this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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[–] gnuhaut@lemmy.ml 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Because people here accuse Poettering of being an asshole: I've read some of his blogposts and seen some talks of his and him doing Q&A: He answered professionally, did his best to answer truthfully, did acknowledge when he didn't know something. No rants, no opining on things he didn't know about, no taking questions in bad faith.

As far as I can tell all the people declaring him some kind of asshole are full of shit.

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

He answered professionally

Until you ask him about security and CVEs advisories...

[–] Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

He is not that bad, the issue is that, as all foss devs, he is not interested in solving problems he does not feel like are important.

The problem is, he disapproves when resources are allocated in his project to those problems and one main area he is not a fan of is support for legacy stuff.

It just happens that legacy stuff is the majority of the industry, as production environment of half the globe needs to run legacy software and a lot of it on legacy hardware

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 37 points 5 days ago (17 children)

Unrelated but how do people feel about the ai images when used for something like this.

The font is very telling for being DallE

[–] NightFantom@slrpnk.net 25 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I think it strongly detracts from the post. I basically skipped right to the comments without clicking the link because I'm assuming it's AI slop, and I'm hoping the comments are interesting.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 7 points 4 days ago

AI should be able to do a really good systemd debate by now, the available training material is immensely huge.

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Absolutely hate it, I just close tabs I'm interested in reading if it has AI generated images.

[–] turdburglar@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 days ago

i’m downvoting ai slop every chance i get. i’m sure it’s just as futile as downvoting every post that used the acronym ‘FAFO’. i hated that one because i think the people who used it thought they sounded sooo cool.

if you’ll excuse me, i’ve got some clouds outside i need to go shake my fist at.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I strong hate these imagines with a piss tint. I can't stand them. And the text has these tiny AI-flavoured imperfections too.

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[–] ExtremeDullard 52 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (14 children)

I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.

Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.

[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 20 points 5 days ago

systemd is easy to work with, other init systems introduce kinks, I rather break philosophy than deal with that shit

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Linux audio has been a cluster^$%< of epic proportions since the mid 1990s. At least you can make single application systems work well these days, but Windows has really whipped the llamas ass on the audio front for 30+ years now, in terms of "it just works" user experience - without being hyper-draconian on the application ecosystem.

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[–] ijhoo@lemmy.ml 17 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Is it really breaking it? As far as I'm aware, it's more like gnu. It has components and you can select what you use (here meaning distros and packagers).

People mistake this for a monolith because it's all named systemd-thing. Integration, like you said, was and is needed. But what if all those separate utilities and services are actually disconnected and speak some protocol different to pipe? Does it make it less unixy?

And poettering is an absolute good guy here. Pulseaudio wasn't perfect, but did it improve things compared to what was there before? Sure it did. Even now, pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.

Perfect is the enemy of good. And while all these tools might not be perfect, they are the best in the Linux world.

[–] ExtremeDullard 24 points 5 days ago (12 children)

poettering is an absolute good guy here

Agreed. But he's also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.

pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.

I wasn't talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can't count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.

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[–] Kabutor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 31 points 5 days ago (3 children)

It's refreshing to read to someone that actually says "I was so wrong"

I was wrong also with systemd, I hated it mainly because I already knew init.d, where files are, where configs where etc. Some years later hate is gone, I'm not a power user, but I just now know how to handle my things with systemd and all is good.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 4 points 4 days ago

I see most often that it's the people who live in init.d - interact with it multiple times a day - who are most vocal about systemd hate. I'm going to call "old dogs don't like new tricks" on that one.

I do get into that layer of system maintenance, but it's maybe 1-2% of my time, mostly a set-it and forget-it kind of relationship. There was a time when the old ways were easier due to more documentation and guides on the internet, which I lean on heavily because I interact with this stuff so rarely. Those days passed, for me, 8-10 years back.

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[–] morkyporky@suppo.fi 20 points 5 days ago (5 children)

I hated it and still do because for a period of years every weird, difficult to find issue on a bunch of servers was caused by systemd. It may be fine now, but I switched to Devuan and have had incredible stability. Poettering's response to security issues was also terrible and honestly the dude seems like a real piece of shit.

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[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 12 points 4 days ago (5 children)

I don't appreciate the attitude and arrogance of the guy behind systemd because he actually believes what he produces can replace everything that already "just works". He wants to push out systemd-homed because "why not". He wants to replace grub. He wants to replace a myriad of things that just flat out don't need to get replaced. autofs, cron, you name it! That kind of thinking and one-size-fits-all mentality is backwards and does not benefit the community in any way. All it does is stuff everything into one bin and so long as influencers like this guy continue to restrict what works or doesn't work according to their own work, the community and its users will not be able to freely develop FOSS. Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency on systemd and so when you're trying to use something like Gentoo, it becomes very difficult to get that done and hacks have to made in order to get it working. FOSS shouldn't work like that. He'll keep stripping away legit projects from major distros until IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good. Sorry if I can't rejoice in the woah whiplash.

