A lot of the arguments about systemd are annoying because they’re either based on things that are simply inaccurate (like many of the jabs about stuffing things into PID 1, done by people who don’t realize systemd-init is just one component,) are based on a super luddite mindset (I really don’t think shitty Bourne shell sysvinit scripts are better than systemd units, TYVM,) or hyperfocus on relatively small points of contention (Usually Poettering’s attitude, which does suck sometimes. Sometimes more specific things like the UID fail-open bug. Sometimes valid but contentious design choices like binary log storage.)
Granted. There is plenty of valid criticism against systemd, and when it was first pushed on all of us I was among the angsty annoyed people. However, I also don’t care that much about init systems, so if it was gonna work it was gonna be fine for me. Systemd today works quite well. It’s a more complete replacement for many of the components it replaces. It has a handful of annoying behaviors, but it also does a lot of things quite well. I really like socket-activated units. User systemd works OK for me too. systemd-networkd is pretty good for systems that don’t need NetworkManager. I initially had some issues with logind, but today it does roughly what I want it to. (Desktop Linux is the only OS that gives me the actual behavior I want with sleep on lid close: it does it only when the last external display is disconnected. I have written software to try to get similar behavior in Windows.)
My remaining complaints:
- I dislike the way systemd is pushing the world towards dbus even more. Not every UNIX like ships dbus by default and not everyone wants it. It is flawed in some ways and it is terrible that it is being imposed as a boundary for all kinds of system services in a way that will take ages to break free from.
- I dislike that instead of building more generalized interfaces or working into existing frameworks, systemd’s interface is quickly becoming a major part of the desktop Linux ABI. Major projects increasingly depend on it, working poorly or not at all without it.
- Generally just RedHat not caring about the former concerns as a whole makes me not like their control over the ecosystem. I’m glad somebody takes the mantle of trying to push desktop Linux forward, but I really have a strong dislike towards RedHat in general, and things that are perceived as highly influenced by RedHat. GNOME’s CSD initiative is the worst thing that has ever happened to desktop Linux and libdecor is an ongoing failure of a solution years later. No offense to the folks who painstakingly work to make it happen, but I’m not sorry, it’s crap. My opinion hasn’t changed even slightly since day one. (Though almost all Wayland compositors outside of GNOME’s support server side decorations, so you could always give GNOME users decorations that let them know how you feel ;)
Why don't more people bike? Because the entire biking community, culture, and market is built around making it hard and dangerous.
No, it is because in most countries road infrastructure is built for cars, not bikes. To make life even more dangerous for cyclists, the laws do not protect them enough.
Here in The Netherlands we have many separate bike likes, inside and outside cities, so-called bike highways, etc. Some city centers are even largely car-free (e.g. Groningen). E.g. from home to my office (~3-4km) roughly 70% of the stretch is on dedicated bike roads.
On average, Dutch citizens [1] make 250-300 bike rides per year, cycling 880km on average. Most people I know cycle to work, do groceries by bike, etc.
We do not have automatic emergency braking, turn signals, regenerative breaking, anti-theft tracking (though it becomes more common with e-biks), rear radar, etc.
First you have to make cycling safe by providing separate bike lanes where possible (preferably physically separated). Secondly, you have to change the culture. Most people in other countries do not even consider cycling to work as an option. Emphasize the health benefits, etc. You also need to educate drivers on how drive safely around cyclists (this is less of a problem here, since most car drivers are also cyclists, and tend to be aware).
Capitalism transforms functionality from a cardinal concern (how much of the thing works, & how useful is it) to an ordinal one (which implementation is least-bad). Ordinal concerns are easily gamed: no matter how easy it might be to do something correctly, it's almost always easier to do it only slightly better than someone else (or to break somebody else's implementation so it's worse).
Capitalism also moves much of the emphasis to the initial selection stage: if any kind of lock-in is in place (even sunk cost), most of what matters is the implementation somebody initially picks, not whether or not they ultimately regret their selection. So, rather than making a solution that is stable and reliable or one that has deep rich expressivity, the emphasis is on making a solution that looks good on a shallow basis.
