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back to article Linux's love-to-hate projects drop fresh versions: systemd 258 and GNOME 49

There are fresh new releases of two of the more controversial and divisive projects in the Linux world for everyone to argue about… and then adopt anyway. The one that's right here with us now is systemd version 258. Back in July, when the first release candidate appeared, we published a deep dive into the new version and its …

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  1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

    Gnome still playing catchup

    >> an implementation of Mahjongg solitaire

    OS/2 Warp 4 had Mahjongg.

    This is something which annoys me about all these new releases of Linux desktops. They are still catching up with features which were released decades ago, yet are trumpeted as being somehow noteworthy. What did we have a while back? A new Gnome text editor. Well I'd better get rid of my Mac and start using Linux all because of that. Where are the big movers and shakers on the Linux desktop? And I don't mean copying features from the latest version of macOS...

    13 11 Reply
    1. m4r35n357 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Gnome still playing catchup

      Well those useless wasters have given us "improved" implementations of ther stupid basic desktop programs with every fucking version of Gnome. Past caring here.

      16 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Gnome still playing catchup

      OSX still hasn't run out of "Innovations", cribbed from KDE and Gnome 8-10 years ago.

      They said, Gnome really is just spinning it's wheels when they aren't working to break features people have expected since 2003.

      7 0 Reply
  2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

    > Where are the big movers and shakers on the Linux desktop?

    I have no direct comment to make. (And that includes no specific disagreement. Read into that what you will.)

    But I invite you to consider two things.

    * systemd, as far as I can tell, is largely sponsored by Red Hat

    * GNOME was started by Red Hat because it wouldn't touch KDE due to Qt; still seems to me mostly RH people today, AFAICT.

    * Conway's Law is real – https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ConwaysLaw.html

    * Red Hat is _huge_ compared to any and all other companies in the Linux distro world.

    I add those bullet points together, and I get 5. How about you?

    17 1 Reply
    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      > two things.

      Whoops. Bugger. Oh well. It grew in the telling, what can I tell you?

      15 1 Reply
      1. gv
        Reply Icon
        Joke

        Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...

        21 0 Reply
    2. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Devil

      "This example recognized the big impact location has on human communication. Putting teams on separate floors of the same building is enough to significantly reduce communication. Putting teams in separate cities, and time zones, further gets in the way of regular conversation. The architect recognized this, and realized that he needed take this into account in his technical design from the beginning. Components developed in different time-zones needed to have a well-defined and limited interaction because their creators would not be able to talk easily."

      This paragraph really flies in the face of the commonly-asserted belief that remote work does not impact overall productivity.

      1 6 Reply
      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Windows

        Er - 1967?

        Perhaps stuff has changed a bit from when I was in short trousers (see icon)

        8 1 Reply
        1. richardcox13
          Reply Icon

          This 100%.

          When I started (around 35 years ago, so rather later than the quote) even an extended phone call was seen as an excessive cost; the idea of the kind of tools that are routinely used for remote collaboration today was only in SF.

          4 0 Reply
    3. steelpillow Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Trollface

      Erm...

      * Given that Agent P works for Microsoft, and RedHat's strings are pulled by IBM, what is your evidence for RH dominance of his work schedule?

      * I didn't know Miguel de Icaza or Federico Mena was in the pay of RedHat back in 1977. Your evidence here is?

      * Speaking as an experienced soft systems engineer, I would note the many occasions on which IT businesses restructure themselves around their product architecture, and suggest that Conway's Law only applies to younger projects and acquisitions: long-term, cause and effect change places.

      * Last I looked, Microsoft committed more code to Linux than RedHat. Meanwhile Oracle, though its Unbreakable Linux is currently built on RedHat, is another giant wading slowly out into deeper waters.

      I make that more bullet points than we trolls have fingers.

      1 5 Reply
      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Erm...

        > Given that Agent P works for Microsoft

        _Now_. He didn't when he wrote it.

        https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_red_hat_microsoft/

        (Note Prague-related gag in headline.)

        History. It matters. Know it or repeat it.

        > I didn't know Miguel de Icaza or Federico Mena was in the pay of RedHat

        "In the pay of". Loaded language. FOSS projects get sponsorship from wherever and whoever, and often, they're so short of cash that they don't ask difficult questions.

        KDE is built on Qt 1.

        Qt only went FOSS with Qt 2 and the QPL in 1999:

        https://web.archive.org/web/20000309083519/http://www.troll.no/announce/qt-200.html

        'Til then, it wasn't Free Software. Source – Richard Stallman:

        https://web.archive.org/web/20120419013021/http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-09-05-001-21-OP-LF-KE

        GNOME was a direct response to KDE.

        Citation:

        https://wiki.kakupesa.net/index.php/The_Story_of_Linux

        https://economics-portal.andrafarm.com/IT/en/2899-2783/History-of-free-and-open-source-software_9500_economics-portal-andrafarm.html#cite_note-26

        > back in 1977. Your evidence here is?

        WTF? Were they even born yet? That is the year after Vi was first released. Another gag nobody got:

        https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor/

        (I don't just throw this stuff together, you know.)

        Typo for 1997?

        > Last I looked, Microsoft committed more code to Linux than RedHat.

        1. [[citation needed]]

        2. This is not a good thing.

        2 0 Reply
    4. bazza Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      > I add those bullet points together, and I get 5. How about you?

      You've touched on the nub of it, regarding "who controls Linux?".

      Whomsoever controls what the developer pool does can take control of the whole thing. They've kinda done that with RHEL, and if they play the same tricks with source as they've already done for RHEL then other distros could struggle to keep up. It'd be a trick - make some project you control "essential", then cut everyone else of having used them to help make it essential in the first place.

      That would leave a choice between a paid-for RHEL with the most CVE's in a kernel / userland fixed with the most development, or something else. If they actually played that trick, the Linux kernel project and other distro could start to become less and less relevant. At that point it may as well be proprietary.

      1 0 Reply
      1. jake Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Who controls Linux?

        Linus does.

        Linux is the kernel. It is not an init (any init), nor is it a GUI.

        Nor is it Microsoft Pottering. Nor RedHatIBM.

        Choose your distribution well. It's totally up to you, and you have nobody to blame but yourself.

        2 1 Reply
        1. bazza Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Who controls Linux?

          No, he doesn't. At least, not for RHEL / Fedora. RedHat control that kernel, because it's they who build and release it. Linus has no ability to tell them to stop doing that. And at least for RHEL they're being a bit shy about releasing their source code. It may currently be a downstream derivative of the kernel Linus oversees, but it's not the same kernel.

          People only use a distro at all if it's viable for their needs. When it comes to things like bug fixes, feature releases, those happen only if there's a large pool of developers writing the code. If, suddenly, those developers are withdrawn from freely distributed projects (such as systemD and Gnome currently are) that most now depend upon, every distro reliant on them is going to start becoming less viable, and less relevant. Linus and crew may still be updating their kernel, but it would become an irrelevance.

          Asking whether this will happen or not is a bit like asking "will the sun set?", because this is a US company we're talking about. IBM may be playing a slightly long game, waiting for Linus to retire (whereupon chaos may ensue), then making their move and installing themselves as the custodian of the only Linux kernel and init/desktop that's getting developed and bug fixed.

          2 3 Reply
  3. ChrisElvidge Silver badge

    Ded Rat

    And Ded Rat is owned by IBM

    15 0 Reply
  4. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Not coming here

    As it happens, neither of those monstrosities have ever come anywhere near my computers - and never will.

    6 3 Reply
    1. jake Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Not coming here

      I'll be honest, I have test computers with both on them. Well, one with both, and one each with one or the other.

      I don't use those boxen in anger. In fact, at the moment they are air-gapped, on their own four-node network (the fourth box is a bastardized BSD that I'm fond of).

      0 0 Reply
  5. Steve Graham

    I don't have a "desktop environment". Just openbox and a pick'n'mix array of applications. Up until I read this article, I had Evince as the default application for PDF files. I thought its text rendering looked better than other ones I tried originally. But if it's being retired I'll use something else. I've just installed Atril from the Mate desktop. Looks fine.

