systemd free trisquel variant?
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Is there any plan in Trisquel to have a variant without systemd? I don't claim to understand the problems with systemd completely but I've been really interested in Devuan GNU+Linux's(https://devuan.org/os/init-freedom) "init freedom" campaign where they say "Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice." So can anyone explain in detail(or link me to somewhere) about problems with systemd and if Trisquel will have(or plans to have) systemd free variant in future?
Lets see if I get it right. But basically there are hackers and users that loathe systemd. The main reason is its scope. It does too many things. this is contrary to the unix philosophy "Do one thing and do it well".
You can find some of the complains here: https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/
In regards to Trisquel. I don't think Trisquel will create a version (trisquel developers can hardly release a version with systemD that is 2 years older than the ubuntu version it's based on) since systemd is free software and doesn't go against the objectives the trisquel project has.
> [systemd] does too many things. this is contrary to the unix philosophy "Do one thing and do it well".
Please refer to the link MagicBanana shared:
http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html
This criticism is answered directly as:
"10. Myth: systemd is not UNIX."
But the underlying claim - that systemd is a single piece of software that does multiple things - is also challenged under both:
"1. Myth: systemd is monolithic."
AND
"6. Myth: systemd is not modular."
According to the arguments laid out here, systemd *is* 'many thing, loosely coupled', which means the claim that it doesn't embody the oft-referenced "UNIX principle" is utterly false. I think the burden of proof lies on the critics of systemd to prove that their other claims do not also fail to fit the basic facts.
systemd is free software. If you do not face technical issues with it, I see no reason to reject it.
Most points against systemd are conspiracy theory. It was fueled by sensationalist articles such as those of Paul Venezia, who announced "the Linux apocalypse", wrote that everybody should "choose [a] side on the Linux divide", predicted an exodus of server systems to BSD because "you have your Windows in my Linux", etc.:
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608798/systemd--harbinger-of-the-linux-apocalypse.html
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608864/choose-your-side-on-the-linux-divide.html
- https://www.infoworld.com/article/2608870/you-have-your-windows-in-my-linux.html
The first distributions that adopted systemd as default did so more than eight years ago: Fedora in 2011, Arch, Mageia and openSUSE in 2012, etc. By 2015, essentially all the main GNU/Linux distributions but Slackware and Gentoo had adopted systemd as default: Manjaro in 2013, Mint, SUSE, Red Hat and CentOS in 2014, Debian and Ubuntu in 2015. Those distributions chose systemd for technical reasons: it was deemed superior. None of them went back. There was no apocalypse, no exodus to BSD, etc. The prophecy failed. And, as studied in the classical sociology book "When Prophecy Fails" by Leon Festinger et al., the "believers" have faced cognitive dissonance and the most fervent ones have coped with the dissonance by reinforcing their beliefs.
After comparing systemd with a disease ("There is a menace which is spreading like a disease throughout the Linux world, it is called systemd."), https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ exposes the conspiracy theory: "There has been a movement, especially around the Red Hat-related developers to copy Microsoft Windows and all of its features". The text continues: "Now this interpretation of how a userspace should look like is implemented and was introduced with big criticism and change in the Open Source world into many distributions. The debacle in Debian is the best example in how to not introduce such a changing technology into a distribution".
