Re: [PLUG] PLUG West - "systemd: The Anti-BusyBox" by Rich Freeman

Not contradicting any of your points, Rich, and it's true, Debian stable is still on init, but Debian testing (jessie) is frozen and defaulting to systemd, it's quite hard to avoid having it pulled in. Once Jessie is forked as Debian 8.0 and released, it'll be down to pretty much Gentoo offering non-systemd installs, and having tried to make a systemd-free install last year, there are lots of things pulling it in, even on Gentoo. A lot of the pushback, I think, is because it feels like a non-choice, that the distros have decided on systemd and there's no alternative, no way for a mere user to register their opinions and desires on this issue.

Rather than defending the merits of systemd, it would probably be more fruitful to address this feeling of powerlessness and passenger-hood.

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 2:28 PM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 12:45 PM, Greg Helledy <gregsonh@gra-inc.com> wrote:
>
> In response to the systemd controversy, an article was recently posted on
> Slashdot raising PC-BSD as an alternative to desktop linux. Apparently
> PC-BSD is FreeBSD with some additions and customizations to make it more
> friendly for a desktop user out of the box.
>

Honestly, I think people are getting fed up and just want to "punish"
distros by abandoning Linux in favor of BSD, since systemd isn't
available for BSD at all. It seems like a very emotional reaction,
and not likely to have much effect.

I'd certainly encourage anybody to understand the pros/cons of Linux
vs the various BSDs and use the right tool for the job and so on. It
just seems a bit much to switch kernels because of something other
than the kernel. As I understand it Debian still allows the use of
sysvinit, and speculating that one day they won't is just speculation,
though it is quite possible (and presumably the reason they'd abandon
it is because 99% of everybody doesn't want to use it). Then there
are distros like Gentoo that probably will offer the option of openrc
for a very long time (heck, some Gentoo devs even forked udev over
systemd), and it is available under either Linux or FreeBSD. I think
Debian has a FreeBSD port for that matter. There are also LTS
versions of distros that won't make the switch to systemd for years.

So, a lot of this "gotta purge my home of the corrupted spirit of
Linux" stuff really comes across as hysteria IMO.

Again, I'm not knocking FreeBSD at all. If you want to run a FreeBSD
storage array because it allows the use of the very mature ZFS without
any legal complications, then that is a very rational decision. I
don't know much about BSD jails, but if for your application they look
like a better solution than VMs or Linux Containers, then again, that
could be a good decision at least in the medium term.

Heck, if you want to use BSD just to learn more about BSD I think that
is a great idea too.

But, I think you'd also be just as well off learning about systemd as
well and making an informed decision.

As to the rest of your question - I'm not super-experienced with BSD,
but I imagine that as a smaller platform than Linux you're going to
run into the usual sorts of issues (that laptop with a fussy chipset
is more likely to not work, good luck getting Steam/Netflix to work,
big software packages like MythTV probably aren't as well-supported,
etc). However, if software compatibility were your #1 concern you'd
probably be running Windows anyway.

If you learn more I'd certainly be interested to hear about it. Oh,
and if you do want another shot to hear the systemd talk I'll be at
Central in March.

--
Rich

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug