I can't speak for any distribution, after quitting as a Debian developer some months back, for several reasons one of which was systemd. But speaking for myself, it was quite clear during the several years of "debate" (i.e. flamewars) over systemd that this was the inevitable outcome. The debate over replacing the "init system" was a complete red herring; systemd knows no boundaries and continues to expand its tentacles over the system as it subsumes more and more components. My problem with this is that once a distribution has adopted systemd, they have to basically just accept whatever crap is shovelled out in the subsequent systemd releases--it's all or nothing and once you're on the train you can't get off it. This was absolutely obvious years ago. Quality software engineering and a solid base system walked out of the door when systemd arrived; I certainly did.
When I commit to a system such as a Linux distribution like Debian, I'm making an investment of my time and effort to use it. I do want to be able to rely on future releases being sane and not too radical a departure from previous releases--I am after all basing my work and livelihood upon it. With systemd, I don't know what I'm going to get with future versions and being able to rely on the distribution being usable and reliable in the future is now an unknown. That's why I got off this particular train before the jessie release. After 18 years, that wasn't an easy decision to make, but I still think it was the right one. And yes, I'm one of the people who moved to FreeBSD. Not because I wanted to move from Debian after having invested so much into it personally, but because I was forced to by this stupidity. And FreeBSD is a good solid dose of sanity.
Regarding alternatives, I looked at Linux distribution alternatives but the choices are not great. I don't want the hassle of dealing with gentoo, though I'm sure it's fine. The others are all smaller projects which are largely dependent upon others. But longer-term, with the merging to udev and systemd and the merging of systemd-specific stuff into util-linux makes the long-term viability of any non-systemd distribution questionable. Short-term it's possible to avoid. But, there's a practical limit to
What path have we chosen? (Score:4, Interesting)
.
systemd is on the way to turning a sleek, efficient Linux distribution into one loaded with awesome bloatware.
And it looks like there is no stopping Poettering's ego now that it's been unleashed.
Re:What path have we chosen? (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't speak for any distribution, after quitting as a Debian developer some months back, for several reasons one of which was systemd. But speaking for myself, it was quite clear during the several years of "debate" (i.e. flamewars) over systemd that this was the inevitable outcome. The debate over replacing the "init system" was a complete red herring; systemd knows no boundaries and continues to expand its tentacles over the system as it subsumes more and more components. My problem with this is that once a distribution has adopted systemd, they have to basically just accept whatever crap is shovelled out in the subsequent systemd releases--it's all or nothing and once you're on the train you can't get off it. This was absolutely obvious years ago. Quality software engineering and a solid base system walked out of the door when systemd arrived; I certainly did.
When I commit to a system such as a Linux distribution like Debian, I'm making an investment of my time and effort to use it. I do want to be able to rely on future releases being sane and not too radical a departure from previous releases--I am after all basing my work and livelihood upon it. With systemd, I don't know what I'm going to get with future versions and being able to rely on the distribution being usable and reliable in the future is now an unknown. That's why I got off this particular train before the jessie release. After 18 years, that wasn't an easy decision to make, but I still think it was the right one. And yes, I'm one of the people who moved to FreeBSD. Not because I wanted to move from Debian after having invested so much into it personally, but because I was forced to by this stupidity. And FreeBSD is a good solid dose of sanity.
Re: (Score:3)
Regarding alternatives, I looked at Linux distribution alternatives but the choices are not great. I don't want the hassle of dealing with gentoo, though I'm sure it's fine. The others are all smaller projects which are largely dependent upon others. But longer-term, with the merging to udev and systemd and the merging of systemd-specific stuff into util-linux makes the long-term viability of any non-systemd distribution questionable. Short-term it's possible to avoid. But, there's a practical limit to
Re: (Score:1)
>after quitting as a Debian developer some months back,
Could you join Devuan please. I ask this as a wheezy user and vid game programmer/modder for lin.
Devuan can preserve the old debian.