Again: Debian adopted systemd as default more than five years ago and did not go back. There was no reason to. In the Debian Technical Committee, the main debate has never been between systemd and sysvinit (that Debian was using until then) or between systemd and OpenRC (that is certainly the second most used init, nowadays) or between systemd and sinit (that suckless promotes, in the subsequent paragraph, and that no distribution uses, as far as I know). It was between systemd and Upstart, which is now defunct and was not minimalist. See the votes here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#6729 (seven of the eight members of the committee prefer both S = systemd and U = upstart to O = openrc and to V = sysvinit). Anyway, there is no doubt Debian's adoption of systemd was painful for the Debian developers... mainly because anti-systemd conspiracy theorists took part in the debate on the Debian mailing lists. Wikipedia summarizes the detrimental results:
In November 2014 Debian Developer Joey Hess, Debian Technical Committee members Russ Allbery and Ian Jackson, and systemd package-maintainer Tollef Fog Heen resigned from their positions. All four justified their decision on the public Debian mailing list and in personal blogs with their exposure to extraordinary stress-levels related to ongoing disputes on systemd integration within the Debian and open-source community that rendered regular maintenance virtually impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History
https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/ then lists "a collection of links related to all the features systemd tries to enforce upon you as a Linux user, because »they know better«". I can only assume "they" refers to all those in the conspiracy. Right after, one can read: "Please add all the links you can find!". The first item says: "Your link here". It is an extremely common technique among conspiracy theorists: in absence of good argument, make a huge list of terrible ones. In that case, they are mostly links to issues that were closed, because they were fixed or because they were not actual issues. Do not believe me: randomly sample those links, click on them and see!
The huge list is an attempt to convert the visitor, who does not have the time and skills to check the links. She may indeed think "at least some of those links must point to significant problems with systemd". The list also supports never-ending discussions, where the believer picks a link (without reading the page behind it; many systemd haters do not know the first thing about init systems), submits it as a "proof" that systemd is evil and, if it gets refuted, picks another one, and so on until the interlocutor (who does all the work) gets tired.
Are you trying to say that Red Hat's corporate influence wasn't a factor in adoption of systemd? I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, systemd's leading developers are Red Hat's engineers, and you shouldn't forget that the first big distribution that enthusiastically promoted systemd was Red Hat's proving ground Fedora.
Also, are you trying to say that systemd creators didn't bully the community into submission with their neglect of common users' opinions, disregard for any alternatives and an aggressive marketing style of presenting 'merits' and 'innovations' of their creation, innovations that are either uncalled for or can be easily found in other (corporate-free) supervision suites like s6?
Ethically speaking, the imposition of systemd was close to a catastrophe, and if you fail to at least acknowledge these dubious things I don't even know what you're doing on a site 'trisquel.info' that promotes community and software ethics first and foremost.
TLDR but they merely hate a blond man and wish his ruin is one of the things I learned from this community, if I understand it correctly.
One of the more recent critiques of systemd is here: https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/index.html#utopia
It's highly technical, but what it includes is the author's critique that systemd has bugs that cannot be solved because the workarounds to those bugs have become standard practice for distros and users, and fixing the bugs would actually break too many systems. Also, systemd is loaded with features that no distro actually uses, so even though development speeds along at a very fast clip, the development itself is not in keeping with the actual user needs.
And this critique should not be carelessly dismissed, as the author has put in a great deal of detail about individual systemd problems and bugs that are literally not going to be resolved.
The author concludes by stating in part that "Upstart suffered from nasty bugs that, at their core, boiled down to having its ad hoc job and event engine out of sync with the underlying kernel process model, producing nonsensical system states. systemd suffers from the same class of issues." And yet - he points out that Chromebooks still use Upstart quite successfully. Which means that init systems in and of themselves are not that important - you can run a highly successful platform with an otherwise misbehaving init system.
The problem as he sees it boils down to the idea that although init systems no longer really matter, systemd has made itself matter because there are many modern apps and software systems that cannot be run without systemd. It is no longer replaceable, especially if you intend to use software that will not run without it. If the author is correct and systemd does suffer from the same problems as the init systems it was meant to replace, and yet systemd itself is not replaceable due to software dependence, then systemd is a problem, and finding a way to use a different init system does become an important priority.
Still TL;DL but his rage is deeper than the Pacific ocean, hotter than sand and sharper than teeth of a shark...
As of personal experience. All systemd based distro's I've installed at some point ended up not booting.
I never had that issue with SysVinit. So. yes, init variant would be very appreciated.
I am in favor of using something other than Systemd but it isn't high on my list of priorities. If Trisquel offered a different option i'd use it but if they don't and focus their efforts on fixing bugs and adding polish i'm fine with that as well. Hell i'd take a newer Mesa version over a Systemd variant because my use case sees more benefit for it.
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