''As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files. Yes, systemd provides a lot of capabilities, but we will be losing some things I consider important.
However, the decision needs to be made.''
I need my systems to work. Not once in my career have I experienced a showstopping issue with systemd. I cannot say the same for sysV.
I have had both ruin days for me. In particular the "hold down" when it detects service flapping has caused issues in both.
I use runit now. It's been rock solid on dozens of systems for more than a decade.
I think the *BSD are also good, at least from an educational standpoint, with their relative simplicity and low system requirements. Since there is a lot of integration making a from scratch distro might take less material, but it could be supplemented with more in depth/sysadmin exploration.
If the project is even split in different parts that you need to understand... already makes the point.
To make an analogy: another part of LFS is building a compiler toolchain. You don't need to understand GCC internals to know how to do that.
I will soon be releasing a distro that is free of systemd, wayland, dbus, and other troublesome software. It is built starting from LFS in 2019, and now consists of over 1,500 packages, cross compiling to x86-32/64, powerpc32/64, and others if I had hardware to test. It's built entirely from shell scripts which are clean, organized, and easy to read.
I need help to get the system ready for release in 60-90 days. In particular, I need a fast build system, as my current 12+ year old workstation is too slow. Alpha/beta testers are welcome too. Anyone who wants to help in some way or hear more details, please get in touch:
domain: killthe.net
user: dave
Systemd, by construction, is a set of Unix-replacing daemons. An ideal embedded system setup is kernel, systemd, and the containers it runs (even without podman). This makes sense, especially given the Red Hat's line of business, but it has little relation to the Unix design, or to learning how to do things from scratch.
The whole point of sysv is the components are too small and too simple to make it possible for "showstoppers". Each component, including init, does so little that there is no room for it to do something wrong that you as the end user at run-time don't have the final power to both diagnose and address. And to do so in a approximately infinite different ways that the original authors never had to try to think up and account for ahead of time.
You have god power to see into the workings, and modify them, 50 years later in some crazy new context that the original authors never imagined. Which is exactly why they did it that way, not by accident nor because it was cave man times and they would invent fancier wheels later.
You're tired of hearing complaints? People still complain because the problem did not go away. I'm tired of still having to live with the fact that all the major distros bought in to this crap and by now a lot of individual packages don't even pretend to support any other option, and my choices are now to eat this crap or go off and live in some totally unsupported hut in the wilderness.
You can just go on suffering the intolerable boring complaints as far as I'm concerned until you grow some consideration for anyone else to earn some for yourself.
The attitude that you don't need to learn what is inside the magic black box is exactly the kind of thing LFS is pushing against. UNIX traditionally was a "worse is better" system, where its seen as better design to have a simple system that you can understand the internals of even if that simplicity leads to bugs. Simple systems that fit the needs of the users can evolve into complex systems that fit the needs of users. But you (arguably) can't start with a complex system that people don't use and get users.
If anyone hasn't read the full Worse Is Better article before, its your lucky day:
This system has many powerful features like built in ccache/distcc support for the build, support for building in QEMU, etc. Eventually it will be fully sandboxed.
There is a heavy emphasis on Doing Things Right according to an old school way of thinking. Everything is kept as simple as possible, yet as full featured as is practical. A major goal is to have everything documented and explained, starting with the shell scripts which build the system step by step in an easy to follow manner.
No package manager currently, though a simple one is in the works which is integrated into the build scripts. It's not really needed. You just build a complete system with all packages you want installed in a single run, with your own configuration pre-loaded. This gets compressed to a tarball. Then to install, create a partition, extract the tarball, edit a few files, install the bootloader, set passwords, and go.
The system uses GTK2 wherever possible, or GTK3 when not. I will either port everything to GTK2 later or create some kind of shim library. Help wanted here. Porting back to GTK2 isn't hard, I just don't have time to work on any of that at the moment.
I understand not wanting to shift from something that is wholly explainable to something that isn't, but it's not the end of the world.
I haven't done LFS since my tweens (and I'm almost 30 now), but I remember the sysvinit portion amounted to, past building and installing the init binary, downloading and extracting a bunch of shell scripts into the target directory and following some instructions for creating the right symlinks.
Obviously, you can go and check out the init scripts (or any other individual part of LFS) as closely as you wish, and it is easier to "see" than systemd. But I strongly protest that sysvinit is either "Linux" (in that it constitutes a critical part of "understanding Linux" nor that it's really that understandable.
But setting aside all of that, and even setting aside the practical reasons given (maintenance burden), when the majority of "Linux" in the wild is based on systemd, if one wanted to do "Linux From Scratch" and get an idea of how an OS like Debian or Fedora works, you would want to build and install systemd from source.
