Re: Proposal: switch default desktop to xfce

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

Josselin Mouette <joss <at> debian.org> writes:

> > Debian should continue to offer free choice of the init system
> 
> Why? “Multiple init systems” is not a feature that any of our users
> should care of. It is not a functional goal.

Of course!

• Developers are users, too.
• The upstart crowd has got valid arguments for choosing it.
• Someone might want to use cgroups for themselves instead of having an
  init system to manage it, e.g. on a very light-weight VM host.
• Run kernels without cgroups support on RAM-constrained hardware.
• Your primary use case appears to be “the desktop”, whereas Debian, as
  opposed to some of its downstreams and Pure Blends, is a Universal OS,
  which means it’s got much more servers in use, which don’t benefit from
  systemd either at all or at least not that much.
• On a VM, I might want to run very low-consuming software only, to lower
  the cost of separating things into VMs of their own. (I’ll be writing a
  syslog dæmon some day because sysklogd (three processes, c’mon!) is now
  removed from the archive and both rsyslog and syslog-ng are waaaaaaaaay
  too heavy-weight for this, for example.)

Note I’m trying to be constructive here for a change.

> > And in reality it seems to be far less modular than what the Lennart and
> > friends keep up claiming (just have a look at Tollef's post above).
> 
> You just don’t have the same definition of “modular”.
> Systemd is extremely modular in its architecture. It doesn’t mean,
> though, that it is possible to pick random pieces to use without the
> others.

I’ll not say anything here but just let this stand of its own, complete
with context, until it sinks in…

bye,
//mirabilos