Why focus on systemd?
Frankly, I don't understand why so many people are focussing on systemd
so much. In my opinion, systemd ist just a *symptom* (although perhaps a
very prominent one). It is not the *cause* of the disease or the disease
itself.
Has anyone ever wondered where all these funny directories like
~/.cache, ~/.config, ~/.local or even ~/Desktop (with a capital D) came
from that appeared in Debian after upgrading to - was it Lenny? Here's
an answer:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
Has anyone wondered where funny files like "recently-used.xbel" suddenly
came from? A file written in a format that requries *five* lines to tell
file selector dialogs that there are no "Recently Used" files, and that
is being recreated even if you don't want any "Recently Used" entry in
your "File open" dialogs at all?
Does anyone remember when files containing entries like
SUBSYSTEM=="block", ENV{ID_CDROM}=="?*",
ENV{ID_PATH}=="pci-0000:00:02.1-usb-0:5:1.0-scsi-0:0:0:1", SYMLINK+="
cdrom1", ENV{GENERATED}="1"
suddenly appeared under "/etc/..." and when countless people started
complaining in mailing lists about incorrect loading of devices?
What I am trying to say is that the same kind of people who graciously
donated systemd to all of us without asking have been shaping our
systems for a long time already, adding bloat, cruft and obscurity and
removing manual configurability and easy and straightforward control
wherever they could.
It's the domination of the desktop environment ideology that's the
problem. Many users came to Linux and Debian years ago because they were
fed up with Microsoft. And now the same ideology infiltrates their
Linux, whether they chose to install a desktop environment or not.
Desktop environments are made by people who lack the fantasy to imagine
a computing world different from Microsoft's, who - just like MS - don't
care for economical use of resources, and who believe that users don't
need to know what's going on under the hood and that users should "take
or leave" what's being given to them. In principle I don't have a
problem with such people. But I do have a problem when they start
shaping Debian also for the rest of us.
Preventing the systemd takeover is certainly important, but it won't be
enough to reverse the trend, I fear.
Just my 2 Cents.
p.
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