Systemd-Free Devuan 2.0 'ASCII' Officially Released (devuan.org) 313
"Dear Init Freedom Lovers..." begins the announcement at Devuan.org:
We are happy to announce that Devuan GNU+Linux 2.0 ASCII Stable is finally available. Devuan is a GNU+Linux distribution committed to providing a universal, stable, dependable, free software operating system that uses and promotes alternatives to systemd and its components.
Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...
We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.
Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...
We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.
nah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:nah (Score:4, Funny)
The minimal install of Devuan should be referred to as Half-ASCII.
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Wait, is that right or is it the thing that goes in the bathroom right next to the toilet?
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Live a little, use Devuan BAUDOT.
By the time it gets to UNICODE (if it does), it'll have grown into the bloated monstrosity that will be its namesake, so it's all good.
Re: nah (Score:5, Funny)
If you ASCII a stupid question you get a stupid ANSII
The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-) (Score:5, Informative)
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--Bruce, in all seriousness I'd like to donate an old dual-core PC that I made into a ZFS server to the Devuan project. Any way you could help? It's 64-bit but doesn't support hardware virtualization, has 4GB of RAM and runs Linux perfectly well. TIA
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If no Devuan developer can use an old PC, some school can use it, and a volunteer who keeps it going. Since Microsoft is being much nicer to Open Source these days but once in a while still shows that they don't get it [theverge.com], I'd suggest you use Linux.
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So yeah, for ZFS, better stick to a distro that's maintained, ex. Ubuntu.
You can find absent maintainers for particular projects on any distro.
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Bruce, I think it's time for a coup d'etat.
Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-) (Score:5, Interesting)
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And this is why it's good that the DPL is an elected position with a short term and not a BDFL. :)
This distro (Score:5, Insightful)
... is a Poettering-Free Zone!
An OS for the rest of us (Score:3)
Feats of speed.
OS miracles.
Has anyone got SystemD usable? (Score:2)
It's great that those of you have the power to choose to run Duuvan or FreeBSD at work. I don't! I use what they use or get fired and replaced by someone else who can get the job done.
I maybe up for a promotion using Redhat/CentOS in a few months and will be judged on uptime and ability to recover from reboots. I am nervous after reading all the hate here.
If everyone is using system D it can't be that bad right? Amazon uses it and so does every fortune 1,000 company. Is there a tutorial on how to use it rel
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I maybe up for a promotion using Redhat/CentOS in a few months and will be judged on uptime and ability to recover from reboots. I am nervous after reading all the hate here.
RH/COS is serving a lot of farms with OpenStack.
:^) and compelled to study where it all goes.
but then...
Google is pressing kubernetes at huge trade fairs. M$ is catching up with open source culture.
Ubuntu is enforcing snap and the other everywhere...
who knows what will happen???
I'm sorry it makes you feel nervous. I mostly feel excited
All I want (Score:2)
Just write the dam' code. Do it properly, with skilled authors and designers so it doesn't contain (so many) bugs and then TEST IT. Not just for function - and that only seems to be that the expected input produces the expected output, but for integration, backwards-compatibility, security and reliability.
That would actually have added value worth paying for. Then every year or two, do it again with a new release.
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Testing is what the rolling releases are for. Their users are our testers. ;)
GNU? (Score:2)
This makes me very pleased (Score:2)
I have a repurposed consumer grade NAS. It lacks any special bells or whistles. It has no sound hardware. It has only a small list of services that I want it to run. It has no god-damned-need for systemD.
Finally, I can use something reasonably mature (like debian), without SystemD's clusterfuckery.
(Because frankly, I fail to see why I need to carry all that shit around just to boot a minimalistic embedded linux, M'kay?)
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Then you need this:
http://without-systemd.org/wik... [without-systemd.org]
Though you can't apparently do this with anything that needs X, because of udev2 issues, it works fine for plain headless servers. I have a number of these running. Just install a standard BASE system and then do the referenced items above, before installing anything on top of the base OS. Job done!
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It's funny that when you google for "udev2", the first hit talks about disabling it.
Dumb name (Score:2)
They've made it difficult to search for text encoding issues in this release of Devuan.
More power to them! (Score:5, Informative)
It's great to see a systemd-free distro making progress. Hope they keep releasing.
And remember, Slackware [slackware.com] is the oldest GNU/Linux distro in active maintenance, and is also free of systemd [slashdot.org]. Even the development version (Slackware-current) has no systemd.
Every review I see about Devaun is positive (Score:3)
Fast, stable, flexible, and systemd free.
Like old (real) Debian, it has excellent package management.