    1 0 Reply
    1. m4r35n357 Silver badge
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      Have you tried Zathura? Minimal, with vi-like controls.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Steve Graham
        Reply Icon

        I've been using unixy systems since the mid-1980s and never liked vi. I did learn the basics when it was the available lightweight editor for tweaking config files, but now I always remove it and install nano.

        5 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          ... whereas I liked vi so much that I found a copy for DOS and installed it on my 80286 way back when. :-)

          4 0 Reply
          1. jake Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            I wrote a simple screen editor for MS-DOS in assembler, based on the vi key bindings, starting when we were testing MS-DOS 0.96 Beta on Pilot Build IBM-PCs. It was fairly horrid, as such things are prone to be, but it was much better than edlin. I kept it running through DOS 2.11, at which point there were plenty of shareware editors for DOS. I settled on MicroEMACS, as shipped with Mark Williams Company's C compiler, at least until I discovered BRIEF.

            1 1 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      It's always about your use case, isn't it? You're right, if it's all about just reading a pdf, many applications will help you out. But on an individual level, small things can make quite a difference. In my case for example, I too tolerate (not a Gnome GUI fan) Evince. I too, like you, saw the sun setting and looked around for alternatives... and as a result try to hang on to Evince, because of its (IMHO) better search.

      I have to work with a lot of large official documents. Legal regulation text and so on. Quick and efficient workflow is you search for specific issues, key words, articles, paragraphs. Now, readers like Atril and Papers, and a couple of others we tried, their search is absolutely OK. Up to specs. Similar. But... Evince is the only one that presents all those search hits in the side bar, all found in the complete document, listed under each other, for you to review, pick and click. Atril for example, will let you find your first hit, highlights it in the text itself, and make you click again to jump to the location of the next result in the doc, on which you need to click again to go to the next hit... click... click... click... page 372... click...

      Like I said, very personal, very needs and work flow dependent. Yes, probably a very simple GUI thing. But quite a PITA if it disappears and no equivalent is available...

      2 0 Reply
  6. Bon-the-One

    Systemd

    I've finally gotten so sick of systemd vomiting all over my systems I've jumped ship to Deuvan, FreeBSD and NetBSD (all great in different roles).

    It has been an utter joy to get back to what I used to love about Linux, which for me is freedom to properly play with an os again. Figuring out how stuff works and why.

    It's been a total breath of fresh air after the slow inexorable decline of Linux, imho. Linux is learning a long warned lesson. Power corrupts....

    14 5 Reply
    1. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Devil

      Re: Systemd

      Counterpoint: all my Linux installations use systemd, and it doesn't bother me at all. I had to learn some new commands and ways of doing things, but I don't find it any more difficult than dealing with the fuckery of init scripts and randomly-strewn configuration and log files. Most of the criticisms of systemd, from what I can tell, boil down to "it's different from what I'm used to" and "it doesn't conform to my idea of the way Linux should be," with a side helping of "Poettering is an asshole." Meanwhile, most people who deploy and administer Linux get on just fine with it.

      8 8 Reply
      1. Steve Graham
        Reply Icon

        Re: Systemd

        "it doesn't conform to my idea of the way Linux should be" in that it aspires to become an operating system, and that's what we have Linux for.

        15 2 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Systemd

          Don't get me wrong. I agree with you. 100% "Do one thing and do it well" So easily forgotten.

          But that kind of MO is not unique to systemd, now is it? Take gnome apps and their, "This is what it looks like. What do you mean, your individual inferior gui preferences and theming? STFU and eat it as we serve it.". "NO! YOU are doing it all wrong! You only get firefox as a snap!", "What do you mean your disk space? Disk space is cheap so just STFU and install this flatpak and we will install the DE essentials 241 times on your cheap diskspace","No, we only do cool new things, not crusty old .deb/.rpm packages. What did you say? Pakitmanageer? Wassta grandpa?", "Oh, have dessert, we hit "print" because you got nothing else useful to do anyway...", "Works on my phone..."

          6 0 Reply
          1. jake Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: Systemd

            Simple answer: Don't use Gnome.

            Works for me.

            9 0 Reply
      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Systemd

        I too am not bothered by systemd and I can understand why admins, especially large hyper and cloud admins may prefer it. Fast boot/reboot times are more critical these days, plus the standardised admin of services and dependencies.

        Using 1 CPU to boot when you have 32 or 64 seems absurd these days. If you don't personally like it then fine, but it fits with modern requirements of an industrial OS.

        BTW I'm no spring chicken myself (55), but I know that hardware, SW and OSes will keep changing/evolving for ever, that it why it's so goddam interesting.

        4 4 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Systemd

          For sure, totally agree.

          I don't mind contrarian distros existing and older tech sticking around, but for fuck sake at least keep it moving and improving. The main reason projects die and new ones spawn is because the old ones stagnate. New requirements come along that can't be fulfilled, bugs hang around for ages that never get fixed...all kinds of things creep in. This is what happened to X11.

          X11 was fucking awesome, it's absolutely solid...but it had bugs in it for years that were fucking annoying that nobody ever bothered to fix until it was too late...like multi monitor mixed refresh rate, fractional scaling...stuff that became quite important. PRs were submitted over the years, but they were never accepted for one reason or another. There was a patch for X11 that I applied religiously for nearly a decade to fix multi monitor mixed refresh rate and a hack I applied for fractional scaling. Both worked just fine, but the developers would never merge them in for some reason. Across dozens of machines I've used those patches. I don't have to now because Wayland just natively works with those things without any hassle.

          3 6 Reply
          1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: Systemd

            > X11 was fucking awesome, it's absolutely solid...

            Agreed.

            > but it had bugs in it for years that were fucking annoying that nobody ever bothered to fix until it was too late...

            Interesting. Never seen them.

            > like multi monitor mixed refresh rate

            I use LCDs. Ever since I switched to flatscreens, very late, maybe 2013 or so, I stopped caring about refresh rates. Seriously. They do not flicker, at all, that I can perceive.

            Confession: I regard the gamers' insistence on high refresh rates to be comparable to audiophiles' claims that gold-plated digital cables make things sound warmer.

            I want to see double-blinded controlled trials that _prove_ that anyone can reliably tell this stuff apart.

            I am short-sighted and old, but with corrections, I have better than 20:20 vision, and I can't see the stuff they claim to need so badly we need to throw away 40 years of Unix GUI R&D.

            For the same reason I do not own a single HiDPI monitor or screen unless it's built into a computer. I can't see it, so why pay extra for it, when SD screens are so cheap now?

            > fractional scaling...stuff that became quite important.

            That's true.

            I attach SD screens to HD laptops and I want things to stay the same size on both. I don't care if things can't span screens, that is simply a non-problem.

            *BUT* the problem is not with X11 or X.org. It is with Xinerama. But everyone uses Xinerama for multihead now.

            > PRs were submitted over the years, but they were never accepted for one reason or another.

            That is why XLibre exists and I am watching it with interest.

            > There was a patch for X11 that I applied religiously for nearly a decade to fix multi monitor mixed refresh rate and a hack I applied for fractional scaling.

            Do tell...?

            > the developers would never merge them in for some reason.

            I do think there is an element of truth in the claims that the big enterprise vendors -- mainly RH -- are trying to stifle improvements to X.org because they want to move to Wayland.

            I can't prove it though.

            > I don't have to now because Wayland just natively works with those things without any hassle.

            Shame that not a single good usable clean desktop works fully under it though, huh?

            That's a deal breaker for me.

            3 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Systemd

          There's a difference between "evolving" and "changing for the sake of it", or dare I say it "devolving".

          Every 10 of 15 years we see new people spout "the next best thing" which was also "the next best thing" of their grandparents. A generation later, this will be replaced with the "next best thing" which is the same as their grandparents, the next generation, it repeats.

          This is a bit of a simplification, but when you've been around a while, you tire of people thinking they know best, whilst refusing to learn from the past. Much of the better results are due to the hardware, whilst the software is stuck as if in the currents of a low head dam.

          Anyway, parallel starts are not something unique to systemd. It's easily accomplished in the realm of an init system that doesn't try to run the whole system!

