Re: farewell

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Dear Marc.

I can certainly relate to your frustration. Also with Plasma certain 
things are broken, like some applications that use Qt WebEngine, IMHO 
partly due to only a few people dedicating their time to do all the 
packaging for Qt/KDE, which is a lot, a huge lot of work.

Marc Munro - 23.07.19, 03:22:
> I didn't want to hate systemd but stuff that had worked forever, like
> restarting gdm from the command line, hasn't worked for me since
> systemd appeared.  And what used to be a simple matter of creating a
> service by creating a script and putting in a symlink into a runlevel
> directory, is now apparently beyond my level of skill to make work.

Just for this I like to tell you that I run Debian with Plasma without 
systemd for months already. Due to the awesome work of the init 
diversity team this is almost trivial.

It just works although I did some manual steps to start pulseaudio and 
for work from services needed for Evolution¹. But I bet you'd call that:

Yeah! Unix!


[1] Using https://git.devuan.org/WIP-init/user-services

This is work in progress and I already like to redesign it for it to be 
a frontend for runit and others… *both* user wide and system wide. But 
it works and I am lazy too and have other important activities.


And yes, I am still running Debian on my laptop, not Devuan. Partly 
because I maintain a Debian package and partly to be able to provide bug 
reports to Debian.

I run Devuan with eudev on my server VMs. Even without dbus as its not 
required, not even for the Qt based service quasselcore.

I am deep gratitude, fully knowing that with Debian there would be no 
Devuan. Looking at the alternatives, it could either be some BSD, like 
DragonFlyBSD… or… well I am not sure whether there are many Linux 
distros out there which meet the high standard Debian adheres to.

Or someone would look at all the operating systems out there, take the 
best of each one and drop anything else… I miss the simplicity back in 
AmigaOS times where I knew the purpose of every single file of the 
operating system.

Computers for me are still there to serve humanity, instead of having 
their own policies – even if it is just the policies some developers put 
into it. I can certainly relate to: "It has to do what I tell it to" 
instead of "It knows better than me". It has no business to know better 
than me, ever. Period. The library for the graphical environment of 
AmigaOS was called intuition.library for a reason.


So if anything: It is easier to let go in gratitude!

And if there is hate… I strongly recommend to welcome it. Let it be 
there. And let it dissolve all by itself.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin