2 and gimp of that era?
These people are fucking retards.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:03PM
If you are going to repeat this a thousand times, you can at least elaborate. I am sitting here running GIMP 2.8.6 in (deblobbed) Slackware, which, as you may know, has absolutely no plans to introduce gnome, let alone systemd (although the community have shown that both can be integrated). I find it unbelievable that GIMP would create a hard dependency on either software package, as it would imply the end of GIMP for OS X and Windoze. While I personally would welcome not wasting time on supporting non-free platforms, I am very certain that GIMP users and developers have a different idea.
Are you saying GIMP developers are so stupid, they will actually tie a productivity application to a desktop environment or a startup daemon? Or are you saying something else?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:07PM
Are you saying GIMP developers are so stupid, they will actually tie a productivity application to a desktop environment or a startup daemon? Or are you saying something else?
The only thing I can think of, as a user of Debian (jessie), is that there are a couple of package recommendations that eventually lead back to some systemd-related libs. They aren't systemd itself, they don't try to install systemd, and they don't try to replace your init. They also are optional, because a "recommended" package in apt isn't required for operation, just auto-installed if you enable auto-installation of recommended packages.
I've also asked for clarification, along with providing a better explanation of the Debian dependency chain, in this comment [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by forsythe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:52PM
I've very rarely seen Linus actually call people names, though he gets quite close. For example, the most recent harsh rejection of his [lkml.org] reads
Yeah, this is pure crap. It doesn't even compile. [...] Why the f*ck do you send me totally untested crap?
It may be a bit of hair-splitting, but also consider the last time he had issues with gcc [lkml.org]:
Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a constant . For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here
It would have been very easy to simply say ``You do some absolutely insane things...'' in place, but he's pretty consistent about attacking code and ideas. The few times I've seen him attack people have been reserved for those on the level of certain udev developers, who consistently submit code that doesn't pass his review and do not improve.
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:06PM
I don't follow LKML closely, so perhaps my information is outdated. I recall reading much more personal attacks, but the recent examples you quote are indeed targeted at the code.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:43PM
"Why the f*ck do you send me totally untested crap?"
You do that to somebody once, and the Emily Post etiquette brigade would probably tolerate my response. Ten times and I might get testy. The shitstorm that has flown at Linus for 20 years, I might eventually use the F word once or twice too. I'm glad he's there to take the shitstorm and do the swearing for the rest of us.
I have noticed a pattern in public that people who trash Linus for his occasional outburst ALWAYS find an example of him getting trolled to death for weeks and then when he finally says they F word they act like a goose laid a golden egg and try to make the general public care.
The problem with that strategy is like most people I don't really care if after getting the shit trolled out of him, he used the F word. And even worse, again like the general public, I just don't care that the astroturfer journalist guys or whatever are trying to make it an issue.
In his situation I think his behavior is reasonable and I'm glad of the job he does.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:15PM
I think open source projects tend to need benevolent dictators running them. How well the project goes tends to follow both how benevolent and how much of a dictator that person is. Without a strong leader, or a very small group of leaders the projects tend to wander and fail. I think Linus has been doing a very good job on both counts, personally.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:24PM
Wow, Linus is definitely correct about GCC there. And that is some nasty nasty bug to debug. So if he's angry, I'd say it's justifiable.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:20PM
The code is not what the argument is about.
I have no problem with Lennart writing systemd, as long as I don't have to use it. What I have a problem with that already twice I have been forced to switch distros simply to avoid systemd (from Arch and Debian).
The code did not do that. Lennart Poetering, the Gnome people, etc. did that. There is a story somewhere about Lennart attacking the Gentoo people for making systemd a choice, rather than forcing it upon people. That's the kind of person we are attacking. Not the coder with some terrible ideas, but the person who wants to force his stuff down peoples throats.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:23PM
In what way did Lennart attack Gentoo? seems like a low watermark to attack a distribution for making software a choice?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:07PM
GP may be referring to Lennart's "Gentoo folks, this is your wakeup call" post:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May/019657.html [freedesktop.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:41PM
I know, right? If only somebody would write systemd-free forks. Sounds like such a thing is in extremely high demand, unless its only a microscopic minority that's extremely vocal that's against systemd. That would explain the lack of forking though.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @08:22PM
There is nothing to write you only have to do this [linuxfromscratch.org] and that doesn't count as writing.
That aside I will enjoy it if someone actually kills Lennart Poettering now that he has made a big deal out of people donating bitcoins to have him killed. Streisand effect meets poetic justice? Yes I celebrate when dictators and mass murderers die too, which automagically makes me a very evil person :3
Feel free to contact my representatives [youtube.com] if you disagree :)
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:56AM
Unless Debian has always used systemd, there's no reason to start over completely from scratch instead of just using the last version that didn't include systemd. Going by all the people bitching about it, systemd inclusion is a new thing, so the latest version without it wouldn't even be that old.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:16AM
True enough, other people might find that interesting, I wouldn't.
If one wants less/no work there's Slackware, Gentoo, Funtoo, PuppyLinux and probably more and also there are LTS releases without anything but tiny traces of systemd which will last for up to four-five years or so.
Although there's not much point to any of this if the future of Linux is under corporate domination. Why has Red Hat been allowed to have a say inside Debian? I'm surprised, they're natural enemies and most Debian people know it.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 3, Interesting) by forsythe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:38PM
I have seen three types of criticism of systemd:
1) Technical. Stuff like Ewontfix [ewontfix.com].
2) People who have problems with the devs' attitude. That includes a lot of comments on SN.
3) Content exemplified by that one AC, who I suspect may the same as `Gregory Smith' (or is it `Tom Collins'? Seems to have changed overnight) on LKML, since they post almost the same content at similar times. Arguments are either nonexistant or one-liners. Classical flamebait.
Perhaps those posting 3 are simply trolling for discussion. But recently I've started to think that they might be strawmen, especially given how fast they picked up on the seemingly-unrelated story of the Intel dev who refuses to commit to Linux. Sure, there could be somebody out there who hates systemd, thinks the best way to make an argument is to post inflamatory content, and then decides to pick a fight with Al Viro, but that activity would also require about ten minutes of time invested, little (if any) thought, and is wonderful ammunition for those who would try to make some kind of social commentary on the linux/free software/open source community.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:00PM
I may be off base on this, but from the outside I think there may be a fear that widespread adoption of systemd will start a trend towards slick tools for system administration that can be quickly picked up by newbies, making Linux administration look more like Windows. Remember MCSE certs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:17PM
Well, I'm sure there's a fear that Linux administration will look more like Windows, but not because of slick tools, but because of "oh shit, something went wrong, and there's no way to find out what; well, let's reboot and hope the problem goes away!"
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:04PM
Sounds good to me. I work in information security; the more incompetent the sysadmin the more secure my job.
(Score: 1) by lizardloop on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:43PM
And all this is why I will keep using Ubuntu 12.04 for everything ever till Amazon no longer let me install it on an EC2 instance. Then I'll VM it in whatever abomination Poettering comes up with.
On a more serious note I think all the hate levelled at Poettering is unnecessary. Open source is a meritocracy and if Poettering's software is a problem then it simply won't get adopted by many people. And in the case where your favourite distribution does adopt his software there are usually plenty of alternatives to choose from. I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for many years which has pulse audio and it all seems to work fine for me. If pulse audio did cause me problems then I would very quickly change to another distribution that didn't cause me problems. The same for systemd, if it causes me problems I'll change. Until then I've no idea whether it will be any better or worse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:29PM
Actually many software projects are a meritocracy by proxy. Thus if the proxy is compromised you have something else than merit that controls the direction taken. Also the burden to maintain a full software project is high enough that individual forks is of negligible importance.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jpkunst on Tuesday October 07 2014, @12:51PM
I am subscribed to both the /. RSS feed and the SN RSS feed. When viewed in the same list, the SN headlines can very often be recognized without looking at the source because they sound childish and inflammatory when compared to the ./ headlines.
How about Linux systemd Dev Criticizes Kernel Community or something like that? The headline Linux systemd Dev Says Open Source is 'SICK', Kernel Community 'Awful' looks incredibly unprofessional and childish.
SN should do better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:16PM
You've been modded to oblivion, so it doesn't matter much, but for what it's worth, I agree with you. Some Soylent headlines look pretty bad, but this one looks like it came straight from the Daily Mail.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:26PM
TOS may have better headlines NOW, but doesn't anybody remember how bad it got just before the migration? Maybe they're still in reconciliation mode.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pe1rxq on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:20PM
The slashdot title is indeed more polite...
But after reading the blog post it seems the SN version is more accurate.
I do not condone death threats and he has every right to code or say whatever he wants. But my opinion hasn't changed much: both his code and blog are best left ignored.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:29PM
do you mean LP's blog?
If so , I have read it and he is a very smary guy. The BTRFS based volume distribution idea is very , very clever.
I think his attitude might be different depending on where you are sitting. But as a user who has the skills to develop, I am always grateful for stuff that works. But I have rebuild many, many packages with tweaks (the sciences are not predictable!!) , and the idea the you might have multiple libraries present for each application is very , very interesting.
Just trying to add some balance ;-) I care about the code, less about the politics...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:48PM
A legitimate complaint about the headline sounding unprofessional got modded "Off Topic"? Got it, any comments about ANYTHING in the summary or headline, or even pointing out misspellings, will be getting moderated Off Topic next time I have mod points.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:56PM
That comment was clearly moderated in an abusive manner. Whoever moderated it down like that should never moderate again. This is SN, not reddit. Abusive moderation should not be tolerated here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:58AM
And it still hasn't been corrected. 24 hour moderation period might be too long right now; a 12 hour period might work a little better until we can get some kind of metamoderation system going.