Here's some nice GTK3 patches for you:
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-disabling-atk-b...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-transparent-win...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-allow-wheel-scrolling...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-appearance-tweaks-and...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-disable-mnemonics-del...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-file-chooser-tweaks.p...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-remove-dead-key-under...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-restore-old-context-m...
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-set-default-settings....
http://killthe.net/patches/gtk-3.24.43-show-alternating-row-...
Note that GTK 3.24.43 is the last version of GTK3.
My system is full of patches like this to tweak, improve, and adjust things. The point is to get off the "upgrade" treadmill and focus on making things work right.
The Win32 layer is the issue, not the underbelly.
Doing it via systemd is like drawing a big black box, writing LINUX on the side, and calling it a day.
They still explain what an init system is for and how to use it.
I for one will not be strong armed into systemd or any other tech. If KDE makes it impossible for me to run without systemd, it goes into the trash bin. I will just install Trinity (KDE3) and be done with it. (Gnome deserves no consideration whatsoever.)
Some of these User Agents have to be fake. Android 6.0.1 with Chrome 144, really? lol
This fella would like to have a word with you:
I'd be open to the idea, if the kernel were open sourced (MIT licensed?) so I could play with it too.
Which is why I asked "learn about what stuff". I think if the goal is to learn about "Unix" or OS design/ideas, you're better off with a leaner, "pedagogical" OS, like xv6. If the goal is to piece together an OS and really understand each piece, I don't think you really want sysvinit. You want something closer to an /etc/rc.local that just kicks off a few daemons and hopes for the best.
You can argue that sysvinit makes a better "compromise" between usability and clarity, and I'd entertain that idea, but then I think dinit is far easier to understand than sysvinit. And of course, at that point you can shave yaks till you fill the bike shed with wool.
Realistically, as much as people may hate it, if you have to pick a single init to standardize on for clarity and "building an entire Linux distro from the ground up, understanding how every piece fits together", systemd is the most rational choice. It's the most representative of the ecosystem, and requires the least "extra layers" to make the "desktop layer" work.
See, this is why when I refer to the Systemd Project, I spell it as "SystemD", and when I'm referring to systemd(1), I spell it "systemd". I understand that some folks who only wish to shit on the Systemd Project also spell it that way, but I ain't one of them.
> systemd-init is a small slice of the code in the systemd repository.
Given the context:
Yes, systemd provides a lot of capabilities, but we will be losing some things I consider important.
We’ve already had NT + Linux userland; that was WSLv1.
Weird. If I weren't a sicko and had OBS Studio installed on my multipurpose box [0] I'd not have dbus installed on it.
dbus is generally optional; not that many packages require it. [1]
[0] Two of its several purposes are video transcoding and file serving.
[1] This is another area where Gentoo Linux is (sadly) one of the absolute best Linux distros out there.
Like clockwork, we'd have a SystemD edge case cause a production-down incident at a (single!) customer site once per year. Inevitably, we'd burn anywhere from a half day to a week attempting to figure out WTF, and end up in some Github Issue where Systemd Project heavyweights go "Wow. Yeah, that looks bad. Maybe we should document it. Or fix it? IDK." and they'd do neither.
The project is full of accidental complexity that its maintainers can't be bothered to fix when unplanned interactions cause problems and are brought to their attention. I certainly don't blame them; that sort of work is only interesting to a very specific sort of personality, and that sort of personality doesn't tend to thrive in a typical software company.
I can also absolutely say that I've never had a showstopping problem with OpenRC in the nearly twenty-five years I've been using it. It's remarkable how reliable it is.
If you'd like to be an alpha/beta/release tester of this system, hit me up via email please. I'll start with an initial closed alpha release here in a month or so, if there's interest.
Now for the donation drive: I have plenty of time and a stable situation to work on this system, but the one drawback is I have little funds--and unfortunately my workstation is getting pretty long in the tooth. (AMD FX. It's been a good system, but I'm getting Left Behind here.) The main thing holding me back is compile speed, especially doing work on Chromium and WebKit. It's 12+ hour compile times for either of those, with the latest C++ standards they're using. The system as a whole builds in about 48 hours on my computer.
So I'm hoping to bump into an "angel investor" who either has some old Xeon (Broadwell or newer?) hardware laying around they would donate, something with lots of cores and memory, or who can make a cash donation for me to buy the gear I'm looking at on Ebay. $400-500 is enough for a nice 5x upgrade. It amazes me how cheap this stuff is. We're talking $5000+ hardware when it was new, for peanuts. Still quite powerful.
