Penguin-Guru

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The debates we all know so well, now hopefully presented in a single, logistically appropriate place.

I am opening this thread because the Devuan thread was falling into chaos. I hope people will use it for all future SysD debate and keep the rest of the site clean. My first, and possibly only, post here will be a copy of my most recent post in the Devuan thread to get people started. If nobody actually has anything to say on this topic, that's fine with me. It's probably only useful if people are really interested.

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I believe these debates may be socially useful so please consider some general requests for the sake of utility and civility:


1: Be kind to one another. We do not all need to think the same way, this debate is only useful for honestly educational purposes.

2: Do not become unduly emotional. It is not useful because there is no mutual exclusivity; both sides of this debate have strong communities to ensure their continuity.

3: Use general common sense to present yourself clearly and do your own research before posting arguments or questions.

4: Reserve liking posts for posts that are objectively useful. There is no value to simply liking all posts that you personally agree with.

5: Provide citations when appropriate or on request. My initial comment will exemplify my preferred style of citation but really anything is fine.

6: Edit comments to strike-through (cross-out) invalidated comments for the clarity of future readers. I am not sure how to do this in the Rich Text Editor but this BBcode implementation uses the letter 's' in brackets and a '/s' in brackets to close the tag, like HTML.

7: Take the time to read, or at least gloss-over, this web page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies. It may be useful to reference it when appropriate to maintain order but not, for example, ad hominem.


These requests are based on my observations of previous hot-topic threads and, although I have no power or desire to enforce them, I believe they will make the discussion much more enjoyable and useful for everyone.
[doublepost=1476030625,1476030368][/doublepost]
Seems like this thread has fallen back into the SysD debates. Please consider moving to another thread called "SystemD Debates", which I have just created (Link-1 below), so that Devuan users can sort through the information relevant to their configuration more easily.

That said, I think it's safe to say none of us are going to change our opinions regardless of what evidence is brought to bear. There is plenty of information out there for those interested, trying to change the opinions of those uninterested is simply a waste of time. Devuan exists to offer an alternative so I hope that people will come to accept differences of opinion. I'll hang a lantern in advance for what is probably a scientifically controversial statement but I believe that people become emotional on this topic because we are afraid that the alternative technology will usurp our preference, thereby endangering our personal comfort. Personally, I find SysD disgusting primarily on principle, but I will not try to convince people to move away from it; a moral decision based on the same principle-- freedom of choice. In fact, I might even recommend it for some use-cases based on organisational circumstances. It is a matter of personal and professional opinion, but the beauty of free software is that we never run the risk of precluding preferences. Where something is not satisfactory, we may change it to suit our ideals. Naturally, less popular software will suffer from less development effort, but the choice is always our to make. In the case of SysD, there are already satisfactory alternatives and a passionate community to support them long-term. Despite the mass-adoption of SysD, Devuan shines pure as an example of our culture's resilience in solidarity. Although I'm not actually affiliated with them in any way, this is why I wanted to make sure it would be available to Pyra users, and this is why I would like to keep the SysD debates and Devuan support threads separate. Devuan is not about hating SystemD.

Link-1: https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/threads/systemd-debates.78306/
 
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Hi all :)

https://github.com/davidjoffe/dave_gnukem/
'Floating' Draft/Beta Storyline/Plot:

The year is $CURRENTYEAR+8. An evil genius, Dr Proetton, has been hired by the CIA to infect the world's computers with a virus called SystemD, crippling them. Only you can stop him. You must find the floppy disk with the Devuan Antivirus on it, and install it on the master computer, which is hidden in Vault7.

Any resemblance to actual persons or entities is purely coincidental

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=davegnukem-magicsam

Cheers, Magic Sam
[/commercial]
 
With "The importance of Devuan" as a title ?
This isn't even a question...
 
there are also many companies which use systemD on linux, with reliability as one of their primary top concerns...
 
Indeed, that shows the benefit of clear documentation. I've learned much more about how my computer boots by reading the sysctl man page than I ever learned about how sysV did it.
 
A recent talk made at an austrialian linux conf piqued my interest. To kick off, it's worth skimming this tale of self-improvement first, and indeed it links that in the opening slides.

It doesn't require much technical understanding to follow it, although an understanding of this debate is needed, so when he refers to specific programs and systems you can skip them.

 
Systemd Now Has More Than 1.2 Million Lines of Code
https://alterslash.org/day/20190525#article-14030904

For something that was supposed to replace a few shell scripts... it's getting big. Not unlike cancer...
[doublepost=1558905133,1558904089][/doublepost]Let's put that into a correct perspective. The push for systemd came from RedHat. RedHat was bought by IBM recently... but they are not re-branding it (the fear of it becoming BlueHat), which is a good thing. (just look at the first page of the RedHat website)

Back to Systemd. Look at the picture and see how much reach it has at the moment.
 
I like how someone in the comments there says "Its internal graph of units is hard to get at". Have they tried running 'systemd-analyse plot > boot.svg'?

I think this needs someone to say what systemd has replaced, to justify what those extra lines are doing. My understanding is that these days it does more than it used to, but I'm not that well informed about what's actually changed.

But yeah, as your double post says, that won't satisfy anyone whose concern is the systemd is doing too much. All I can say is that the old init scripts stuck me as extremely badly documented, and at least now I have to documentation at my fingertips to see how my system's actually booting, if i care to.

Edit2: RedHat Enterprise Linux didn't actually enable this by default until Mid 2014. ArchLinux took it by default in October 2012, and was second to make it default after RedHat's Fedora distibution started using it in late 2011. It's interesting that the more forward looking distros don't tend to have so many supporters for the more traditional boot scripts, or so many alternative boot systems, although this feature creep should probably worry archlinux people whose one traditional benefits was that it installed a very simple system to begin with and gave you the tools to install anything else you cared to, rather than starting with lots installed and requiring you to risk breaking things when you stripped them back.
 
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Code:
root@home:~# systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 4min 53.558s (kernel) + 41.918s (userspace) = 5min 35.476s
o_O wow... And here I thought I had a decently fast Workstation. Suggested width for the svg is 33628 pixels.
Ah.. I see: You need to type in your luks password real fast, because every second is counted. edit: maybe, it's the suspend from Disk that takes that long.

Well, Ubuntu has it's upstart.

other init thingies:
http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
http://smarden.org/runit/
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/openrc
 
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