Other distros get more bloated, less flexible, and more authoritarian; Devaun embraces the true ideals of Linux, and UNIX.
Gentoo and Funtoo have an OpenRC option (Score:3)
There are still systemd-free distros out there, support them if you care. I'm happy with the above.
Re: Triggered? (Score:2)
Wait, we need to have a doctorate to bitch about systemd now?
Re:No one cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Except for losing log messages and not providing a proper exit status. It's really hard to troubleshoot problems without log messages.
Re: No one cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: No one cares (Score:5, Informative)
https://ewontfix.com/14/ [ewontfix.com] is a good article which goes into detail about why systemd is a bad architecture.
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Re: No one cares (Score:5, Informative)
Neither claim which is true. No logs have ever been dropped by systemd
Many people who have tried to troubleshoot early boot issues (mostly with RAID) disagree with you, including myself.
and the exit on failure is because the daemon fails after systemd did it's thing
*its
and people not fully understanding how asynchronous starting works.
Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.
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Re: No one cares (Score:5, Informative)
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.6M Feb 1 23:31
It's clearly not a lithe, slender little thing running as pid 1.
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keep it flexible and replaceable.
Exactly! I've been using Unix since before Linux existed. The original philosophy was that it worked as a bunch of simple, self-contained components. Commands are terse and to-the-point. If you want something more complex, pipe them together. Even the shell was replaceable.
Oh, and everything could be treated like a file, including devices. This concept seems to have gone a step farther in Linux, where even processes can be accessed through /proc.
Re: No one cares (Score:4, Informative)
Funny how people who support systemd are either blind or run a full memory purge after reading any story about systemd on /.. Good examples are all over the comments on /.. If you didn't see them, you're either new here or you pointedly missed them.
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No, that's not me.
Search for COME FROM, btrfs, RAID1.
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Sorry, but Slashdot gave me " No matches found. Try a different search or head back to the main stories. ".
You used slashdot's search function? You must be noob here.
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But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd, but having not seen this myself I will of course not say that systemd had nothing to do with it but it sounds odd since / is mounted before init is called by the booting kernel. And I've read many storied about default initramfs:s having trouble with degraded raid1 btrfs so I think you blamed s
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But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd,
It does not matter even slightly whether systemd caused the problem if it exacerbates the problem.
but having not seen this myself I will
...ramble anyway, about things you don't know about.
Re: No one cares (Score:5, Informative)
Funny how so many people claim systemd is a lousy architecture to build upon, yet never provide any evidence to support those claims
Nah, I did a fairly long analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of systemd in my journal. [slashdot.org] If you disagree, go ahead and tell me: it will increase my knowledge.
Re: No one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
"How do I know there is nothing better? All the major distros have adopted systemd. If there was a better alternative I'm sure they would adopt it."
Bollocks. They adopted it because it became a dependency of other software, because the devs of that software were lazy and/or incompetent, like gnome. All except redhat of course which did it deliberately to the rest of us.
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I've heard that claim made before too... Are we really in a situation where a combination of laziness and conspiracy has forced most distros on to systemd, yet there is apparently enough support to build a fork of Debian without it?
Wouldn't it make more sense to, say, fix Gnome and a few other key bits of software to work without systemd, thus freeing all these distros that were forced to adopt it? Or just move to other window managers?
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I've heard that claim made before too... Are we really in a situation where a combination of laziness and conspiracy has forced most distros on to systemd, yet there is apparently enough support to build a fork of Debian without it?
All the available evidence says yes on all counts.
Wouldn't it make more sense to, say, fix Gnome and a few other key bits of software to work without systemd, thus freeing all these distros that were forced to adopt it? Or just move to other window managers?
Yes, yes it would. But that's not the course that was taken. Debian went to systemd with a slim majority vote, but people act like it was a unanimous decision and foregone conclusion. Well, it was neither.
Re: No one cares (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps you have an alternative explanation, if so I would like to hear it.
Yeah, I do, I discussed it at length in my journal, with this particular entry being the core [slashdot.org]. Lennart Poettering spent a lot of time working with distro builders and figuring out what would make things easier for them. So that one use case it does well, and I commend it for that.
And I would say there are other use cases it does well, but that is the most important one. Why am I against it? Again I discussed it at length, but the short answer I will restate from above: when pieces of the system become too entwined, that's bad architecture.
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Thanks, that explains a lot. So there needs to be an alternative that suits distro devs as well as users in order to replace systemd.
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Re: No one cares (Score:4, Insightful)
If I were designing it, the init system and the hot swapping system would completely separate, but the init system would call into the hot swapping system through a minimal interface when needed. That would give you maximal flexibility.