(Score: 1) by gumpish on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:03PM
The headline is simply quoting someone, and it isn't doing so out of context.
If the content of the headline seems unprofessional and childish, perhaps that's because Mr. P's whining about not being warmly received as God's Gift to Open Source (and throwing in some SJW bait for good measure) is what's unprofessional and childish.
(Score: 1) by wirelessduck on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:41PM
FWIW, I just copied the headline from el reg.
Laziness (or is that apathy?) wins again...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:54AM
If you care about it but couldn't not get around the path of least resistance, it is laziness. If you do not care about writing original headline it is apathy. I
(Score: 1) by jpkunst on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:58AM
My comment was meant for the SN editors, not the submitter.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:10PM
Dear Mr. Poettering,
if the Linux community is really as awful as you say, you should leave it alone as soon as possible. I'm sure no one in the community will object.
Yours sincerely,
[name unreadable due to binary corruption]
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:47PM
YOu may think that. I may think that. Buy obviously enough people in the linux community like systemd and what it provides, otherwise it wouldn't be so pervasive, and there would be many forks instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:07PM
Doen't work like that. Look at product tying and dependencies.
If you want gimp you will have to remove rsyslog from your network and switch to systemd init. WTF?
By careful backroom political dealing you have to rip out all of gnome, pretty much, to get rid of systemd. Personally I think that would be an improvement but enough people like it for the pain of gnome-elimination to be worse than the alternative.
I don't think anyone likes it, but is being forced in a sort of "emperor has no clothes" manner.
Nobody personally wants gnome, but everybody "knows" everyone else says its the only way to get linux on the desktop, even if actual linux desktops don't use gnome it doesn't matter. And that "needs" systemd because everyone knows you can't have linux on the desktop unless some stuff no one cares about in gnome but everyone knows everyone else thinks is really important is changed. Its a BS cascade.
(Score: 4, Informative) by forsythe on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:38PM
I think this is extremely telling. I've mentioned it in another subthread, but perhaps it bears repeating. You've referred to my distro of choice, Gentoo, as ``uninfected''. I can run GIMP with whatever init system I want.
There's nothing in GIMP's code that requires tying it to a specific init system. The only patches that are applied to the code of GIMP that I'm running (AFIACT)
1) Ensure deprecated pixbuf APIs aren't referenced
2) Change -u to -Wl,-u, in some Makefiles to make clang happier
Clearly nothing in GIMP's source code needs these dependencies that depend on dependencies that... depend on $POLITICS. Yet these dependencies exist in major distributions.
I'm not saying there's a conspiracy. It's probably nicer for the end-user to have a GIMP that integrates with something that would be nice to integrate with something else, etc. etc. But the dependencies are there and aren't strictly needed.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:16PM
You've referred to my distro of choice, Gentoo, as ``uninfected''. I can run GIMP with whatever init system I want.
Debian is "infected" with systemd as of jessie (it is to be the default init), and you can still run gimp with whatever init system you want. You don't need the non-init parts of systemd either, he seems to just be stuck on the fact that gimp recommends (not require) dbus, which also recommends (not requires) a systemd-related lib. Not systemd itself, just a lib.
So, the dependencies aren't there because they aren't strictly needed. If we end up with udev becoming dependent on systemd*, that will be a massive problem, because Xorg has a strict dependency on udev, but that isn't the case right now.
* The two projects have been combined, but currently udev still seems to be separate from systemd dependency-wise. The future may change this, which would be a much bigger problem than an incorrect complaint about gimp.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:06PM
If you want gimp you will have to remove rsyslog from your network and switch to systemd init. WTF?
So the gimp developers like systemd. If there were enough gimp developers that didn't like systemd they would fork, and make "goodgimp". Systemd at worst is simply "not a problem" for gimp developers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:33AM
I've been a user of GIMP since about 1998. I've a lot invested in the program.
Screw it. I'm sure some KDE or wxWidgets alternative like Krita is just fine for
my needs. Purging GNOME3 will be a cathartic experience anyway. We don't
need it.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:35PM
In case you didn't know it you're arguing in favor of systemd by falsely claiming it's what people want when it was Red Hat and Gnome who made the Debian decision and then you ignore the existing alternatives to the distributions using systemd, alternatives people talk about already having switched to on the same page as your comment.
I have a modest bridge that might interest you, fairly cheap, good living, solid construction of genuine stone, northern latitude in a temperate climate, has running water, will accept bitcoins or Lennart's prune of a heart as payment :P
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by E_NOENT on Tuesday October 07 2014, @01:30PM
GNOME has essentially been a horrible blight--a trojan horse filled with steaming shit--on the GNU/Linux OS, ever since the Miguel Igcaza days.