          7 1 Reply
        3. m4r35n357 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Systemd

          A few questions . . .

          Why do you dislike deterministic booting - is is somehow disturbing to see your services starting up correctly before your eyes, in a sequence that you understand?

          How much of your life do you "waste" while your computer boots up?

          What is so great about an event-driver, chaotic parallel shit-show, hidden by a splash screen and virtually impossible to debug?

          2 2 Reply

          1. This post has been deleted by its author

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Systemd

            OK, as I implied in my post it's industrial demands that motivate faster boot/reboot times, especially for vm service environments.

            Whether you or I find a sequential more satisfying as a concept doesn't matter, whether you or care how long the boot takes doesn't matter.

            Stuff like this matters (and always has) in a commercial environment. Efficient booting is more recent because of high core availability and the need to provision and fail-over quickly.

            > "What is so great about an event-driver, chaotic parallel shit-show...".

            There is absolutely nothing wrong with a dependency-driven concurrent boot sequence that makes full use of the available resources. Unfortunately concurrency is the future of performance computing.

            > "..hidden by a splash screen and virtually impossible to debug"

            https://askubuntu.com/questions/33416/how-do-i-disable-the-boot-splash-screen-and-only-show-kernel-and-boot-text-ins

            2 2 Reply
          3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: Systemd

            > How much of your life do you "waste" while your computer boots up?

            Quite a lot, actually.

            I reboot my Macs about once every month or two, because they don't need it.

            I shut down my Linux boxes at night, because sleep is unreliable, hibernation is unsupported and is disappearing and needs huge swap partitions, and generally they need updates several times a week that mandate reboots.

            Secondly, systemd boots _were_ faster when it was new, about a decade ago, but they aren't any more. One of the developers, who I will not name, told me in person:

            "Oh, that's because we turned off preload. It helped when people were still using HDDs but now everyone uses SSDs we figured we didn't need it any more."

            2 0 Reply
            1. Anonymous Coward
              Reply Icon
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Systemd

              > systemd boots _were_ faster when it was new, about a decade ago, but they aren't any more.

              Heh, well how bout that. I'm not seriously surprised, just from anecdotal and gut feels, but it's definitely interesting regardless.

              In some cases I found myself waiting longer for BIOS or (hack, spit) UEFI to POST and load than for the OS to boot, especially the larger configs and multiple cards with option ROMs and such. I do recognize that real metal is nearly always slower than virtual and cloudy for startup time.

              Still, this "must have faster boot time" thing from systemD is (was, it seems) trying to solve a problem I simply don't have.

              Coincidentally, I ran into the "wait a few minutes while systemD decides whether to let you shutdown" problem again this evening. Fortunately that system is scheduled for a rebuild and reinstall.

              1 0 Reply
      3. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Systemd

        > criticisms of systemd, from what I can tell, boil down to "it's different from what I'm used to" and "it doesn't conform to my idea of the way Linux should be,"

        Nothing wrong with either of those, frankly. People are allowed to like what they like, prefer a certain way of doing things, and so on.

        The people who can, and are sufficiently motivated to do so, have moved on to other things.

        > side helping of "Poettering is an asshole."

        This is not unexpected. Public figures with ... strong ... personalities often offend people; sometimes they even set out to do it. No surprise that people on the receiving end don't always react well.

        > Meanwhile, most people who deploy and administer Linux get on just fine with it.

        "most" and "fine" are doing a lot of work there.

        I used systemD for years, from its introduction (to us) in RHEL7 and onwards. We used systemD because we hadn't any realistic choice, being a Red Hat shop and committed to that path at the time, not because we were "fine with it". Quite the contrary.

        Rather, we figured out how to adapt and make (an unsteady and unhappy) peace with systemD, because again, we had no alternative then. But every new release brought new problems, and it's fair to say that systemD and its creeping features caused us more trouble and work by far than any supposed problems it was alleged to solve.

        Glad for you that systemD has worked out and you're happy with it. Not at all our experience -- more like grudging, reluctant acceptance.