Re: No one cares (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: No one cares (Score:5, Insightful)
"You're not paying for this racoon we are setting loose in your kitchen, so you have no place to make demands of someone who is giving you a raccoon for free."
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You like it so much, you won't publicly associate your pseudonym to liking systemd.
> While it comes with some problems of its own it, does solve real problems and is an improvement.
Really? "Real" problems in a systems event reporter that has worked near flawlessly since its inception, over twenty years ago? What might those have been?
Re: No one cares (Score:4, Informative)
I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.
Then I guess you do not work where I work
But with that said, to me systemd has been a big meh. Had no issues with it nor does it excite me. At home I run Slackware and I find a bit faster and easier to deal with than what I use at work and personally, prefer it over other distros.
BTW my work hardware is more beefed-up than I have at home, but none of the performance has to do with systemd but with background tasks I need to have running at work.
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You're not paying for this racoon we are setting loose in your kitchen
I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.
Exactly. Systemd is mainly something that allows the ford versus chevy crew to get outraged about.
I guess they got tired of the text editor wars.
It isn't like there are no options if a person doesn't like systemd. In fact, for the most discriminating Linux cognoscenti, they can roll their own, with not a thing to disturb their delicate sensibilities : http://www.linuxfromscratch.or... [linuxfromscratch.org]
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Actually, no.
SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.
And fork? Pffft. That's what you're against, right? So, one can either fork systemd and 'do it right', or... not use it.
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Re: Imagine this (Score:4, Insightful)
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On the other hand, most of the rest of us are home-gamers or small busineeses, not RH's customers (most of us use Debian...) and almost any customization of services you want started at boot gets broken by a new rev of systemd.
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Re:No one cares (Score:4, Insightful)
They are talking about "systemctl start XXX" returning 0 when XXX fails to start. This is always due to XXX failing after it forks so systemctl does not see the failure before it has already done it's thing.
Lot's of the older sysv init scripts contains lots of pre-flight tests on daemons where the script writes knew that the daemon would fork first and look for configuration files etc later and then when the unit files where created these pre-flight checks where removed (but there is nothing that prevents a unit file from having pre-flight checks) by maintainers that didn't fully understand why these checks where there.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Seriously. For my life, i cannot understand why the Linux community is so worked up over it.
Re:No one cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Agree completely.
I've been using a systemd system for years now. Not one problem related to systemd. Unless you call fast start up and shut down a problem. The old init scripts were a mess, each one slightly different with no easy way to tell what commands each one would accept, and no way to get something simple, like the human readable purpose of the script. Systemd is a big improvement, for some reason rejected by people that somehow feel empowered because they can hack startup/shutdown scripts.
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Let me ask you this?
Do you use Linux professionally as a programmer/user or as a system administrator?
It seems the later who switched to FreeBSD and Duvuan for good reason have a complex environment with hundreds of racks and virtual machines where a reboot means things like your array or SAN don't get mounted and daemons randomly get shut down with no logs on why seem common. I could be wrong but systemD is great on a laptop for faster boots but professionally sounds like a nightmare when the CIO is breath
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How is this a mess ? This can only be a mess if you have no idea what you're doing, in which case you shouldn't be commenting, worrying or thinking about Systemd or "old init scripts".
Unfortunately "they" decided to impose this massive pile of crap that does everything now ( opposite of what UNIX should be - and because of what UNIX is is why we use it... otherwise everybody would be running Windows on their servers ).
But it's politics. Redhat is doing it because of
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I saw a similar title earlier today and gave 1 fuck, "what a dumb name". Fuck, why are OS names so shitty?
What difference does that make?
I think Windows is a lame name and Solaris is cool but that didn't stop the former from becoming more successful than the latter.
I also think most rappers have exceedingly stupid names but many of them are multi-millionaires and I'm not.
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I'm pretty sure that Narcocide != APK.
Re:Not universal until it includes systemd (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.
Thanks
Bruce
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I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.
Thanks
Bruce
appreciated the response, bruce. there is however a caveat in the approach that you recommend (create what i believe is missing and provide it), so let's go through it, to illustrate.
question: what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.
question: so what would be needed instead? an entire fork of de
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Well, logically you should give that piece to Debian. It would fulfill Debian's (ill-considered, IMO) decision to include SystemD, and would make life easier for Devuan, and it's nice for Debian to make life easier for its derivatives. Now, I guess De
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what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.
question: so what would be needed instead? an entire fork of devuan would be needed, wouldn't it? so that's something that i would need to maintain, on my own, wouldn't it? bear in mind that it would be a fork of a fork of debian.