Nobody should use it. For anything. Ever.
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 1) by Kunasou on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:55PM
Since Gnome 3 came out I started using LXDE/XFCE/MATE... That crap is no good.
P.S, About Poettering:
He's turning into a huge attention whore, he talks about rot but the one rotting is him.
I hope he disappears, I'm not criticizing systemd (I use it and it works) but his personality is awful.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:57AM
The same can be said about MS Windows, until it doesn't. The question is not if systemd works, but how easy it is to debug. Any software of that size and complexity has bugs, and the only ways to deal with them in the long run is to have the system strictly modularized and with good debug output. Systemd apparently has neither of these features.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1) by Kunasou on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:42AM
Systemd-journald is a bit of a pain, I use rsyslog but still isn't perfect.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jcross on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:33PM
Poettering seems bent on not just making bad technical decisions but on actively attacking the community. But there might just be a silver lining, in that it gives a lot of people a common enemy, a reason to band together and be pissed off enough to put some effort into making an alternative. It's a bit like the Slashdot Beta in that way, really, and look what we got out of that. Ultimately, controlling open source software as a whole is cat herding on a massive scale, and this guy won't be able to do it in the long term.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:36PM
+1 insightful... :)
and I hope you're correct about the long term..
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:34PM
Is it possible to (ab)use the APIs that systemd makes use of to write a drop in replacement that works the right way along the Unix philosophy such that you don't have to rip out large portions of software on your own?
(Score: 2) by velex on Tuesday October 07 2014, @02:46PM
I'm not a Debian user so I hope this is the right link: https://packages.debian.org/sid/systemd-shim [debian.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:04PM
Cool! ;-)
Now it's just the question if the leftover infrastructure from the systemd infection will make the system crap anyway?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:23PM
I was wondering that myself. Maybe it depends on whether the requirements to get stuff working are to have A) the systemd blob installed and wired up, or B) actually running, in which case it has processes that need to interact with the rest of the system.
If it's A), they might be able to fork systemd and rip out stuff until it doesn't actually do anything (since we're not planning to actually use it) but still provide all the API points with whatever dummy return values we need to make stuff with dependencies on it not immediately freak out? However I'd hazard a guess that LP isn't that big of a moron and has gotten the tentacles hooked in more along the lines of B) such that by the time you get it disentangled, you have "dummy code" that ends up being 3/4 of the original product anyway.
But at that point, you would still have to get all the other projects to rebase to your nonfunctional, not-tracking-the-latest version and/or convince them to switch off systemd dependency, which sounds difficult. Or just make scripts to recompile half your system from source, I guess? It sounds like it would be a fair amount of end-user work unless you got all the devs onboard, which is probably impossible.
Just my uninformed, $.02 guesses :P
PS: Sorry, that's a bit tangential to what you were originally saying in that it wouldn't be a functional replacement, merely an attempt to disentangle the dependencies to the point where you could escape.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:11PM
From my point of view it's really about getting the program to be installed with the least amount of fuss without having to give in to the systemd philosophy (or lack of).
It's probably fork time. The question is how much money, developers and support that will join. Ie will the latest SCSI-SAS card be Debian-real-unix compatible? etc.. Will NVidia proprietary drivers come for it? etc..
(Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:27PM
Of course you have to weigh the effort to do that versus the usefulness of the program. GNOME is a deliberate bad actor and an enormous pain to sanitize but most programs that will require it will do so innocently, and require very little effort.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Nerdanel on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:36PM
To make a drop-in replacement for a systemd component you would need to have replacements for the entire ever-growing ball of katamari or else accept that you will always need to play catch-up because of the unstable and undocumented internal interfaces between the numerous components that make systemd. In the latter case, Poettering could break your program at will by releasing an update with a changed internal API. Then things would be broken for those of your users who installed the update until you had the time to make and release a new version of your program. So Microsoft.
The heart of systemd is that if you want one piece of it or want to use software that depends on systemd, it wants to force you to install the entire monolithic systemd complex.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:15PM
Suppose you want to use "OpenFOAM" or even FireFox etc. It seems unrealistic that the developers of these programs would play the catch-up game with systemd. So ought to be possible to fake an systemd environment at the program level? or at least for the support libraries they use.
(Score: 2) by Nerdanel on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:54PM
It's the difference between internal and external APIs. Try to make a replacement for logind while still wanting to keep systemd as your init system and you're in for trouble because logind is part of the greater systemd whole. Making a program that uses systemd without being part of the hairball is an entirely different thing. It is a thing that can easily force your users to go all systemd in everything though unless you or someone else provides an alternative, such as the non-GNOME people who hack GNOME to work without systemd do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by juggs on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:18PM
May be worth following along with what uselessd is up to: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ [darknedgy.net]
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday October 07 2014, @03:42PM
What exactly is going on these days? I see a trend:
1. Gnome 3
2. Unity
3. Firefox 29
4. systemd
5. Any Fedora after version 18
All this stuff seems designed to wreck Linux by changing it for no good reason. No one asked for it. No one wants it. I've spent several years now scrambling to migrate from Gnome to KDE to get work done, and find extensions to fix Firefox. I couldn't even get the installer for the latest Fedora 20 to run on a machine that ran the Fedora 19 installer with no problems. (So you can't say it's my hardware.) Who is behind these changes and why?
Does anything link these disasters? Do they have anything in common? Or are people just wrecking things to have something to do? These changes aren't for the better, and don't improve anything. I'm all for change that makes a substantive improvement to software.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by lizardloop on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:17PM
I think a lot of it is boredom.
Ubuntu 8.04 did everything I needed in a desktop. I'd have quite happily carried on using that so long as drivers for newer hardware came out. Unfortunately "doing nothing" is boring for developers so they will keep doing stuff. Mostly they will do stuff that appeals to them and they are capable of. Really clever people will build a better file system, encryption algorithm, kernel etc etc. Less talented developers will just endless mess around with the UI of existing code. Usually for the worse.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:29PM
I've long stopped seriously using Linux for desktop purposes and I think my comment years ago about the developers seeming to be sabotaging Desktop Linux still applies today (and seems to be confirmed every year or so ;) ):
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1896782&cid=34450782 [slashdot.org]
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2534838&cid=38110568 [slashdot.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:54PM
They all stopped optimizing for "Power Users" and started making the software more approachable to everyone.
(Score: 1) by Jesus_666 on Tuesday October 07 2014, @06:42PM
While I agree that Unity is not everyone's cup of tea, Gnome 3 is gnarly and systemd seems to have a strong "be my use case or GTFO" mentality, Firefox 29's UI doesn't quite fit the bill - because it's easy to revert. At least when Mozilla screws with things you can just install an extension and continue as if nothing had happened. No such luck with systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:02PM
I'm up to 14 extensions now to make Firefox just barely usable. I'm not talking about actually useful extensions like ad blockers, Firebug, and all of them, either! I'm talking about extensions that exist solely to fix UI bugs that the Firefox devs intentionally introduced.
I'd switch to Chrome if its UI wasn't even shittier than Firefox's is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:58PM
JTRIG [firstlook.org] happened [firstlook.org]
I strongly suggest everybody interested in Free Software watch (FreeBSD maintainer) Poul-Henning Kamp's talk at FOSDEM [youtube.com] earlier this year. It is a fictional "report" about a fictional NSA program called "Operation Orchestra". Except that it what he describes is so shockingly simple and obvious it's hard to deny that that something similar is "Operation Orchestra" must be happening - if not the NSA, then someone else.
The basic idea, It turns out, it that it is amazingly easy to manipulate open development: you just submit patches.
There are PSYOPS in play right now, and this time, the nerds are the target. PHK;s lesson on this subjecct is simple and effective, and one of the most important lessons to learn in this brave new world of technology we find ourself in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:04PM
Mod the parent up!
Open source software is going through an extremely bad time currently. I don't know if it's a clandestine attempt to disrupt the community, or if it's just a bunch of ignorant hipsters naturally screwing stuff up like they normally do, but the user experience is clearly suffering. Even projects that have been sensible for a very long time, like Debian, are succumbing to whatever it is that's ruining so many open source projects.
This isn't going to end well, at least for these projects. They will become like XFree86 soon enough, I do think. On the bright side, it's looking more and more likely that FreeBSD will see a huge resurgence soon.
(Score: 1) by ThG on Tuesday October 07 2014, @04:47PM
Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!)
I only wish he had included that Bitcoin address..
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:54PM
I don't like him either, but when you say stupid things like this you are wrong. Just wrong.
Say whatever you want about his work, say whatever you like about him.
But threats like this are never right.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Tuesday October 07 2014, @09:57PM
Well no matter how wrong and stupid you think it is your comment makes it clear that you are not going to punish it in any way that makes any difference. Is that why someone stole your paradox detector? x)
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Tuesday October 07 2014, @10:45PM
I hope that ThG does not really mean harm to anyone.
Sometimes you post something which just goes just a bit to far, I hope this was such a case.
In cases like this I feel it is important to distance oneselve from such a post. If only to let it be known that such sentiments are not universal.
However small, to me that does make a difference.
What you want to make of it is entirely up to you.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday October 08 2014, @06:39AM
My starting point is that I would rather everyone and everything was nice and reasonable but the realities are that this isn't the case. In fact the world is nowhere close to it. Then what?
I think the way you do but only up to a certain point, after that point such notions contribute to the damage being done and thus they stop being sensible reactions no matter how good the intent is. Kindness and being considerate are treasures, but only if you (and others) are not attacked or harmed. Taking a step back and making sure one understands the conflict can help a lot but only if the opponents show any inclination towards mutual cooperation on common ground, if not it's a waste of time.