This kind of logic affects even folks who aren't getting paid for their work, because it's taken to be 'common sense' instead of a set of generally-undesirable side effects of a warped circumstance.
Software for a general audience expresses this in a more extreme way than other fields because it's nearly immune to costs like materials & liability, and because regulation largely hasn't stepped in to limit the worst of its side effects. If you build a house, it has to stay standing for long enough to sell (which is a lot longer than most software operates as intended), and it needs to pass inspection in order to be saleable; failure on either of these fronts is a big deal, because no matter how little you pay for labor, houses cost a great deal in materials, most of which lose nearly all their value in salvage. Software is almost pure labor, and can scale to an absurd degree because of this. Unlike publishing, software really doesn't have strong traditions left over from when manufacture and distribution was substantially more expensive & so quality was more important. As a result, the software industry behaves less like publishing and more like futures trading (that other entirely-abstract profession where people who are good at numbers inflate and pop bubbles while living in houses they can't afford and driving up the city's rent).
I was immediately reminded of the Dual Photography paper (well, I had to look it up first; I only remembered the "photographing a playing card that is facing away" demo at the end):
> "Wokeism" (and the even more made-up "cancel culture") is the new War on Christmas.
Saying that woke excess is "made-up" and "hysteria" is gaslighting. Coca Cola ran a diversity training encouraging employees to "be less white": https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co.... The Smithsonian has a whole page on "whiteness" treating it like it's a bad thing. If you work a college degree-required job, you've probably had an employer recommend you read something by Robin Di Angelo, who claims she "tries to be a little less white every day."
I've never met anyone who got offended when I said "Merry Christmas." I've repeatedly run into instances of woke excess over the past year. The faculty at my law school declared themselves "gatekeepers of white supremacy" on a Zoom call: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator.... (The interim dean, who declared himself a "racist," is a friend of mine, and I was shocked to read about his behavior.) Even the whole Dr. Seuss thing--"Mulberry Street," which was cancelled, is one of my daughter's favorite books. I bought it for her a couple of years ago new at a Barnes and Noble in Annapolis. It's not some obscure relic of history.
I think it's tremendously disingenuous to deny that this phenomenon has crossed the line from "manufactured outrage" into "real concern."
Granted. There is plenty of valid criticism against systemd, and when it was first pushed on all of us I was among the angsty annoyed people. However, I also don’t care that much about init systems, so if it was gonna work it was gonna be fine for me. Systemd today works quite well. It’s a more complete replacement for many of the components it replaces. It has a handful of annoying behaviors, but it also does a lot of things quite well. I really like socket-activated units. User systemd works OK for me too. systemd-networkd is pretty good for systems that don’t need NetworkManager. I initially had some issues with logind, but today it does roughly what I want it to. (Desktop Linux is the only OS that gives me the actual behavior I want with sleep on lid close: it does it only when the last external display is disconnected. I have written software to try to get similar behavior in Windows.)
My remaining complaints:
- I dislike the way systemd is pushing the world towards dbus even more. Not every UNIX like ships dbus by default and not everyone wants it. It is flawed in some ways and it is terrible that it is being imposed as a boundary for all kinds of system services in a way that will take ages to break free from.
- I dislike that instead of building more generalized interfaces or working into existing frameworks, systemd’s interface is quickly becoming a major part of the desktop Linux ABI. Major projects increasingly depend on it, working poorly or not at all without it.
- Generally just RedHat not caring about the former concerns as a whole makes me not like their control over the ecosystem. I’m glad somebody takes the mantle of trying to push desktop Linux forward, but I really have a strong dislike towards RedHat in general, and things that are perceived as highly influenced by RedHat. GNOME’s CSD initiative is the worst thing that has ever happened to desktop Linux and libdecor is an ongoing failure of a solution years later. No offense to the folks who painstakingly work to make it happen, but I’m not sorry, it’s crap. My opinion hasn’t changed even slightly since day one. (Though almost all Wayland compositors outside of GNOME’s support server side decorations, so you could always give GNOME users decorations that let them know how you feel ;)