(A better video card would be great too, if you're feeling generous. Mine is a GTX570. I'd love to have a GTX7xx or newer, or equivalent AMD. That's more of a want than a need however.)
I'm very interested in ppc64 gear too. I want this system to have first-class PPC support. Anyone got an old POWER8 or POWER9 system laying around, or 32-bit stuff? I've got this system building OK in Qemu for ppc64le but it is SLOW, as you can imagine. Like 5 seconds per line in configure scripts, lol.
If anyone out there is in a position where they can help this project in some way, email me please! Thank you.
What makes you decide that these are troublesome software's? Systemd is usually argued that it is monolithic and breaks the Unix paradigm.
But then you are going for X over Wayland? X is a monolithic application that breaks the Unix paradigms.
Are you just picking things because they are old, or is there a reason you decided to go with this setup?
We need both.
(I recommend staying far away from "X11libre" also, for the same reason, with no further comment.)
Monolithic stuff is OK too, where it makes sense. The kernel is monolithic. ZFS is monolithic.
(Yes, this system has ZFS support. The module is built in to the kernel. In time it will support booting from ZFS also, when I finish the initrd code.)
There is a clear, solid reason for everything this system is or does. I'm not a contrarian or a purist, just someone with opinions gained from long experience who is not happy with the direction mainstream Linux is headed. My system is a zen garden of bliss compared to buggy garbage like Ubuntu.
Really, it's like someone added a turbo button. Ubuntu and friends are so bloated, laggy, and slow. I regularly use this system on 15-20+ year old hardware. The default window manager is Enlightenment e16. It's snappy and responsive everywhere.
KDE, Xfce, etc are supported also and are noticeably peppier than on mainstream distros, just due to the lack of bloat, gazillions of daemons running in the background, etc. Out of the box, nothing runs by default. You enable only what you want.
Another inviolable principle is that no application is allowed to originate or receive network traffic unless the user specifically requests it. There is ZERO network activity going on in the background. None of this steady stream of who knows what contacting who knows where that goes on with other systems. No auto update etc. No internet required or used during the system build. Python module installs do not consult the central repository or download anything. Meson or cmake does not download anything. Etc. All that's patched out and disabled.
It's a distro that is meant to be forked. It's very easily done. It's a blank slate, a vanilla Linux system with subtle and tasteful improvements that is the ideal starting point to customize to your exact specifications. If you want to add in systemd and wayland, fine, I don't care, it's your system and you can build it according to your desires. People can use this platform to build their own custom OS and save themselves a ton of work vs. starting completely from scratch.
It's a system that can be audited. Everything is built with shell scripts, starting with source archives and patches that are applied during the build process. It's all inspectable and the process can be understood step by step.
It's a way to hit the ground running with a full featured, working system, while learning in the process. This distro will teach you what LFS would teach you, but with less of a "sheer cliff face" learning curve, letting you focus more on higher aspects of building the system while still learning the low level details in time.
The build is actually overall simpler than LFS despite being way more featured, with things like Ada support. (Yes, it has GNAT.) I just found a way to do it better, and kept iterating countless times to simplify and improve to the max.
Existing systems did not satisfy my requirements or standards of quality, so I just had to create a new one.
UNIX design was so great that its authors did two other operating systems trying to make UNIX done right.
One of the few times I agree with Rob Pike,
> We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.
Accessibility should be something that the system fully supports. There is speech synthesis and other useful bits installed so far. Maybe someone would like to work on this project. Email me if interested.
Also Linux is trailing here Solaris, OS X, Aix,...
Both can devolve into empire building. We need both to be transparent and open.
Though it seems to be sneaking in through application space on a WinNT foundation
UNIX is only an OS with some good ideas, and also plenty of bad ones.
No reason to stick with it ad eternum as some kind of holy scriptures.
Theoretical or aesthetic advantages are no guarantee that the software in question will actually be superior in practice.
Mr Pike has indeed constructed a better OS than Unix; too bad AT&T neither knew how to achieve viral popularity, nor why Free Software (as in GPL) is going to dominate the world. By about 1995, it was already too late. (Something similar happened to Inferno vs Java.)
Still, the Unix principles of modularity, composability, doing one thing well, and unified interfaces are widely considered very sane, and adopted.
Pretty much what I was thinking of. My understanding from reading some commentary in this area is the Linux implementation is yet a little botched due to how it handles waiting threads.
So, I'm not going to test your distro or switch from my Gentoo. I like Gentoo a lot, most of all because it's so very-very easy to patch any official package. Just put the patch in /etc/portage/patches/<package> and that's it. It gets automatically applied on the next install.