Stuff like this is why I'm not a christian or pacifist; if one continues acting as a sacrificial lamb all one does is to contribute to, improve the effectiveness of, and encourage all kinds of evils and damages.
I wish I had fully realized the truth of this many decades ago but its truth is contrary to my innate nature.
I often try to provoke thought and I'm good at failing. It's not like most of my serious opinions are nice and comfortable (at least they aren't to me, and in addition to that they take some effort) so to a large degree it's a given. I have no reason not to wish harm on the people behind systemd any more than I have any reason not to wish harm on the US government and the IS and anyone else who harms me or wants to harm me. Seeing it that way is not a human right but instead a much more fundamental existential right shared with anything living and upon which everything else is built. None of the aforementioned follow any other rule in any meaningful manner thus I shouldn't either to the extent I have to have anything at all to do with them (and I'd rather not).
While the whole systemd debacle took me by surprise (two or three weeks ago or so I didn't even have an opinion on it) it has become clear that systemd is a big attack: a Linux utterly at the whim of corporate interests is what this really is about and such a Linux isn't worth anything to me nor something I can recommend to anyone.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 2) by jdccdevel on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:44PM
Just a note for all the systemd refugees, Gentoo uses OpenRC by default, and doesn't look to be changing to systemd by default any time soon (Although it is optional.)
The main complaint I've had/seen regarding Gentoo is that it takes so long to install anything. Enter Sabayon Linux [sabayon.org].
Sabayon is a binary rolling-release distro (like Arch), but based on Gentoo packages.
I'm a long-time gentoo user, and my only complaint has been compile times. I'll be trying it out in a VM today.
Also, if Pottering thinks Linux is really that bad, maybe he should just quit and do something else. Take his ball and go home as it were. I'm sure there are many closed-source software shops that would appreciate his particular brand of egotistical narcissism. I, for one, would not be sorry to see him go.
Does systemd have some interesting ideas? Yes.
Is the implementation HORRIBLE, bloated, overreaching, and buggy? Yes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:02AM
Dude, you're over a year out of date. [google.com]
They sold their soul 2 Summers ago. 2013-08-12 [sabayon.org]
If you want a Gentoo derivative that doesn't even allow systemd in its repo, that's Funtoo.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @06:08PM
Some testimonials have been taken from those who've had a run in with systemd
http://youtu.be/LMqbeE84ANY [youtu.be]
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:31PM
As long as Linus Torvalds is in charge. The reason? He refuses to accept that what worked in 1993 doesn't work in 2014. I mean if Windows tried to keep drivers based on .INI files you'd laugh, right? Well the driver model Torvalds uses is soooo damned old it makes .INI look high tech! The most telling fact is that no.other.OS. uses Torvalds design, not one, yet we are supposed to believe the entire rest of the planet is wrong and Torvalds right? Oh and that includes the other FOSS OS, BSD, in the "not using Torvalds crap design" camp and guess what? You can upgrade BSD and all the drivers continue working!
At the end of the day he isn't the only one [digit.in] that is sick of Torvalds and the "good old boy" network at the top of the Linux stack, when polled about the aging of the kernel team and if they would work with them you got responses like "cesspit of abuse" [linuxinsider.com] because like Ulrich Drepper before him Torvalds attitude and primadonna behavior? Just not healthy and a major turn off.
So while I'm sure those slurping the koolaid will call me The FOSSie equivalent of nigger [tmrepository.com] the facts don't lie, 1.- In 22 years of giving away the product the numbers of desktop users are lower than the margin for error, 2.- The ONLY major success that Linux has ever had in the consumer space is being locked down in a classic EEE by Google [arstechnica.com] and Torvalds and his bad attitude scares away new devs and makes more enemies than friends. So I will be glad will Torvalds finally steps down, maybe with some new blood in there Linux can finally grow beyond the little niche it has held for the better part of 20 years.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by pe1rxq on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:49PM
Guess what... the majority of developpers seems to disagree with you.
That is the beaty of a free software license. Linus is only in charge as long we let him in charge.
If this large group you speek of really exists they can just fork the kernel and introduce the panacea of driver models and Linus can't do anything about it.
Untill that happens it seems that those who complain are nothing more than a minority.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:11PM
My dick is 20 foot long and I fuck supermodels every night...what you won't take my word for it? Then why in da fuck should I take yours? Citation or GTFO, quit wasting my time with worthless bullshitting. I provided citations, where is yours? That is right, you are talking out your ass. BTW I'm gonna LMAO if you come back with a FOSSie wordpress blog as "proof". I provided actual professional websites, so don't be bringing me no wordpress wanking.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:27PM
Want a citation from an actuall website? Fine: On soylentnews.org there is a poster called Hairyfeet who acknowledged that Linus Torvalds is still in charge.
