Debian implosion 2014

calvinb

Staff remembers have been quitting like crazy as the systemd debate rages on. With the quitting of Ian Jackson, the dude fighting it or at the very least, fighting to make it optional has quit. Another notable personality who quit was Joey Hess, responsible for the installer.

Regardless of your opnion of systemd, this doesn't spell good news for Debian.

stitch

Anti-systemd as it breaks the UNIX philsophy of keeping good quality programs that fit a single task. Yes the sysvinit is aging and needs replacement but systemd is not the answer. It's far too buggy, they are far too overzealous with their reach, do not care about POSIX compatibility nor do they seem to care about stability. It's another Poettering PulseAudio-type bullshit special.

That said Colin Watson and Russ Allbery have also resigned this week; the former of which was partially over all the systemd hate.

I've forever had a soft spot for Debian as it was long a solid go-to distro for avoiding RedHatisms I do not like but jessie will be putting an end to that.

dosbox

When it comes to Linux, Slackware has always been my favorite.

noone

After dealing with Pulseaudio and it breaking machines for ages, I can't trust anything Pottering writes to begin with. That garbage when it came out would sit there and eat ram until your machine began to swap. It took a few years before they actually fixed that bug, which was fixed after Pottering walked away from it. I used Gentoo and Debian mainly for ages, and had that issue on every other distro I tried it on also. It didn't even solve the issue it was trying to address to begin with either. I used Gentoo exclusively on my desktop for several years up until a year or two ago, and made sure it would never install by hardmasking the package and ensuring my make.conf had the pulseaudio flag disabled. When I switched to Mint, it came with Pulseaudio out of the box and I see latency issues with audio even to this day. I haven't bothered to try and uninstall it as I tried before and had zero audio output whatsoever.

I'm all for replacing what we have with something more modern, like for instance Xorg definitely needed a gut and major revision. I'm not a fan of systemd assimilating, like the borg, everything in its path. I probably would have turned a blind eye if it was just systemd and logind and nothing else, but to assimilate udev, dhcpd, ntpd, cron, logging, etc is taking the kitchen sink approach to solving problems. All this new code is going to be massively buggy and the developers themselves writing this crap have this elitist mentality that everyone else is wrong.



I had a go with systemd when it was introduced with fedora a few versions ago. Every machine I used it on would hang on shutdown and would never shutdown cleanly. Half the time it would commit suicide on boot and cause a kernel panic. I filed a bug report, automatically closed as "won't fix". No explanations why, no nothing. I had a go with Arch earlier this year and still had the hang on shutdown issue with my hardware.
On servers, I typically compile my own kernel with grsecurity support. This is not supported by systemd and causes it to break. People have filed bug reports and they're typically closed with the response "use a regular kernel with selinux". Typical Redhat response, as it's really not in their best interests to support competitors. I have bets, like the Gnome developers also, he doesn't even eat his own dogfood. (I went to a conference after Gnome 3 was released and they were doing their presentations on Macs running OS X and using MS Office. )

Did I mention that this kitchen sink approach is going to be a security nightmare?