I'm using a Phenom II x6 1100 on a Gigabyte 880G. Firefox compiles in about 3-4 hours I think, not really sure. I do all Gentoo updates over night and it's usually ready in the morning. I can't say about Chromium or webkit - never used them - but 12h seems waaay too long.
GPL is on its way out, a good example is that all Linux competitors in the embedded space, including Linux Foundation's Zephyr, none of them has adopted GPL.
GPL based software is now a minority, almost everything uses licenses that businesses rather reach for.
If you like Gentoo, more power to you! It's not for me.
This isn't just another run of the mill distro. It's like nothing else that's out there.
I forgot to mention that I have PaleMoon on the system also, and it compiles in a much more reasonable time. Like two hours or so, I think.
Chromium and WebKit are ginormous, and worse, they are compiled with the latest C++ standards which are slow as hell to compile. Nothing wrong with my system, it just takes forever to compile this giant bloated crap. I need more CPU cores, to blast my way through the pile of work that needs to be done.
Look of the size of the Chromium source code archives these days. It's fucking outrageous. 15 compressed gb (and growing rapidly!) of third party code vendored inside third party code vendored inside third party code, three or possibly even four levels deep! ("Yo Dawg...") Let's just have 5 complete copies of the LLVM suite in random places in there, because why not? Google has lost its marbles.
Yeah, I'm working to fix Chromium's little red wagon too. I'm on version 3 of my custom Chromium build. The binary of version 2 was slimmed down to 186 mb in size (compare to Google's version), with a 300 mb source tree (same) when I quit on it to start version 3. There was plenty more to take out. This latest version is going to be the best yet.
Do you have a reference? Not that I don't believe you, but I hated this behaviour from Poettering (although he seemed to more often blame the user) and we should totally raise up issue like this. It's a mature product that shouldn't have sharp edges any more.
Hindsight is an interesting thing. Makes mistakes more visible while making Chesterton's Fences invisible.
We shouldn't forget these. These fences are there for the reasons. Yes, fences can be revised, but shall not be ignored.
So when it comes to projects that teach the fundamentals of GNU/Linux, such as LFS, overwhelming the user with a large amount of user space complexity is counterproductive to that goal. I would argue that having GNOME and KDE in BLFS is largely unnecessary and distracting as well, but systemd is core to this issue. There are many other simpler alternatives to all of this software that would be more conducive to learning. Users can continue their journey with any mainstream distro if they want to get familiar with other tooling. LFS is not the right framework for building a distribution, nor should it cover all software in the ecosystem.
Leave it at what? How is Wayland not honest about it's intentions? It is completely transparent about the motivation behind the project. Whether you agree with the motivations is different, and thats fine to disagree with a project.
However there hasn't been a scenario where Wayland haven't been honest.
Yes, I am ignoring your side comments about systemd because I was asking about Wayland, and mixing the two together implies that you are just complaining about the new, rather than technical/architectural reasons.
(Plus I have to ask as "killthe.net" doesn't come up with anything)
FreeBSD came before Linux (as 386BSD), and is also active used by the industry. How much code did Sony or Raytheon shared back to FreeBSD? (LLVM is not FreeBSD proper.)
Going systemd-only is not necessarily a good choice (though I do understand it from a practical point of view). There are other, better alternatives for System V that are smaller and more modular so you still get the Unix "feel" without the absurd complexity of interlinked shell scripts that System V relies on.
I'd like to see OpenRC getting adopted in System V's place. Upstart seems to be dead (outside of ChromeOS) but it would also have sufficed. Alas, I'm not someone with the time or knowledge to maintain these tools for LFS, and unless someone else steps up to do all the hard work, we'll probably see LFS go systemd-only.
That said, there's no reason to go full-fat systemd, of course.
Or the Linux distros used by NVidia.
In case you never read it, https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
Hardly the piece of OS beauty that gets praised about FOSS circles.
Discussing whether UNIX is good or bad seems narrow-minded, as there is no solution to that. It's like discussing whether iOS is better than Android. We can always isolate some specific parts and discuss that, but just slashing the whole concept doesn't help anyone and rarely yields any meaningful results.
Respectfully, that's nonsense. Linux is directly inspired by Unix (note: lowercase) and Minix, shares many of their traits (process and user model, system calls, shells, filesystem, small tools that do "one thing well", etc.), and closely follows the POSIX standard. The fact that it's not a direct descendant of commercial Unices is irrelevant.
In fact, what you're saying here contradicts that Rob Pike quote you agree with, since Linux is from the 1990s.
