Re: complaints about systemd
After having read much of the stuff available online (including parts of Lennart Poetterings blog), it appears that the essential point of it all seems to have been to make boot up a little faster.
Bit i have a strong feeling that just a few seconds faster boot up simply do not justify the heavy impact.
The new systemd is by no means easier to maintain or customize, or even just to grok in the first place, with binary logs, abandoned script format (no more init scripts), providing a temporary hardware base - like sockets or autofs mounts - for later daemons (so you have to configure 2 different places now), and so many backward dependencies that it soon (already?) will be impossible to don't use it. And even trivial updates may need a reboot now.
The new system reduces some complexity on one side while introducing much more on the other.
It will make Linux a lot less attractive for people who want to work with it as developer, or distributor, finally cutting its dev base.
Unfortunately, these few seconds were just about all that normal users recognize, and thus they constantly nagged their favorite distributions to make the move.
I can very well imagine how just these few seconds are also the most impressing argument to be presented to the Red Hat board, which anyway never had the time to dive into details of pros and cons. They want the summary. In Lennarts presentation, those seconds probably were the killing measure of success. Making the developer inexchangeable...
I can't help but it reminds me of the way city govs pay horrible sums for planting huge trees, to have a visual result immediately. Faster is always better ! As a tree biologist, i know how these trees are grown in nurseries, cutting their roots dozen times to football size, and how they are doomed to crank many years later, shortening their life span - of course, with additional cut-down and exchange costs. For all my life, so far, i was growing and planting trees, and for some time, was part time working to cut the unlucky ones down, and i should know the money involved. But in the budget plans, there's simply no connection between nursery, planting, and replacing. There's simply no one judging about it in synopsis of decades. It's all about now and here.
Right now i see such a thing happening now and here in the linux world, too. It gives me the creeps.
I'd insist to know who ever complained about a few seconds boot up if there was no knowledge of any faster alternative. Is there any real problem behind it ? Like, for my 4 y old PC desktop (which, besides, boot up in 7 seconds with some customized sysv init) or for way too old hardware which always needs too long either way ? Is there a problem in server farms ? In laptops or smartphones which anyway got hibernated most of the time, instead of a reboot ?
If my first task of the day is to boot my whatever-device, what for would i need these spared seconds. Just because they exist, would i wait, and get my first whatsapp, even before doing anything else, like going for a coffee ? Am i addicted like 'Did you already watch your boot up today ?'
Instead of doing something useful in parallel, which spares me just this time.
But wait, wasn't parallelizing one of the core issues.
Or was it hypnotizing, ugh, i just can't remember.
That said, i don't deny that systemd contains some good ideas. But they should be implemented in the respective (daemon/subsystem) packages, and in a smart 'launchd' which does not need to be more than that.
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