        14 0 Reply
      4. gosand
        Reply Icon

        Re: Systemd

        I moved off of Mint in 2018 because my system started hanging on boot and shutdown. I thought my HDD was failing. After lots of troubleshooting, I learned about systemd, and Mint had foisted it upon me when I dist-upgraded. I tried and tried to fix it, but eventually started looking at other distros. (in my history, problems with a distro is what makes me switch, and i've been doing this since '98)

        So I have been systemd free since then, and never once have regretted it. I've never had a reason to use it, and I am sure it's much more stable now.

        However,

        I acquired a laptop from my work in a buy-back program after mine got updated. It's only 4 years old, and is quite usable with good specs so I installed straight Debian XFCE on it. I use it a couple of times a week to do nothing much of anything, and it boots up and shuts down very quickly. Until it doesn't. About 25% of the time it takes about a minute and a half to shut down. I haven't been bothered to troubleshoot it because I can just walk away from it while it's contemplating itself with its stupid little countdown timer.

        Now I really see no reason to use systemd.

        12 0 Reply
      5. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Systemd

        Totally agree.

        I've used Linux for decades...change is inevitable. In 5 years time, systemd might be gone...and we'll have a whole new crowd of next-init haters demanding distros with systemd...the old way. It's just how it is.

        There are three camps in Linux...those that hate change and want the status quo forever...those that demand progress every hour of the day and want the new tech NOW...and those that don't care either way.

        By far, the biggest group is the third group...but it's also the quietest group...they don't complain, they don't demand...they just build shit. The haters are by far the smallest group because they don't have staying power...they just keep fracturing and fracturing until small groups of dozens of people rally in a Discord around an obscure distro. Haters can't agree with each other. I've seen so many contrarian distros over the years...they always die eventually. Usually because the one dev maintaining it gets bored / loses their mind / moves on or because the community becomes just a load of people moaning and hardly anyone contributes in any meaningful way.

        The folks that always want the bleeding edge never really go anywhere, they just hop to the next new thing...these guys are important because they're the helmets taking bullets and knives before good ideas become mainstream. The people that don't care are the ones doing the heavy lifting in most of the communities out there...they just need shit to work for projects, work, hobbies etc.

        2 5 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Systemd

          You missed the most important camp:

          Those who don't want change for the sake of it, or change that is poorly thought out, but welcome change when it provides a real improvement.

          10 0 Reply
          1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
            Reply Icon
            Trollface

            Re: Systemd

            > Those who don't want change for the sake of it, or change that is poorly thought out, but welcome change when it provides a real improvement.

            Oh, you mean FreeBSD users?

            [Note the icon!]

            2 0 Reply
        2. m4r35n357 Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: Systemd

          What about the group that goes on hypothetical rants about the "sorts of people" who do this and that?

          1 1 Reply
        3. gosand
          Reply Icon

          Re: Systemd

          There is the 4th camp of Linux users, and I think it spans the other 3... those who want a choice. There are people who build their own kernels, or run optimized kernels for whatever they are doing. (hobbyists, projects, work). There are people who run different DEs or WMs - because they prefer to work/operate how they want. There are people who have different needs for audio. Or video editing. Or image manipulation. Or file systems. Or this or that. Or it's not needs, but wants. They just want to tinker. There are options within the Linux ecosystem. The sheer number of distros is extremely daunting - but that is the actual beauty of Linux.

          But for some reason, systemd has become a de-facto standard for.... reasons. Because most distro maintainers didn't have the wherewithall to NOT use it. That was actually the case with Mint. I got a response from the maintainer (Clem) that he didn't have a choice in the matter because they are based on Ubuntu that is based on Debian. There are other init systems out there, and I am sure there are technical reasons why they may be better in certain use cases. Systemd scratched an itch, I think largely for sysadmins managing a vast sea of installations. But I don't know, it's not my itch. And honestly, I don't CARE about the init, I just want it to work. If it doesn't work for me, I want the ability to swap it out. That is how it used to be, but now that is much harder to do. There is no other part of Linux where that is the case that I am aware of. I am sure there are advantages to systemd. But it is built to crowd out the ability to NOT use it. That is what I don't like. That diminishes one of the strengths of Linux. It's a single point of failure, which will most likely be exploited - either by malicious actors, or greedy companies. I guess those are just different sides of the same coin.