But all of this is irrelevant to the main topic, which is whether systemd should be part of a project that teaches the fundamentals of GNU/Linux. I'll reiterate that it's only a distraction to this goal.
I know there are strong opinions on this, but isn’t systemd part of the core of most Linux desktops nowadays?
And yes, the layered storage stack does have a performance penalty to it. But it's also infinitely more flexible, if that is what you need. Linux still lacks IOCP (which io_uring is not a replacement for).
Windows' VMM and OOM is also generally much better.
Pike is more than entitled to an opinion, but I think there is some cause-effect reversal at work here. The linux circles aren't people driving the UNIX-love. The UNIX-love is effective in practice - especially the blend of principle and pragmatism that the linux community settled on - so the linux circles happen to be bigger than the most similar alternatives. Better alternatives are going to have to fight through the same slog as linux if they want recognition.
So is UNIX design only great when it serves the message?
I guess there are alternative "forks" like QtWebEngine that just try to bring in only the blink engine part.
The Unix security model is mostly useless today, but it seems like something better is possible as an incremental change, and there are projects that do that, like RSBAC.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, Linux plus systemd, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Linux/systemd.
Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning systemd system made useful by the systemd corelibs, systemd daemons, and vital systemd components comprising a full OS as defined by Poettering.
Learning Linux or Unix from scratch shouldn’t include using crude hacks.
Kids and their Parents learned it in the 80s and they had nothing but a manual. Either these people were massively more intelligent, or the same approach, using modern methods, would work again and again and again.
Considering the 1% rule of the internet (it's about the ratios, not the numbers!), shifting more people from the 90% to, at least, the 9%, seems to be one of the better courses of actions to take.
What we, MY FELLOW HUMANS [1], absolutely do not need is more people being optimized towards using a computer solely as a tool for someone else ... especially because AI can replace 99%+ of them anyway.
At this point in time, having programmed deep in the internals of both Linux and Windows, I think it is probably incorrect to call either kernel an inferior or superior one.
I mean, it was true for both of them at some point (Overlapped IO was great on Windows and missing on Linux, for example) but today, in 2026, the only differentiating factor is the userland experience.
For me, Windows loses this hands down.
The reason it is being removed is precisely because now we are in the Linux era, no longer in the Unix era.
Have another vote in favour of OpenRC, and even Upstart, if it somehow revives.
Neither does systemd its init.
Unknowledgeable people keep confusing systemd the init and systemd the daemon / utility suite. You can use just the init system without pulling in resolved or networkd or whatever.
Systemd is the Unix philosophy of lots of modularity. But because all the systemd daemons come from the same shop, you get a lot of creature comforts if you use them together. Nothing bad about that.
You're confusing systemd the init manager and systemd the project. systemd as an init system only "replaces" initd, syslog and udev.
All other components under the systemd project are optional and not required, nor is there any push to make them required.
Don't get me wrong, NT also has its share of questionable design decisions. However overall the technical design of the kernel is great.
If you're going to argue that Linux implementing systemd is a good idea because it's following the trend in "proper" UNIX descendants, then the same argument can be made for it following the trend of BSD-style init systems. It ultimately boils down to which direction you think is better. I'm of the opinion that simple init systems, of which there are plenty to choose from, are a better fit for the Linux ecosystem than a suite of tightly coupled components that take over the entire system. If we disagree on that, then we'll never be on the same page.
If the intention is to create a system that users can reason about, then sysvinit offers the worst of all possible worlds.
Time flies fast, faster than recycled arguments. :)
People who like software that I don't personally like may continue to use it of course, with this system also even, it's just that it won't be in the official repository is all. But as the whole thing is designed and encouraged to be forked, that shouldn't be too much of a burden if someone likes other aspects of the system and wants to maintain their own 'systemd/wayland' version.
I'm not sure I'd be smugly pronouncing anything about the superiority of Windows if I were a Microsoft guy today.
It's not surprising that systemd was heavily inspired by NT. That's exactly what Poettering was paid to create, by his employer Microsoft. (Oh, sorry--RedHat, and then "later" Microsoft.)
I'm not a big corporation. I prefer MIT, or better yet, public domain.
I have no idea what they're planning or why, just guessing, as they seem to be bringing Linux and Windows closer together all the time.
One project on my distro is a new init that will be much, much simpler than SysV, more like BSD and without all the years of cruft.
I don't understand why people have such difficulties with the Golden Rule, sounds a simple and fair enough concept.
I'm OK with that in the end because my system is a better LFS anyhow. The only part that bothers me is that the change was made with reservations, rather than him saying no and putting his foot down, insisting that sysvinit stay in regardless of Gnome/KDE. But I do understand the desire to get away from having to maintain two separate versions of the book.