[–] urandom@lemmy.world 18 points 4 days ago (2 children)

The is the first time I’ve ever heard someone accusing grub of „just working“

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 5 points 3 days ago

Grub is working perfectly fine.

If it breaks it is, in my experience as a grub user for over 20 years and as a guy working in server hosting for 15 years, either because of failing HDD/SSD or because of user error. People don't read when the updater tells them that running "grub-install" is needed (or they perform it on the wrong drive/partition) and then blame grub when it fails on the next boot.

The crappy bootloader that comes with systemd very often, in my experience, fails to register that a new Kernel was installed and boots the old one (or fails to boot if the package manager removed the old Kernel).

Oh and GRUB has so many useful features, like booting a ISO image. GRUB is a piece of programmer art!

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 12 points 4 days ago (4 children)

All it does is stuff everything into one bin

Well, it is not one bin. There is no monolithic systemd bin that does everything. There are a lot of separate bin files for all the different tasks. Well and if you don't want to use timers, then don't and just use cron instead. If you don't want to use journald, then just don't and use rsyslog or whatever you want. Don't need systemd-homed? Well, then don't use it. You want to configure your network with something else then systemd-networkd? Great, do it if you want.

The Poettering Army will not come and force you to enable all the options 😜

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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago

He wants to replace grub.

I hope so!

[–] Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago
[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

So, I don't like the guy either, but for a little devil's advocacy:

The stuff that already "just works" was developed during a very different era in terms of computing power, tasking of the computers which were running the systems, etc. Nobody (serious, and he is serious) develops something different because "why not?" they, at least from their perspective, feel that they are improving on the status quo, at least for the use cases they are considering.

one-size-fits-all mentality is

being decided by the distro maintainers, not the developers. Sure, developers promote their product, but if a distro thinks that multiple flavors are a better path, they distribute multiple flavors. It's not like the systemd developers are filling billion dollar war chests with profit because they're using strong-arm tactics to coerce distro maintainers to adopt their products.

stuff everything into one bin

When one bin serves the purpose, it's a lot easier to maintain, modernize, security harden, etc. than ten bins.

the community and its users will ~~not~~ always be able to freely develop FOSS.

Fork it and your loyal users will follow.

Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency

Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That's the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.

FOSS shouldn’t work like that.

FOSS, by its very nature, should be expected to work all the ways. If a particular way can't get enough developer traction, it stagnates but never really dies, not until the ecosystem it is dependent upon can no longer find hardware to run on and users willing to run it.

IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good.

I am very glad that I walked away from CentOS about 8 years back, its proximity to Red Hat never made me happy. I have been trying to walk away from Canonical (toward Debian) for about 3 years now, but it still has some hooks that keep our professional team happier than Debian. If the unhappy ever outweighs the happy, we'll execute the move.

Sorry if I can’t rejoice

Never asked you to. End of devil's advocacy. I still don't like the guy, but I never really interact with him. I do interact with his products and the alternatives, and in my use cases the products speak for themselves. There's nothing about systemd that makes me dig around for systemd free alternatives - they are out there, but for my use cases I don't care. YMMV.

[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Why did you quote me but leave out where I mention systemd explicitly with Gnome? lol

So you agree Gnome has too much of a dependency on systemd. Let's not beat around the bush. Let's call a spade a spade.

Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 2 days ago

Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency

Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.

Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?

Absolutely. If you don't mind using Gnome exactly as Gnome wants you to - this year - then it's usually a pretty refined desktop experience, but if I wanted to be told what to like, how to like it, and to shut up and be happy, I'd use a Mac.

I prefer XFCE for its modularity... don't want a launcher bar? Don't run the launcher; nothing else misses it when it's gone.

Mess around with Gnome too much and it becomes a nightmare mess of dependencies.

[–] socsa@piefed.social 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/systemd/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd Linux.

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[–] Allero@lemmy.today 19 points 5 days ago (13 children)

I'd say the main bad part of systemd is how it's used and now expected everywhere.

If you search for some Linux guides or install something complicated or whatnot, they always expect you to have systemd. Otherwise, you're on your own figuring how things work on your system.

This shouldn't really happen. Otherwise, yes, it's great, it integrates neatly, and is least pain to use.

[–] Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show 20 points 5 days ago

In my opnion, systemd is like core-utils at this point.

It's so integrated into most things and the default so many places, that most guides assume you have it.

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[–] sxan@midwest.social 16 points 5 days ago (9 children)

I've been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.

The thing I don't like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the "do one thing, do it well" Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.

My issues with systemd is that it isn't an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it's slow and doesn't seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).

Recently I've been using dinit on a system, and I'm pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I'm running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.

Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?

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[–] the_wiz@feddit.org 16 points 5 days ago

I still doesn't like it...

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