          Always a fun view: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg

          2 0 Reply
      6. bazza Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Systemd

        Journalctl is dog slow and not worth it.

        5 0 Reply
      7. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Systemd

        > it doesn't bother me at all.

        Tell me. How many dual boot?

        How many dual boot with non-Linux OSes?

        How often do you replace those other OSes and reformat their partitions?

        All of those are problems with systemd.

        0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Systemd

      258 releases and it's still shite. That must be some kind of record.

      10 2 Reply
      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Trollface

        Re: Systemd

        > 258 releases and it's still shite. That must be some kind of record.

        No no no.

        The version number is a lie.

        The team "embraced and extended" udev and added 139 to the version number.

        You need to read the Reg more, Mr AC.

        https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/03/version_252_systemd/

        It's really version 119.

        I interpret that as "1.19" myself. _Nearly_ the second release of the first "good enough to ship" version.

        1 0 Reply
        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Systemd

          Good enough to ship, maybe.

          Not really good enough to be the default.

          Definitely not good enough to be widely adopted and spreading itself into other areas of the OS.

          It is, however, a fine demonstration of 800lb gorilla marketing and control.

          1 0 Reply
    3. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: Systemd

      Could Agent P be beavering away in the small hours on a project to bring Systemd into... Windows?

      3 0 Reply
      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: Systemd

        > Could Agent P be beavering away in the small hours on a project to bring Systemd into... Windows?

        You say "joke alert" but that is genuinely the reason he got the job at MS, yes.

        WSL2 runs real Linux in a VM.

        It integrated the VM with the host using hacks to init. It didn't work with systemd. The kiddie admins didn't know any other way to start services and things than

        systemctrl start apache2

        or whatever. MS doesn't have anyone left who could hack systemd -- they also don't have anyone left who could upgrade the NT kernel POSIX personality to be Linux compatible, which is why WSL2 was based on the Windows Phone Android app runtime -- but they have lots of money.

        So they just hired the guy who wrote it.

        I thought this was well known?

        https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_red_hat_microsoft/

        2 0 Reply
    4. RAMChYLD
      Reply Icon

      Re: Systemd

      Latest SystemD broke DNS support, uinput.

      Users suddenly no longer able to use controllers in games.

      https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/39043

      Additionally users of ResolveD suddenly cannot get DNS resolution because of premature enabling of buggy DNSSEC support.

      https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=308364

      Both these issues combined gave me a frustrating few weeks that culminated in both my Arch and CachyOS machines getting reformatted.

      5 0 Reply
    5. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Systemd

      > I've jumped ship to Deuvan

      Devuan, right?

      Fair enough.

      Debian is still pretty big & bloated, though, and that means Devuan is too.

      I am still investigating Alpine. It is a colder cleaner breath of fresher air. It uses as much disk as Debian uses RAM. It uses so little RAM, it's like a 1990s distro, but built from all-new modern updated code. It boots faster on a Core 2 Duo from 3Gb/s SATA SSD than Debian on my 9th gen Core i7 with NVMe.

      Main snag: I'm lazy. I use a bunch of Electron apps because I'm lazy and they do the job. They don't work on Alpine. I need to find replacements that don't need Chromium and Glibc. Not got round to that yet.

      I need Slack and I want Whatsapp, Telegram, FB Messenger, and so on, and because I do not want a dozen apps running all the time, I want all my messenger apps in one client. Which is one of many reasons Signal is a PITA.

      It looks like Thunderbird may be able to do this, if I tolerate some rendering errors.

      And I don't want to pollute the crystalline purity of Alpine with Flatpak.

      But while I understand, sympathise, even praise your choice, there are alternatives that are just a _bit_ more work that bring far greater benefits than changing some discoloured bricks in the foundations and leaving the edifice intact.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Systemd

        I've only experimented with Alpine so far -- e.g. worked out how to PXE boot into the installer so I could stand up some test VM's, but so far it's been pretty positive.