Ultimately I just have to part ways with LFS for good, sadly. I'm thankful for these people teaching me how to build a Linux system. It would have been 100x harder trying to do it without them.
> ...we should totally raise up issue like this. It's a mature product that shouldn't have sharp edges any more.
To whom would these issues be raised to? Based on my personal and professional experience, the SystemD maintainers (and -for those who are paid to work on the project- those who manage them) seem to disagree that "eliminating sharp edges" is a big priority!
The biggest problem is that people are being railroaded into one thing or the other by the strong arm of corporations instead of being given options. My system helps with that.
I won't support systemd/wayland/etc, but others easily can add that in to their version of the distro if they like and support it themselves without too much work, as it's designed to be forked by anyone.
The LFS project is free to make any decisions that they want about what packages they're going to include in their docs. If anyone is truly that upset about this then they should volunteer their time to the project instead of commenting here about what they think the project should do IMO.
When I was building the initial version of my distro starting from a Linux Mint computer, one time I accidentally double-mounted the virtual filesystems (/tmp, /run, /proc, etc), on the target volume as my script was too primitive and didn't check the mounts first.
Exactly 60 seconds later, the whole system crashed.
Later I accidentally did this again, except this time immediately caught the problem and undid it. No matter--systemd still crashed 60 seconds later anyhow.
Or like the bug that was revealed a while back where the firmware EEPROM was writable by default in /sys or wherever it was, resulting in somebody's firmware getting overwritten and the system bricked. lol
That's the systemd life for you, in a nutshell. That sort of thing times a thousand. Not all at once, mind you--it will just take a nibble out of you here and there on and off until the end of time. After a while it will straight up fuck you, guaranteed. Which is exactly what it was designed to do.
Same with anything "Linux Puttering" touches. The guy who is now officially a Microsoft employee, as people were saying he really was all along.
Name two major distros that use 'systemd init system' but doesn't use the other parts.
Freedom and liberty are what I value. There is no harm occurring to software as a result of more freedom or more liberty. Quite to the contrary.
Is your Golden Rule "you will use 'my' software exactly how I dictate, or else I'll call my dogs to attack you"? That's not the one I was taught.
I release all my code in the public domain.
Regarding freedoms, let us take this scenario. Your small company depend on a complex bsd library thats hard to replicate. It gets the attention of a much larger company, they fork it make various changes to make it much better and keep it closed, their product kills yours. While, if it was GPL (or AGPL as its needed today), the company either has to redevelop it inhouse if they wish to serve it as product to the public without releasing its sources, or they do the same thing as in the bsd case, they make a much improved version...and you have equal access to the same sources, you can take that and pivot upon it instead of your company dying. Its very simple, more or less mathematical game theory. Nobody can force anyone to choose a license, its your choice. Again, Mac OS is not a very encouraging example of the overall outcome of BSD licensing. No freebsd/openbsd/whatever person is permitted to read or use Apple's "fork" now. Apple took the hard work of others and instead of paying it back in like, it doesn't take a single cent of money, "paying" back here simply means doing the same the others did, they generously provided you their work as foss, you pass back your delta to it as foss. Thus raising the high water mark of the entire ecosystem. Think academic research. Its usually released in open, so any improvements made by one team are available for others to use and further improve upon. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less. How does GPL "force" anyone to do anything? They can either choose to follow the license, or choose another library or home grown an alternative if they dislike the terms.
This requires NT API compatibility due to applications using NT API. Despite Microsoft telling devs don't use the NT API, devs use the NT API and Microsoft makes adjustments to ensure compatibility.
> I have no idea what they're planning or why
Clearly, because the whole idea not only makes no engineering sense, it makes no financial sense. They need to build the NT kernel anyway -- it runs the entirety of Azure services!
Just ask the guy who bricked his motherboard due to a systemd bug where his firmware wasn't write protected and got destroyed by a 'rm -rf' command. lol
No, in fact I don't. Indeed, I go far out of my way to avoid these parasites entirely, and anyone who depends on them. I don't give a damn what anyone does with my software. I don't need the attorneys to do anything.
For accusing me of "misinterpreting" what you wrote, you seem to be quite confused yourself. What part of "public domain" don't you understand? The means I don't give a shit what you do with the code. You can decide for yourself. You know, the mature, unselfish approach. Busybodies and control freaks hate this one simple trick.
> Regarding freedoms, let us take this scenario.
Here we go, lol. We're headed down the rabbit hole straight to the juicy caramel center of your flawed thinking.
> Your small company depend on a complex bsd library thats hard to replicate. It gets the attention of a much larger company, they fork it make various changes to make it much better and keep it closed, their product kills yours.