Please don't post while drunk in the future....
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:42PM
If you are gonna do nothing but play anecdote circlejerk then i will respond with stale copypasta. Either provide the citations to back up your horseshit which you claimed, and I quote "the majority of developers don't feel that way"...well in case you have never heard of Carl Sagan let me enlighten your uneducated ass, he said "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence [carm.org] and since I provided actual citations to back MINE up its NOT too much to ask for your to quit pulling shit out your ass and put up or shut up. Until you actually back up your bullshit with citations you can enjoy some copypasta, in this case the newly highlighted edition of "The Hairyfeet Challenge" now celebrating its eighth year with ZERO passes, yay!
Take ANY mainstream consumer oriented (not LTS, because even Ubuntu advises against mainstream users using LTS) from FIVE years ago, this simulates a 5 year typical lifecycle. This BTW is less than HALF a windows support cycle, so I'm cutting linux a break. Lets say you use Ubuntu, that would be Ubuntu 9.10 and can be downloaded from their archive. Install it on ANY PC, desktop or laptop (NOT VM as that isn't real hardware and comes with special drivers) that has a wireless card. Wireless is required because more and more mainstream users are ditching wires and nobody wants a laptop that doesn't have wireless, do they?
During this phase you are the system builder so CLI (which is usually required because Linux driver support is poor) IS ALLOWED. Once its installed you are no longer the system builder but THE USER, so like a windows user you are ONLY allowed to use the GUI. You then get to "enjoy the freedom" of using nothing but the GUI (because if you can't even update the thing without CLI you're no match for windows are you) of updating to current...with ubuntu that is SEVEN RELEASES, just FYI. You will film this and post it to youtube, you only have to upload the final install process of each release and a pic of the device manager showing working hardware complete with wireless showing WPA V2 connection, but the complete video should be hosted on dropbox to prove you aren't faking it.
BTW in case it isn't clear working hardware means WORKING HARDWARE, it does NOT mean wireless that can't use WPA, it does NOT mean a PC with no sound or VESA video, it means FULLY WORKING HARDWARE and again if you are unclear please see the highlighted areas (which you apparently didn't understand last time since you completely ignored them for more circle jerking anecdotes) as completing the challenge REQUIRES vids of the final install of each upgrade (last I checked that would be EIGHT for Ubuntu, and around SIX for most others, be sure to have room on your SD Card!) along with a 5 minute video of the end of each install showing that upon completion you could go to hardware manager and had 100% functional hardware with NO FUTZING. After all if you have to futz with the thing just to have functional drivers it isn't on the same level as Windows now is it? BTW the first Windows that passed the challenge was Win2K (RTM to EOL with ZERO failed drivers, 10 years of support) WinXP (14 years, ZERO fails) and both Vista and 7 can go from RTM to current with ZERO failures. So lets see them snappies, otherwise you are just throwing yet more bullshit, which if you want bullshit see "many eyes" (which gave us such well vetted code the world lost billions on heartbleed and will probably lose billions more on stopping the current BASHing...what quality!) or again what all the anecdotes guys like you throw around lead to, the ever popular lies [tmrepository.com], damn lies [tmrepository.com], and the tao of bullshittery. [tmrepository.com]
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:15AM
I'm sorry to dissapoint you but I am not making extraordinary claims.
I am simply making an observation: Linux has a license [ https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/COPYING?id=refs/tags/v3.17 [kernel.org] ] which allows anyone to fork it [ http://www.fsf.org/ [fsf.org] ].
You yourselve already acknowledged that Mr. Torvalds is still considered to be in charge.
From those simple facts I came to the conclusion [ https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4257&cid=103276 [soylentnews.org] ] that the group of disgruntled developers is not big enough yet to challenge the leadership position.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:27AM
Again you said, and I quote "the majority of developers seems to disagree with you."....now I want you to explain to the class how EXACTLY a copy of the license magically means that the developers agree with Linus Torvalds? After all I like Windows 7 and have no problem with its license, yet I think Steve Balmer was a bvlight on IT and the worst CEO since the Pepsi guy at Apple...one does not in any way, shape, or form affect the other.
And how many major software projects have YOU forked sir? None? Then that excuse holds ZERO weight. after all the plans for the MIG-15 BIS are online, I'd like you to build me one by Thursday...you can't? You don't have the manpower or resources? Then welcome to reality. saying "you can fork it" is NO DIFFERENT than Mitt Romney saying "have your dad pay for college" in that it assumes an insane amount of money and resources is held by anybody and everybody."Just fork it" is like many eyes, a myth backed up with almost no evidence,just look at OpenIndiana, that OS is being built by fricking Sun developers and after 3 years they can't even release a stable version!
So if you wish to stand by your statement I want to see a citation from a major publication showing a poll of developers saying they support Linus Torvalds, otherwise you are just pulling facts from your behind sir.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:28AM
As you can see, he doesn't talk to you, he talks past you.
