this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
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And neither Arch, nor Ubuntu, nor Debian, nor OpenSUSE, nor any other distro using systemd belongs to IBM.
systemd has nothing to do with any corporation doing bad stuff to "our Linux".
It is just newer software, doing more things more easily.
Sure, the centralization is pretty damn bad. But for example replacing sudo is needed.
There's plenty of 100-loc tools for that already. And doas, who has most of sudo's server-features, is not much bigger.
And they all work even without systemd or services.
Seriously asking: what's wrong with Sudo? And aren't there already loads of alternatives?
I suppose doas is a pretty great alternative.
Smaller code is often good, but not always.
systemd nightmare needs to end. Too many broken garbage from malicious actors within the opensource community.
Just as an experiment, get every distro to have at least 2 or 3 SysVInit / runit / rc.init alternatives, and you will see a MASS Migration back to SysVInit. Bash/shell script init functions were really dead simple and almost unbreakable/hackerproof.
Systemd really needs to be thrown in the garbage dumps of history so we can finally have a UNIX-like boot back.
As someone who writes bash scripts, fuck no, this is a terrible language and it shouldn't be used for anything more complex than sticking two programs together.
Also, parallelism goes right out of the window.
Maybe you'd convince me with a real programming language.
That just made me imagine a Rust rewrite of systemd
There is (was?) a group writing a whole Linux-esque OS in Rust: https://github.com/nuta/kerla
Any time I see a grognard seriously suggest going back to bash for anything exceeding 10 lines of code it makes me very happy none of them are in control.
If systemd is as bad as you claim why did nearly every distro switch to it?
Corpo sabotage of opensource. So many community projects are under the thumb of corpo insiders. It was a "cash-grab" a way to shoehorn and takeover an essential but mostly unchanged and stable Init system. And they shimmed that into everything they could ram it into with no options or alternatives.
You should probably take the tin-foil hat off once in a while to let that noggin of yours breathe a little.
Why would corporations prefer it?
What exactly did companies gain from making Linux distros switch over to systemd?
If anything, the switch ment a loss of productivity as their staff needed to relearn stuff, not to mention loss of technical knowledge as there would be others who simply would not accept the change and leave the company when the change happened.
This means increased costs, either due to retraining, or due to needing to hire new staff which is expensive.
Meanwhile, I can't see anything that would mean that companies would earn or even save enough money to make it worth the effort of making distros implement systemd.
Ok so doing it for direct gain seems to be out, but you mention "corpo sabotage of opensource", I can't really see that either, a developer won't move a successful Linux project to Windows, AIX, Solaris, Darwin or HP-UX just because of a move to systemd.
So even indirect gain seems to be out, so "corpo sabotage" doesn't really seem plausible.
But, I may be wrong, please, tell us how exactly a move to systemd has benefited companies enough that it would make the effort and expense to make a distro move to sytemd, let alone a majority of distros, worth it.
you're putting to much thought in something that even the guy who you're asking didn't
that's some high ammount of copium from someone that never made a distro
Where did I say they belong to IBM?
We already have doas, which is such a simple codebase I'd have a hard time imagining it contains a bug that leads to setuid being a problem. run0's codebase size on the other hand...
Eeeh, if anything, systemd is Microsoft's contribution.
/s sort of
Btw can RH as the biggest contributor to systemd make it paid like it did with RHEL? Then it's going to be the death of the free and independent Linux desktop for quite a while.
Don't spread lies, misinformation and/or FUD.
It's not. They've only made it harder for other parties to freely benefit from RHEL's hard work at the expense of RHEL.
Uhm what? I asked a question bruh.
True but they still can find something to hurt everyone. Not like I think it will happen but it is a problem with centralization and a company being behind a big and important product.
The bold parts include a false claim; i.e. Red Hat made RHEL paid.. So it's perfectly possible to include a lie, piece of misinformation and/or straight up FUD within a question.
I agree with you that Red Hat is indeed way too powerful in this realm. Hence, there will inevitably always be the fear that they might (somehow) misuse their power. So far, they've been mostly benevolent and I hope it will stay that way. There's no fault at being cautious, but this should never lead us towards toxic behavior.
EDIT: Why the downvotes?
Isn't it? And for distro devs access to the source code is the only thing that matters. I am quite sure it is paid.
I agree but I think you are the toxic one here. You boldly accuse a kinda new Linux user that asks a question in sharing misinformation and being toxic. I kinda get the first part but the second? You either don't know what toxicity is or you're just being toxic.
No-cost RHEL is accessible for individuals or small teams up to 16 devices. RHEL is paid for enterprises and businesses because of its support; which also includes (exclusive) articles and documentation.
You made it seem as if you were regurgitating the common line of misinformation when last year Red Hat changed how access to RHEL's source code worked.
That regurgitated statement is misinformation. Besides that event, which actually didn't make RHEL paid, I'm unaware of Red Hat retroactively changing a formerly free service to cost money instead.
Do you mean the people working on Oracle Linux, AlmaLinux OS and/or Rocky Linux? Or did you actually primarily imply others? If so, could you elaborate?
😅. Sorry, this is just not very productive. But, I will try to be more careful with the language I use when communicating with you 😉.
If, with your earlier statement, you meant the whole RHEL source code fiasco from last year, then that's plain misinformation. And if you share that, then that's sharing misinformation.
I prefer open conversation in which we can communicate directly. If you're sensitive to that, then I will abstain from doing so when I'm interacting with you.
At worst, I only implied it. At best, it's a general advice directed towards anyone that happens to read it. To be clear, I didn't intend to attack you. So no need to be offended. Nor should you take it personally.
~~Finally, as this comment of yours clearly shows, you're at least somewhat susceptible to misunderstand the writing of others. Ain't we all to some degree? Though..., (perhaps) some more than others. Regardless, likewise, without trying to offend you or whatsoever, I would like to propose the idea that you might have jumped to conclusions that you didn't have to necessarily.~~
If IBM makes redhat do something that greedy and stupid (it'd be more likely to happen with a distribution like fedora or centos than userland components), we have plenty of existing infrastructure to fall back on.
I mean, if they make an actual workstation distro and kill systemd's real FOSS nature, everyone else will have to spend some time rebuilding their distros with other init systems. That'll be quite a sabotage.
RedHat is not restricting access to any upstream project. They package things in extremely stable form, which means they need to manage like all the software themselves and do tons of backports, as normally software just releases new versions.
They restrict access to these packages.
So yes, their 5 years old systemd with backported security fixes may be restricted. But not the normal systemd you can install anywhere.
No, it's licensed under the LGPL, which means source code can be freely distributed and distros would continue to package it for free no matter how hard Redhat tried to paywall it.
You are not wrong. IBM management paralleled in the same cash-grab and exit C-suite functions that has consumed Redhat. That is why the merger happened.
Soon, Purple Hat should be charging for systemd and hopefully other corpos and organizations will move back to sanity.
From systemd licenses readme:
I can understand critism of systemd for its tools only working with itself and not with any other Unix tools. But it's absolutely a conspiracy theory to think they'd want to charge for systemd. Though I do agree that if someone was charging for systemd (which they can't because its open source), open source alternatives would pop up.