        Even with some of the docs (wiki pages) on the PXE subject being marked obsolete, it only took an hour or so of reading and a couple PXELINUX config attempts before I had it working well enough to use for installing.

        Next is doing a full install and Alpine config, as if I were going to stand up a server and use it for infrastructure and services for-real. Beyond the ephemeral bits I've done so far.

        So far I have a good feeling it would work fine for most any infra server duty I'd care to use it for (DNS, NTP, DHCP, SMTP, etc.) and probably more besides. Not sure if Alpine would be a good daily driver on the laptop, but I'll give it a try at some point.

        0 0 Reply
  7. steelpillow Silver badge
    Devil

    More phonelike 'n'ever...

    ...and that's supposed to be good?!

    Then again, I don't know which is the more cringeworthy branding;

    Hey, all you Gnomes and cute little Ptyxies out there, it's Showtime! - >Ta-ra-ra-BooM! Tish! Kathrrrrump!< ... etc etc etc.....

    Thank the Lord for good ol' MATE.

    10 0 Reply
    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: More phonelike 'n'ever...

      "...and that's supposed to be good?!"

      Why yes! Didn't you hear the rave reviews that Windows 8 got when it first came out? And didn't you see how Windows 10 doubled down, moving everything out of the old Control Panel and ditching the stuffy old Start Menu for good?

      Oh. Ah. Now that you mention it, I didn't see that either. But the smart folks at Gnome clearly did.

      10 0 Reply
      1. RAMChYLD
        Reply Icon

        Re: More phonelike 'n'ever...

        It was at that point I ditched Gnome for XFCE.

        But then XFCE decided to follow suit apparently.

        Now I'm on KDE. I don't like how Qt hogs resources, but at this point I think I'll have to suck it up and bear it.

        0 0 Reply
        1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: More phonelike 'n'ever...

          > But then XFCE decided to follow suit apparently.

          In what way?

          2 0 Reply
      2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: More phonelike 'n'ever...

        > But the smart folks at Gnome clearly did.

        Because MS said it was going to sue them.

        https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/

        Then after MS terrified them into submission, it ripped and replaced all that stuff anyway.

        Much the same as it sold Corel the "Office 2000 look and feel" and VBA for WordPerfect Office... on condition that Corel axed its Linux distro, its desktop Arm box the Netwinder, its version of WordPerfect Office for Linux, its native WordPerfect for Linux...

        Corel obeyed.

        Then MS replaced the Office look and feel anyway.

        Poor suckers at Corel. CoreL Linux OS was great, WordPerfect was just reaching greatness, the Netwinder hardware looked great.

        All killed at the behest of Redmond.

        3 0 Reply
    2. m4r35n357 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: More phonelike 'n'ever...

      or the devs.

      0 0 Reply
  8. Neil Barnes Silver badge

    Those old enough to own reading glasses

    Three pairs last time I looked, and another pair for driving...

    But back in the day when I worked for a broadcaster and eight bits per channel was the way of things, it was apparent from user testing that while most people couldn't tell two colours differing by a least significant bit in one channel, they could - for example - see contour lines on a smooth gradient. Like the sky in a TV image.

    Sorry I can't provide references from this distance.

    2 0 Reply
    1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: Those old enough to own reading glasses

      Three pairs last time I looked, and another pair for driving...

      One pair of (bifocal) glasses for reading/computer use, one (varifocal) pair for driving/dog walking

      But then when your prescripion is -12 (with astigmatism) and -9 (with astigmatism) you are somewhat constrained by what you can do - the lenses have to be made of high-refractive index material to not have the edges about the same size as a double-glazing unit..

      So glasses are *expensive*. Because of my prescription, the government gives a generous grant (£5 per eye - the optician just gives me the £5 off and doesn't bother to claim becaus ethe byzantine and tortuous claim method costs way more than £5 in employee time)

      I sometimes really envy people who can just wake up in the morning and see stuff more than 6 inches away from the tip of their nose. Mind you, these days it's usually a kitten face about an inch from my nose wondering why we haven't fed them yet. And, given that we have 3 kittens, I had forgotten that they all come fitted with hobnail boots for running around during the night in.

      0 0 Reply

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