(I especially like the way he links to a guy who admits he's a loser then calls that a citation.)
He has been told repeatedly that RedHat meets his silly little challenge yet he continues to troll this shit.
-1 Troll
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:12AM
I don't even like the GNU userspace for Linux, but it seems to me that even though facts may not lie, the spin given to them certainly can.
So while I'm sure those slurping the koolaid will call me The FOSSie equivalent of nigger
This doesn't seem a well-supported assertion. The link talks about trolling and shills and your opinion is that this is the "FOSSie equivalent of nigger." That's certainly not a fact. There's no possible way this could be any more transparent in its inflammatory nature.
As long as Linus Torvalds is in charge. The reason? He refuses to accept that what worked in 1993 doesn't work in 2014. I mean if Windows tried to keep drivers based on .INI files you'd laugh, right? Well the driver model Torvalds uses is soooo damned old it makes .INI look high tech! The most telling fact is that no.other.OS. uses Torvalds design, not one, yet we are supposed to believe the entire rest of the planet is wrong and Torvalds right? Oh and that includes the other FOSS OS, BSD, in the "not using Torvalds crap design" camp and guess what? You can upgrade BSD and all the drivers continue working!
Well, that's not a citation. That's mostly an opinion. There aren't really many facts in here other than "no other OS" using "Linus'" driver model and "you can upgrade BSD and all the drivers continue working."
1. You mean, all 2 of the other major OSes which have completely different aims and only a couple others that are even *less* popular than GNU/Linux?
2. Well, that's great for BSD. It's interesting that you mention nothing about tradeoffs, clearly meant to imply that there are none. I'm not a kernel dev, but I'm guessing this is disingenuous at best.
At the end of the day he isn't the only one that is sick of Torvalds and the "good old boy" network at the top of the Linux stack, when polled about the aging of the kernel team and if they would work with them you got responses like "cesspit of abuse" because like Ulrich Drepper before him Torvalds attitude and primadonna behavior? Just not healthy and a major turn off.
Yeah, you quoted two sources. That's uhh. A real ripping crowd you've got there.
Your first source admits readily to being ill-suited for the type of organization that the kernel is. Additionally, he refers in numerous places to where he made it emotional. Nothing stopped him from forking it and doing his own thing. Hell, from what I'm reading, he probably would've been very successful. His experiences with the community and interpretations of its problems are his own.
Your second source actually references you in detail, which is somewhat hilarious. You might want to mention that up front, chief, even if it's not related to your point. It does at least expand on quotes from numerous different people, but your assertion that these views apply generally really screams of sample bias.
I'm not going to say that these things aren't problems because that's an opinion (one that I disagree with to boot), just like the fact that they are problems is an opinion. But really, to try to play that off as fact just because there's an interview and an article about it doesn't imply the widespread nature of this opinion that you claim it is. Additionally, it doesn't matter if 99.9% of the community thinks it's a problem, it's still an opinion. Even if 99.9% of people in general (aka those that may or may not be in the community) held that opinion, it would still be an opinion. It's doubtless that the opinion becomes more important as more people share it, but this still does not turn it into a fact.
1.- In 22 years of giving away the product the numbers of desktop users are lower than the margin for error,
And does the kernel aim for desktop success? If that was their goal, they'd definitely have failed miserably. As far as I'm aware, Linus has always just put it out there for whomever happens to be interested. It turns out that there's a lot of interest from the people that need a high degree of control - they have server hardware of various kinds and embedded devices. What you say is a fact but it's not clear that it's a meaningful fact. Or related to your assertion.
2.- The ONLY major success that Linux has ever had in the consumer space is being locked down in a classic EEE by Google
Well, again, what you say is true, but what's the relevance? You haven't established relevance.
and Torvalds and his bad attitude scares away new devs and makes more enemies than friends.
That's pretty much hearsay and isn't well-supported even by your citations. And the part about making more enemies than friends? What proof do you have of that? That's inflammatory for the sake of it.
So I will be glad will Torvalds finally steps down, maybe with some new blood in there Linux can finally grow beyond the little niche it has held for the better part of 20 years.
Fair enough. Only nitpick here is that I don't think characterizing "pretty much everything in the world that isn't a desktop" as "little" is fair, but to each his own opinion.
I agree with you that the facts don't lie, but I disagree completely that your post is above any kind of rebuttal because it's based purely in fact. It's not. It's mostly opinion passed off as fact and there's no shortage of inflammatory and emotional language. Generally, facts and emotions have nothing to do with one another. Just a tip.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 07 2014, @07:59PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toVPMHRo8M&feature=youtu.be [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:07AM
F*ck off if you don't like it! It will be the best for the world. Go work at microsoft.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:33PM
...of Poettering's personality. This has explanatory power, at least to me. :)