Sounds like you had a very poor business model. Probably because you have no idea what you're doing. Your monetization strategy failed. Pick yourself back up and try again.
The solution is not Big Brother and his machine guns to force others to comply with your dictates. (i.e. the lawyers and legal system, if I have to spell it out for you.)
> While, if it was GPL (or AGPL as its needed today)
AGPL is strongly avoided by almost everyone, for good reason. It's even more of a cancer than the GPL.
> the company either has to redevelop it inhouse if they wish to serve it as product to the public without releasing its sources, or they do the same thing as in the bsd case, they make a much improved version...and you have equal access to the same sources, you can take that and pivot upon it instead of your company dying.
...or they just decide to develop their own version from scratch instead, keep it closed source from day one, and you get nothing at all. Happens all the time.
If you were truly a shit-hot developer you would not be concerned about anyone ripping you off. You'd know you're so creative and putting out so much quality effort on a consistent basis that you'd never worry about being surpassed by anyone.
Big company thought of a good idea to add to your big pile of good ideas? No problem. Copy that and come out with another good idea or two for him to steal. If they're always imitating you, then that means you're the industry leader, doesn't it?
If you're not the industry leader however, because you really only had one good idea and Big Company has more, then what right do you have to try and Stop Progress just for your own selfish ends? That's what this all boils down to: selfishness, due to insecurity.
Your mentality is completely foreign to a true winner, but oh-so-common among the insecure midwits. They're always deathly afraid that their One Thing will get ripped off and they will be left with nothing.
It's a scarcity mentality. That's the problem. It's all in your head.
You're a squirrel with one little nut that you cling to desperately, in hopes that nobody else will grab it. You make all your life about protecting that nut at all costs. You're so glad that Big Brother offers you his machine guns to help you protect it. You don't care about the harm that comes from bringing thugs with guns into the picture to push people around. You're just desperate to protect Your Thing, so you will accept anything that you believe will help this end. It's the same broken mentality that manifests itself everywhere else besides software also. Nothing new under the sun.
Do not pretend that I don't understand you far better than you know yourself, or that I am misinterpreting you in some way. I've seen ten thousand of your type if I've seen one. You're everywhere, especially on HN. I'm well aware of what your mentality is. The root of the problem is your insecurity.
> Its very simple, more or less mathematical game theory.
You don't have a clue about how economics actually works--which is typical for those of your loudly expressed opinions. But you think of yourself as some enlightened game theorist. Not quite.
The bottom line is, you can't FORCE people to behave how you want through your favorite legal fiction or any other, and you damn sure should never try, as it's a fool's errand that only leads to tears. One of the basic laws of the universe.
The people who created GPL knew this from day 1. That's exactly why they created it to be the way it is. Irt was an act of sabotage. This knowledge is currently far above your level however, and is likely to remain so for a long time to come; probably forever.
The world is not falling and BSD is winning the license war for good reason. End of discussion. It's all over but your crying.
You again seem very confused. Its exactly the same as they closing up a bsd fork. So how is the outcome or incentive any different? With bsd they can do that without any effort, with gpl at least they have the friction and may deem it too much of a friction. Google's fuchsia attempt failed despite its behemoth size, Android is still linux.
How exactly is it a sabotage? You are again making up utter absolute fucking crap out of thin air and acting retarded making up an entire fantasy universe in your head.
Since you are such a smartass wanker, tell me this, how is the other company being forced to release their changes making the market less competitive? On contrary, this makes it more competitive, since everyone is forced to compete to this level now, they themselves will have to keep developing something better, and again paying the inhouse cost if they wanna be jealous.
AGPL is strongly avoided by...yes companies who live off of turning existing libraries into websites...who'd have thought, hardly a surprise why and who avoids it.
Big company can add a good idea, but big company has big resources. I am telling you that you can now pivot on their changes and putting them under the pressure cooker again: more competition. Competition is nice.
How the fuck is a simple license that nobody is forced to use a "sabotage", are you really even thinking? How much fucked in the head can someone be to think a completely legal and simple license is a "sabotage"? A "sabotage" against what or whom? If its a sabotage, then protest whatever legal framework allowed it. Do you disagree with copyright, is that what you are saying?
If you disagree with copyright, then I hope you have no problem with taking the source code of competitors by any means. After all, if licenses are bad, and government enforcement of copyright is bad, why should copying and releasing a company's internal sources be bad?
If this is a "scarcity" mentality, then the entire history of Mathematics for the past few centuries is a scarcity mentality. If you are man enough to follow through, then say it out right in the reply that you believe Mathematics is a scarcity mentality.
