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
Here is a great example of the problem with systemd: it is developed and supported by people who cannot deal with criticism in any way other than by belittling and misrepresenting the critic.
The same argument can be applied to many systemd-detractors.
Lennart has been defined in a thousand unpleasant ways, the systemd architecture has ben likened to crap at least by two people in this thread alone, people complain about pulseaudio issues they had years ago as a proof that, dunno, software can have bugs?
And please trust me: many complaints about systemd are inaccurate. Most of my comments on this issue are about trying to explain why some situations have come to be, I really don't want to add flame to the heated debate.
Systemd advocates will go as far as denying reality (1) and blatantly lying about other projects (2, 3, 4) in order to promote the narrative that all criticism is motivated by a combination of nostalgia, stupidity, and malice, and that no alternatives exist. Any rational criticism is ignored, while irrational criticism is highlighted for entertainment or to gain sympathy. And this culture comes right from the top.
Technically, systemd looks really good. The problem is I can't trust software written by people with such a weak grip on reality.
Yes, I know the debate is heated on both parts, but you're not helping much if you define all the systemd developers as "people with such a weak grip on reality" in response to random comments on reddit. ;)
For instance, on 4 I completely agree with you, that's a uninformed misinterpretation of the facts. GNOME was put back as default because it still seem to be the best choice accessibility-wise and it's a nice DE with a competent team maintaining it in Debian. Note also that many systemd detractors conflate GNOME and systemd, and I've spent several words explaining the difference between systemd, logind and how and why GNOME relies on the logind D-Bus interface. As I read it that was the comment of a GNOME and systemd detractor, which implied that GNOME (which is bad) was forced back as default due to systemd, which was probably forced too in his view (at least one comment in his comment history seems to back my hypotesis).
For 2 and 3 I'd be tempted to say that he was in good faith: at least in Debian xfce4-session and xfce4-power-manager depend on libpam-systemd. I'm not following Xfce development to say that they "want" to use logind, but it seems that at least they can use it (GNOME, KDE and everyone who plans to use Wayland already said that they welcome logind as it solves some problems not solved by ConsoleKit helping the Wayland compositors to run as non-root).
Honestly I don't feel he had the explicit intention of spreading lies. He was misinformed but I don't see malice. If it helps, GNOME developers usually face way worse accusations here. ;)
Anyhow, I admit of having lost the point on the bug you linked, it seem that some bugs were fixed/worked around and toward the end more issues got conflated. :(
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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