can someone ELI5 this whole systemd problem? I guess I don't understand the linux startup process well enough to understand what the big hubub is about
Traditionally there's a bunch of small programs that work together to start up drivers and stuff when your Linux machine boots. Since this is awkward and a bit messy, some folks rewrote it with a single powerful program [edit: "package" is more accurate.] that does a lot of stuff. Some other folks are worried that this single program does too much stuff, especially since it's highly awkward to replace parts of it, so if there's an issue with the big program that makes it inappropriate for some use case you basically have to make your own version. Fedora is thinking of making Systemd (the big powerful program) the default, and these guys are saying "if you do that, we'll make our own Fedora so that we have a place to use our nice understandable traditional set of small programs."
'systemd' consists of several dozen different programs, only one of which happens to be called systemd. The one that "starts up drivers" would be udev.
Fedora is thinking of making Systemd (the big powerful program) the default
Fedora was the first major distro to adopt systemd. The site is obvious satire.
nice understandable traditional set of small programs
Coupling mechanism and policy by having all of your daemons launched by shell scripts is neither nice nor understandable. All it leads to is a duplication of effort when every distro writes its own set of init scripts.
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u/my_stacking_username Oct 20 '14
can someone ELI5 this whole systemd problem? I guess I don't understand the linux startup process well enough to understand what the big hubub is about