I Switched (Back) Over To Fedora As My Main OS & It's Going Great!

[justmy2cents]

Since the people who hate systemd have yet to be convinced, I wanted to bring up most of the common objections to systemd and counter them. It's probably a waste of time.

waste of time? not at all, you make good points. it was just funny to see them explained to... me

of all arguments, i can't agree with 3

you cannot be invasive and replace something that never existed in the first place. session handling was sore subject until logind finally showed up

and the only one i feel you kind of fail to explain is 5. at least Fedora still completely supports old init structure. there is no need to claim replacements of C

[Michael_S]

waste of time? not at all, you make good points. it was just funny to see them explained to... me

of all arguments, i can't agree with 3

you cannot be invasive and replace something that never existed in the first place. session handling was sore subject until logind finally showed up

and the only one i feel you kind of fail to explain is 5. at least Fedora still completely supports old init structure. there is no need to claim replacements of C

Good points, thanks.

[justmy2cents]

I never see systemcl showing last lines of logs, probably is a new thing.

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemctl.html

search for "-n, --lines=". it was like this from start.

here is completely old school without systemd commands

[root@localhost ~]# service vsftpd start
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl start vsftpd.service
[root@localhost ~]# service vsftpd status
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl status vsftpd.service
vsftpd.service - Vsftpd ftp daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/vsftpd.service; disabled)
Active: active (running) since Mon 2015-02-02 18:41:30 CET; 32s ago
Process: 13433 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/vsftpd /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 13434 (vsftpd)
CGroup: name=systemd:/system/vsftpd.service
└─13434 /usr/sbin/vsftpd /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

Feb 02 18:41:30 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Starting Vsftpd ftp daemon...
Feb 02 18:41:30 localhost.localdomain systemd[1]: Started Vsftpd ftp daemon...

note that i only have 2 lines of log since i never used it on this machine. but, if you needed more you could always write something like
[root@localhost ~]# systemctl status vsftpd --lines=20

perhaps you're starting to notice your claims always go against bugs in implementation, not against systemd. maybe instead of whining you should file bugs against implementation

there is one more thing to note why interfaces like networkd are important. don't you get sick of how setting network on different distro needs almost relearning? don't you get sick of every distro needing to reinvent network tool (or that tool having zillion codepaths just to work everywhere)? with one interface every network tool could work everywhere

[GreatEmerald]

I've used openSUSE from the very beginning, and I continue to use it because it continues to be the best option for me (looks like the Distro chooser was pretty accurate). YaST makes some common administration tasks very easy, OBS has possibly the largest variety of packages, SUSE Studio makes creating specialised LiveCDs super simple, the support for KDE is always very good (running Plasma 5 since a while now). For special hardware (servers, embedded systems) I use Gentoo for its optimisation potential.

And for newcomers I recommend Mageia, since it too has a control panel, the basis is stable, everything is fairly user-friendly and relatively simple (but allows selecting more options when needed, too). And they can use Apper to install programs in a user-friendly manner.

[BLinux]

They are all the same. Linux even in 2015 is not for simple users. There is not an easy way to upgrade a distro for ever like a simple update, there is not automatism (if something wrong happen during an update for example you need to manually use the terminal), packages missing everywhere (like Nine support, pepperflash-firefox, new players and kernels) and all without an alternatives.

I think your statement is wrong: "There is not an easy way to upgrade a distro for ever like a simple update".

I've been a Fedora user as my main desktop system since F8. Since then, except once, I've been able to upgrade from one release to another without having to re-install everything. The only exception was some time around F17 (I think) where they made some changes to the file system layout that made it hard (not impossible) to upgrade to the next release. I did a fresh install at F18 only because my hard drive crashed after so many years. That F18 system was upgraded to F20 without issue. I recently built a new computer and installed F20 and upgraded to F21; that last F20->F21 upgrade was as simple as running 2 commands:

# yum --releasever=21 distro-sync
# yum install system-release-nonproduct

There is also the 'fedup' tool that makes upgrading Fedora easier, but I haven't used it. I've always upgraded Fedora from one release to next major release using yum.

[Michael_S]

I think your statement is wrong: "There is not an easy way to upgrade a distro for ever like a simple update".

Seconded. I've upgraded Fedora using fedup without problems. I've used the Ubuntu software center (GUI tool) to upgrade Ubuntu many times without ever having a problem. One upgrade left me with bizarre menu appearance, and I had to wipe out my ~/.config directory to get it fixed. But I have never had a distribution version upgrade wreck my system.

[Delgarde]

We're going to have another flame war about systemd? Really?

Sure, why not? It seems to be a hobby for some people...

[Delgarde]

I don't get why people uses this or that distro for the DE. Are you people so shortsighted that you don't think you can install this or that DE in every single distro (through the main repos and/or external repos)? Distro-hopping just doesn't make sense to me.

Because defaults matter. If you want to run Gnome, Fedora is probably the best bet, because they're a big distro that uses Gnome by default - it's the combo that gets more testing than anything else, and is well integrated with the tools provided by the distro. Sure, you can install it on something else, but the experience might not be quite as good - it hasn't been tested as thoroughly, doesn't have all the pieces integrated top to bottom, etc.

[Hugh]

my experience with Fedora and Ubuntu

I'm a long time Fedora user, but I often installed Ubuntu for others who just want to be users.

I like Fedora, but there's too much package churn for ordinary users. The Fedora release lifetimes are short too. Ubuntu LTS is great for ordinary users.

I like having to go an extra step when I'm doing something patent-encumbered (eg. playing MP3s) but not ordinary users.

For simple problems, the Ubuntu community has been great: enough others have done everything so that all simple bugs have been reported along with workarounds.

For complicated problems, the Arch community seems remarkable (their documents help me even though I don't use Arch). The Fedora folks are good. Ubuntu maintainers seem ineffective.

Recently, Ubuntu has had some unfortunate slips. For example, my HTPC running 12.04 LTS had an update failure with the nvidia proprietary driver yesterday. Lots of earlier reports, no fix, no blacklisting of the update.

Systemd? It works, but it is a mystery to me. I wish I knew of an intro that explained its structure in a reasonable amount of detail. I don't want a cookbook. I don't want a black box. I hate treating it as a black box. Black boxes are the opposite of why I use Linux.

[Michael_S]

Systemd? It works, but it is a mystery to me. I wish I knew of an intro that explained its structure in a reasonable amount of detail. I don't want a cookbook. I don't want a black box. I hate treating it as a black box. Black boxes are the opposite of why I use Linux.

There are dozens of such articles. Lennart Poettering is the lead developer for systemd, and his own blog is a good starting point: http://0pointer.net/blog/archives.html

I think his initial post on systemd, "Rethinking PID 1" is excellent for explaining why he started the project and how systemd works. http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd.html

His post "The Biggest Myths" addresses most of the common criticisms of systemd. http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/th...est-myths.html

One objection to systemd that his "The Biggest Myths" don't address is the idea that the Unix philosophy emphasizes small, self-contained components that interact with each other and not large, complex systems. (Almost any other objection you can imagine is listed in that post, I'm just throwing in this objection and my counter argument myself.) While that is true in general, there are exceptions to that guiding principle that are in wide use in Linux, BSD Unix, OS X, Solaris, and elsewhere:
1. The Linux kernel is a giant monolithic structure instead of a collection of interoperating parts like GNU HURD. This is a direct violation of the Unix philosophy.
2. Earlier filesystems for Unix and Linux did not have journaling. This has since been added, even though it's something that could be done separately from the filesystem layer itself, because it just made sense to link a filesystem with its journal.
3. Early file revision control systems like RCS dealt with one file at a time in one location. Then CVS was created, adding complexity - more components in one place - but it supported multiple files as part of one project. The current world standard for revision control, git, has digital signature verification of changes and works with distributed copies of files. No one is seriously suggesting that the Unix philosophy alternative to git is shell scripts that use RCS + rsync + ssh + sha256sum.
4. Early data storage and retrieval systems used flat files. A relational database is tremendously more complicated for the sake of providing the famous 'ACID' features - Atomicity, Concurrency, Isolation, and Durability. Newer distributed data storage solutions have been created that lose one or more of the ACID features in return for the ability to do things like have distributed upgrades, live adding and removal of nodes, improved speed, etc... Again, you don't see anyone seriously suggesting that all of these systems be discarded in favor of flat files because a system architected on flat files is more true to the Unix philosophy.