Point the first, not getting your packages included in a distribution does not prevent them from being used. You can even create your own metadistribution which includes them into another distribution if users adopt your repository.
Point the second, you're asking about putting seeds back into seedless watermelon. You don't do that. You just go get a watermelon with seeds in. We still have them. And we still have Debian.
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I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)
With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD.
apologies i missed this the first time, however it's probably best done as a separate response anyway. so it goes like this:
1. i have used debian since 1996, since phil hands donated me a 486SX25 laptop so that i could work on samba 1.9.16 and beyond, on the move. its flexibility and reach means i will not use anything else.
2. systemd is so bad - the developers so psychologically damaged - that i will not use it. i will not even tolerate libsystemd1 being on systems that i manage, so it has to go (entire
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I've said for years that Bruce Perens is an insufferable narcissist with an ego the size of mount Everest. If that sentence doesn't convince you, I don't know what does...
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Devuan isn't Gentoo. It's supposed to be a collection of binary packages with good dependency management. Systemd is by design a poor fit for any such collection that offers an option other than systemd. That's why if you decide to install a Debian Jessie system with SysV init, you have no choice but to install some pieces of systemd as well.
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The same is true in devuan.
Devuan ASCII even rolled back on the removal of the libsystemd dependency that it started to removed in Jessie. Now the packages that were only changed to not depend on libsystemd are again taken straight from debian and include that again.
Devuan ASCII also ships with elogind, which provides the same APIs that systemd-logind provides on debian and undid all the changes that were in devuan jessie that removed the dependency on those APIs. They even celebrate that "archivement" in t
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Re: Not universal until it includes systemd (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for the bit on mother Theresa. You seem to have your brains together so can you explain what the problems with ststemd are?
caveat: my brain is known to be made of mush, sometimes. as in, some form of dyslexia / delay means i get basic boolean logic wrong, ok? :)
* the first clue is this: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/... [mitre.org] which contains 27 separate and distinct entries, three of them for this year alone. by contrast try searching for "sysvinit" and you get *ONE* entry dating back to 1999. you'd need to start searching for "bash" and start doing a bit more investigation (a bash search refers to several variants) to get a proper comparison.
* the systemd team have been known to ignore bugreports, closing them arbitrarily. not just once but repeatedly. i've seen posts made by people on here which gave references. basically they don't listen to constructive feedback.
* the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous. there's no consultation about the impact of the changes being made: they're just blithely "handed out" and if you don't like it go fuck yourself is the general attitude. management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1. one mistake and your entire system is compromised (or falls over).
so basically it's down to abdication of responsibility of developers and users to a team that has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of willingness to recognise and take seriously the responsibility of their role... or more to the point that the distro maintainers *CHOSE WITHOUT CONSULTATION* to forcibly abdicate responsibility on BEHALF of users, the maintenance and running of their system to systemd's developers. if you are not familiar with what happened with the debian "vote": systemd was the absolute worst and least-favoured choice by far and above... and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.
there are many many articles and examples of why systemd is an extremely dangerous *technical* choice, but mainly it's down to the fact that the users haven't been given any choice - right across the board - due to all major GNU/Linux distros swapping over all at the same time like a flock of birds / shoal of fish. try doing "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd1" and see what happens (or equivalent on fedora, or archlinux). that there *is* no choice is in itself a dangerous precedent (a monoculture).
basically it's really hard to describe.
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Sorry, but if you don't understand why a service manager should know about which file systems are mounted and whether or not the network is up before starting services, you have absolutely no authority to talk about these things.
As for process control: that's been a badly implemented part of init since its very beginning, as the ultimate ancestor process on a *nix machi
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Fine grained control is useful. I'm afraid that the grasping intrusion into other systems, reliant on deep integration with the Linux kernel, is non-portable and intrusive to many other stable parts of the system. So was the non-necessary binary system logging, which could have been left as plain ASCII, the intrusion into network configuration with the DHCP components, the intrusions into auto-mounting, the unnecessary and undesirable intrusion into user process monitoring and hardcoded killing of backgroun
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After it became quite obvious that the NSA's selinux project was a little too obvious a vector for backdoors, an alternative method for introducing opaque, complex, unneeded, and bug riddled code as close to the kernel as possible was needed. Systemd is not so much a technical product as it is a social engineering one.
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Considering that I've had one problem with init scripts ever, and it was so long ago I found the solution in an actual paper book, I'd conclude that you're talking out of Lennart's arse.
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So, if all we need to run X without being root is to use a relatively small daemon, then use that daemon. There's no need to assimilate it into an ever-growing behemoth of incomprehensibility.