Re: Systemd

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2014 14:26:43 +0200
berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:

> 
> 
> Le 25.04.2014 06:29, Ralf Mardorf a écrit :
> > On Thu, 2014-04-24 at 23:32 -0400, staticsafe wrote:
> >> > Have you read this stupid things?
> >
> > At least the argument regarding to journalctl isn't stupid. Making
> > a log
> > file binary indeed is the most worse the systemd developers could
> > do.
> 
> You know, things like dbus, dconf, and systemd makes me think that 
> tomorrow, linux distributions might looks like Microsoft's OSes ( 
> regedit, binary logs, etc ). 

I've had that same thought. Add grub2 to the list. What is this love
affair with complexity that the Linux community is beginning to have?

And don't get me started on opaque (though transparency enhanced)
desktops like Gnome3 and Unity, or the system-crashery of KDE.

Kinda seems like the (de) evolution of cars, doesn't it?  As a kid,
I could tune up my beater flat head 6 1959 Plymouth in 20 minutes with
a 10 inch adjustable and a gapping tool. With today's cars, I'm lucky
to be able to change the air filter.

Of course, cars have an excuse: they need to increase mileage and
decrease pollution. What excuse do we have in Linux? We want to boot a
little faster? We want to make the computer accessible to the guy who
needs to be stepped through the finger sequences of pressing Ctrl+C?
We want a pretty picture on the boot screen to remind the user of the
good old days of Windows?

And at what cost? The malfunction of your systemd log-viewing will, by
definition, occur exactly the time you need to view the logs most.
Waiting for the modern monitor's cycling through every possible
resolution, and missing the first half of your boot because Grub2 set a
frame-buffer just as the monitor sync'ed with the 80x24 text of the
initial boot. And, Googling for a way to shut off the frame-buffer, and
for every one of the multitudinous solutions posted, there are five or
so for whom the solution didn't work. The frustration of the former
newbie whose formerly convenient Unity turns into a maze-venued easter
egg hunt when he starts running more than ten or whatever programs.

People ask me why I run Debian. For starters, no Plymouth. I don't even
have to have lightdm: I can use startx. If I want, I can still manually
edit my networking. It makes no assumptions about my desired desktop
environment: I don't need to use a different distro just to get my
desktop without the (bloated) others. Debian is like an OpenBSD that
has all the programs already ported to it, and can do a good job
running Xfce or LXDE or OpenBox. Or, to put it another way, it's like a
FreeBSD with a package manager you can trust. With Debian, Vim is my
adjustable wrench.

I don't look forward to having separate tool just to look at my logs.
And I fear something else...

Talk to people who owned cars in the 1960's, and they'll all tell you
how much they miss having cars they can actually work on. I hope in
five or ten years we don't hear Linux old-timers reminiscing about the
days when you could recover a borked Linux computer just by booting a
live CD.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance