Debian May Need To Re-Evaluate Its Interest In "Init System Diversity"

[L_A_G]

Ever hear your aunt bitch about the lack of init system diversity in her Windows 10 Home Edition?

Well of course you don't when it's hidden away and only known to Microsoft's own developers. It could be just as bad if not worse and you wouldn't know a thing until everything went badly wrong.

Sure, when you don't know how badly something has been put together does give you some peace of mind, but wouldn't you want to know if something you rely on has been badly built? Here in Finland we have a saying "Tieto lisää tuskaa" which roughly translates to English as "The more knowledge, the greater the agony" and I think it describes the situation here pretty well.

[jrch2k8]

You can do a lot of that stuff on various Linux distros.. but I haven't found one that can do all of it and do it easily without a lot of hacking.

ArchLinux + ZoL(all my archs have ZFS root installations ) + systemd-boot + systemd + nftables + systemd-nspawn(+ ZFS dataset) + DBUS broker.

Now in all fairness PF is still in a better state that nftables(the gap is closing fast but still not there) but systemd-nspawn is superior to jails specially in the latest release with the ability to manipulate numa allocation on the fly.

Also i fairly believe ZoL is way superior to the current FreeBSD ZFS implementation(but well FreeBSD devs think this as well and are working on ZoL port, so this point will be null in the future)

[k1e0x]

ArchLinux + ZoL(all my archs have ZFS root installations ) + systemd-boot + systemd + nftables + systemd-nspawn(+ ZFS dataset) + DBUS broker.

Now in all fairness PF is still in a better state that nftables(the gap is closing fast but still not there) but systemd-nspawn is superior to jails specially in the latest release with the ability to manipulate numa allocation on the fly.

Also i fairly believe ZoL is way superior to the current FreeBSD ZFS implementation(but well FreeBSD devs think this as well and are working on ZoL port, so this point will be null in the future)

You're not going to defend btrfs? heh. You can actually use ZoL on FreeBSD now, I've used it. Seems fine. I like taking jabs at Linux users because they rush to the defense so hard and get so upset.

It's all FOSS and I sometimes use Linux (but oddly not that systemd flavor.. hmm.)

But really the main nice thing of FreeBSD is it's just a much simpler system. There is less of it to wade through. And it's consistent because it's a full OS and not a distro. If you want to hack on it.. you have far less work and research to do to get the results you want. Linux probably has more lines of code in the kernel, than all of FreeBSD's base. Maybe twice as much.. and for the system.. have you ever went on a deep dive into Ubuntu to try to figure out why it's doing something? It's a spaghetti mess of scripts usually written in different languages.

Also if you think about it.. systemd isn't the most used init on Linux.. It's actually a minor one. Android is Linux.

Personally I like OpenRC.

[oiaohm]

Way to miss my point. The quality of the init service is irrelevant if the OS does its job for the user. A user interacts with an OS, not with a kernel and most definitely not with an init service. This doesn't apply to sysadmins obviously.

Yes init service could be irrelevant but the service management is not. Like cups print server dies and service management does not kick in and restart it or you are unable to restart it hello no printing. We see this on windows with winspool all the time.

The reality you interact with services more than you notice using the desktop. So quality or lack of quality of service management does directly effect your desktop user experience at different times.

[danmcgrew]

Modern Software Development is Cancer

"...PulseAudio? Is my sound any better? No. Shit. Wayland? Are my graphics any better? No. Shit. Systemd? Is my system more stable and/or boots faster? No. Shit. And the list goes on and on and on and on...
"...Windows 10. Half-baked releases. I didn't pay money for a half-baked crap you will complete in 2 years. I don't need a system settings menu that will be equivalent to the Control Panel in 6 months when I had the perfectly sane and functional Control Panel in Windows 7/8 years ago...

"...When I go to a restaurant, I don't want to know what the staff is doing with my food. I'm paying for the service and ignorance. And I expect the same from software. I'm paying, I'm the boss. It's time the software industry started serving its boss, the user..."

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/software-development-cancer.html

[L_A_G]

Way to miss my point. The quality of the init service is irrelevant if the OS does its job for the user. A user interacts with an OS, not with a kernel and most definitely not with an init service.

Maybe not directly, but indirectly very much in much the same way someone driving a car interacts with the brakes using the brake pedal and the engine using the accelerator one. Some people don't care about either, but it doesn't mean that they're not important or that they shouldn't both be put together at least half decently.

This doesn't apply to sysadmins obviously.

You do realize that sysadmins and developers make up a pretty significant chunk of the Linux userbase?

[jrch2k8]

You're not going to defend btrfs? heh. You can actually use ZoL on FreeBSD now, I've used it. Seems fine. I like taking jabs at Linux users because they rush to the defense so hard and get so upset.

It's all FOSS and I sometimes use Linux (but oddly not that systemd flavor.. hmm.)

But really the main nice thing of FreeBSD is it's just a much simpler system. There is less of it to wade through. And it's consistent because it's a full OS and not a distro. If you want to hack on it.. you have far less work and research to do to get the results you want. Linux probably has more lines of code in the kernel, than all of FreeBSD's base. Maybe twice as much.. and for the system.. have you ever went on a deep dive into Ubuntu to try to figure out why it's doing something? It's a spaghetti mess of scripts usually written in different languages.

Also if you think about it.. systemd isn't the most used init on Linux.. It's actually a minor one. Android is Linux.

Personally I like OpenRC.

Well, i worked through the years with many OSes all the way from Caldera/SCO to Solaris and recently to Archlinux(since 2012 i think) and i have enough experience with filesystems to trust ZFS with my life. I did try BTRFS several times through the years and honestly is not even on the same league as ZFS is for me because it lacks many features i consider tier 1 (like proper RAID 6/0+ for example) and compared to ZFS is quite easy to make it unusable and also it doesn't work properly with virtualization(huge no no for my workflow).

I did use FreeBSD from 4.3 up to 10(i still use FreeBSD derived tools like opnsense firewall tho) quite commonly on my workflow(as i did use hardened openBSD a lot) but since systemd 100+ i replaced them all with ArchLinux throughout the years and honestly once you do understand how systemd works is better than anything you can find and easier than anything you can find even windows and apple systems(an boy i did use launchd a loooot same as Solaris SMF).

The level of reproducibility, automation and resource management/security systemd provides is unique specially if you are a developer with enough skill to work with DBUS.

Now i do agree with you in the sense most Linux distros just barely use the power of systemd and many for lazyness or lack of taking 5 minutes to read the documentation just add some very idiotic defaults and call it a day that have given argument to the regular haters and i do admit that systemd may seem overkill for someone who wanna just push power on and open firefox and have a minimal understading how code/security works making it seems like systemd use gigabytes of RAM and bloat your hard drives, etc ,etc etc. when in reality is not even close to how it works but yeah FreeBSD is a good OS as Linux is, just use what you can understand better for your workflow and thats it

[oiaohm]

Also if you think about it.. systemd isn't the most used init on Linux.. It's actually a minor one. Android is Linux.

That is in fact insanely hard call. Cut down systemd is in fact used inside some 3g/4g modems. So you have Android init in one area if the soc and in the other a highly custom Linux kernel with highly cut down systemd. Yes the auto restarting of services and watchdoging of services is liked inside 3g/4g modems.

Systemd might be the most used init system with the Linux kernel the problem is that it would be a lot of work to prove it with all the different odd ball embedded usages.

[Ananace]

Systemd API is public and documented. If other init systems want to implement it they can.

This simple fact actually caused GNOME support to suddenly take a massive leap on Solaris, when they were able to just implement all the systemd API's for things like session-, locale-, console-, time management, etc.
Since systemd had taken the time to actually create a set of well-documented and supported API for doing these system-facing actions, GNOME of course switched their GUI implementation to using them, so that they wouldn't have to deal any more with the minutia of how to - for example - interface with the NTP service on all possible init systems and configuration designs. And at that point, all that the GNOME-on-Solaris devs had to do was write stub services that mapped the Solaris configuration APIs onto the systemd endpoints, and suddenly they were able to switch to basically running unmodified upstream code - improving system stability, security, and the update tempo.

I seem to recall BSD doing a similar thing as well - mapping up the systemd APIs, as all the modern DEs nowadays use said APIs to handle such things, to distance themselves from the underlying system design while still allowing for usable configuration mechanisms and the like.

[starshipeleven]

Yes, I see you have a lot of poor implementations of good stuff in FreeBSD

You see wrong

and all of that stuff is harder on Linux

Wrong

chroot... lol You know a jail isn't chroot right?

I didn't want to make BSD look bad, but if you insist...

Linux has a better implementation (relying on the same kernel features also used by Flatpak and docker and others), and you can use Firejail to create such sandboxes on the fly. (package available in many distros)

https://github.com/netblue30/firejail