I mean if I wanted to win at all costs, why shouldn't I steal your code and release it and make life harder for you. Or if I wanted to be a real winner, why don't I go and shoot you.
Tell me again moron, how the fuck does a license "force" you, who the fuck is "forcing" you to use gpl if you dislike gpl? I don't even know how deep a level of mental illness one can have to imagine someone with guns is coming out to kill you and rape you and force you to use GPL programs and libraries. Are you even thinking man? This is literal violent paranoid psychosis level of insanity. You are fucked in the head beyond repair.
How the fuck is a GPL library stopping progress? Why does Big Company feel tied up due to a library being GPL? You said it yourself, they could redo it inhouse? If they were such hot shit they'd do it and continue the march of progress anyways.
Its very simple, its so simple I am not even sure I am talking to a functional level of iq: do you think more progress is made from less eyes on an idea? If the changes made by Big Co were available to the public, that's a much larger pool of engineers to take it in all sorts of directions. You are so fucking dumb its beyond words.
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington
It's difficult to have a conversation with someone so profoundly ignorant of reality. Do some research and stop wasting our time with your angry rantings.
Especially when it's a giant blob of buggy C code written by a known hack who has multiple decades' worth of history of foisting shit code upon a less than enthused public.
> At least for me systemd is a net positive
For the moment. Just wait until it finds a way to fuck you. It's plotting and scheming behind your back to do so as we speak.
Systemd for some reason seems to uniquely be the epicenter of giant facepalm bugs like LEAVING THE SYSTEM FIRMWARE VULNERABLE TO AN RM -RF COMMAND, a situation which causes alarm to none of the systemd crowd. They just shrug if off. "What's the big deal? I don't get it," they say.
I used to see the same mentality from Microsoft people back in the day. "Why would you use Linux? I don't get it. Windows is fine."
It's because you lack standards. You're completely used to being surrounded by software and hardware that is Fucking Garbage. Everything is like that in your world. You're happier than a pig in shit, oblivious.
Aside of that, plan9 wins on the theoretical side, it was a research OS, but in the practical one... it's opinionated.
I have read the first couple pages of these results. Would like you like to highlight one of these in particular?
Run levels. That's it, sysvinit is about run levels. Each run level starts or kills off its own specific list of runnable things like applications, daemons, capabilities, etc.
Run levels were a desirable feature back in the day amongst System V Unix vendors, so each run level required its own kill and start scripts for each item. Run levels, for example, could take a running system from single user (root admin) mode to multi-user, multi-login, NFS sharing, full X11 mode in one command immediately as the scripts ran. This allowed rapid reconfiguration of a system, such as from a GIS workstation to a headless file server, etc. etc. as needed. Each system could be configured to boot to a specific run level. Rather than duplicate some or all such scripts across some or all run levels, symlinks were the solution.
For example, Solaris had run levels 0 through 6. Zero was a blunt force system halt; 1 was single root user admin mode; 2 was multi-user headless mode with NFS; 3 was multi-user X11 windows mode with NFS; 4 was unspecified and therefore kept for purely local configuration as desired; 5 was a planned, orderly system shutdown; and 6 was a planned, orderly system reboot. The root user could implement their choice of run level directly with the init command.
Each run level had its own run control directory (rc.d) under /etc/rc.d for its appropriate kill and start scripts, which were run in order of their K or S number, so dependencies had to be kept in mind when numbering, and curing a dependency failure was as simple as changing a script's number to rearrange the list. So, why copy S04blahblah from rc2.d to rc3.d when a symlink is far better?
Its not hard to understand when you get the big picture, and it wasn't hard to administer if you had the proper overview of it all. Admittedly, admins coming in cold would have to sort through it all, which is partly why it gained a reputation for murkiness when not properly documented by/for local admins. Keep in mind it was the era of administering sendmail macros and NIS tables by hand and you get the picture.
NOTE: edited for clarity
That's how vendor lock-in works, in which a myth is propagated that having it all come from under one roof is best. In fact, it is a guarantee that best-of-breed alternative solutions cannot be used. Interoperability is thwarted. This is why sensible Unix admins historically knew to keep options open for mixed-vendor sourcing as long as the bosses didn't get roped in to a single vendor or source.
I am very sorry to inform you but efivarfs is something coming from the Linux kernel. Being able to rm -rf it is squarely something that is entirely on the kernel implementation, WHICH THE AUTHOR OF EFIVARFS EVEN ADMITS[0]
#facepalm
Think about it, you can't obligate the systemd folks to maintain codebases that aren't theirs.. would be madness.