Regarding this apparent Gentoo Exodus (General) stuff, I understand the disdain for trannies and bloat, but can someone break down why it's justified to jump through hoops to avoid systemd? I don't really get involved with the linux culture much, I just do my own thing, so don't understand that controversy too much.
I get it for gentoo, especially with Rust and all, but in a more general sense it's always been one of those things to just be mad at on the internet as something to do.
As one of the least qualified people in the thread to answer this, I'm happy to take a stab at it. That way everything I get wrong someone will leap in to tell me and you'll get the answers that you want!
So... first an anecdote. I like Windows. I think it's superior to GNU/Linux in most regards. This may, just possibly, be the wrong thread to pitch that in but it's relevant in so far as I got one of the biggest owns because of that. I despise SystemD and was one day extolling why I considered Windows to be better - an object orientated design throughout, clear and consistent logging and access controls as well. And a few other things. To which some snarky git pointed out "Hey, Overly, isn't that the rationale behind SystemD?" And fuck them for being right. The reasons I hate SystemD are also (somewhat) the reasons I like Windows. If Windows is Sauron, then SystemD is Saruman, sitting in Isengard, regarding Mordor with envy and remaking himself into Sauron's likeness. Windows is (since Vista / 7 onwards) Windows done right. GNU/Linux with SystemD is, imo, Windows done wrong.
Okay, enough philosophy. What do I actually mean by that? GNU/Linux and various UNIXES (do they still exist?) are very impressive and very powerful. But because they went first and broke new ground, there are things about them which later software could learn from, steal and sometimes do better. Off the top of my head, ACLs (access control layers), file ownership, init systems, logging to pick a few. Which has then been subsequently patched over with atrocities like SELinux to give it some semblance of the ACL power that Windows has. In fact, BRB - making a meme.
There we go. But I didn't come here to rag on GNU/Linux which is grand and mighty and pretty cool - I work on it all the time. My point is that SystemD is in theory supposed to bring all this stuff to GNU/Linux but I think mostly what it managed to bring were the
downsides of Windows. It's like watching someone see the mighty German army of WWII and instead of saying: "tanks and mature industrialization are what we need" saying "racism! racism and a belief in Thule occultism are what we need to take away from this". SystemD was billed as a new init system. That's what it was sold to developers and distributions as. What does it actually have in it by this point? A fucking HTTP server for displaying logs, a firewall, hard-coded DNS resolution using Google's servers, access to fucking everything because it's essentially a giant blob that runs as root. Honestly, I could just link to various online debates for it but suffice to say one reason it pisses people the fuck off is because it slipped in under false pretences. It was supposed to be this little thing but it was very clearly designed from the start to take over in an embrace, extend, extinguish approach. Extracting it from a distribution these days is like rooting out crabgrass. It has, imho, made Linux less secure. There are also some howlers in it like where it mounts the EFI system read-write by default automatically. That's your motherboard. You can literally brick your motherboard by overwriting a directory. But great dictator Poettering declared he likes it that way and closes it. Frankly, I wonder if he gets his queues from the NSA who
want GNU/Linux to become less secure. I mean, it's not the first time they've deliberately sponsored code that they knew led to vulnerabilities so that they had a way in to other people's systems (cough RSA algorithms cough).
The whole Thousand Eyes theory of secure software never really panned out (the idea that Open Source software is inherently more secure because anyone can look at the code). In practice there's too much of it and too few people who understand it. Last I checked Windows actually had same amount of security vulnerabilities known as most GNU/Linux distributions (sometimes fewer). But what that principle does achieve well is guarding against DELIBERATE subversion. I like Windows but who knows what backdoors are in it for the Intelligence agencies. IMO, the giant intractable blob that is SystemD does quite a good job of moving Linux distributions in that direction, though.
See Windows has nice integration between its components (by which I mean consistent security models, logging, permissions, process handling) because they're all designed to work together in a consistent way (after it went through years and years of being terrible, that is). Ironically, Windows does better on the UNIX principle of "Do one thing and do it well" than most UNIX tools these days. And SystemD is a big violation of that principle. It's not an evolution, it's a dictator-led system imposed on a lot of tools and components that predate it by literal decades.
Eh, I've done a really bad job at this. It's sucky and it lied and it took away people's choice. It's essentially the Google ecosystem in software form - in theory you can work around it, in practice "choosing" not to do things its way is a nightmare. I'm glad anything I write on Linux systems is at the application layer and not low-level. As it is, my frustration with it is limited to small things like trying to remember how to check the syslog now I can't just cat it.
Sorry - someone else answer his question. This is just an ill-constructed rant.
