
The Poetterisation of GNU/Linux (2013) - pmoriarty
http://slated.org/the_poetterisation_of_gnu_linux
======
secure
I dislike this article for the ad-hominem attack alone. It would have been
just as easy to get the point across by dubbing it “the systemd-ization of
GNU/Linux”.

If the author really wished for more competent developers to spend their time
on GNU/Linux, I recommend they don’t attack individual developers, regardless
of their opinion :).

~~~
buzzrobot
Yes. It's dismaying. Evidence of lack of character a silly insistence that
everything is perfect in Linux and should never change.

(Systemd is plumbing. Users should never know it exists. Everyone else is
_paid_ to deal with it.)

~~~
digi_owl
Yeah right, lets turn Linux into yet another John Deere scenario...

------
darkr
> I was part of a group who campaigned relentlessly for years to oust these
> vermin

So someone who holds a different view from you on the future direction for
Linux are "vermin"? Sounds like the rantings of a certain someone with the
initials A.H.

~~~
lmm
Supporting a different direction is one thing. Making a deliberately
incompatible API and refusing portability patches so as to force adoption of
your preferred direction is quite another.

------
nextos
Systemd has undeniably brought some good things to Linux. It's much faster and
less buggy than the mess SysV init was.

But the monolithic design is probably a hefty price to pay. However, systemd
units definitions are declarative, so it's doable to replace it with something
else while keeping compatibility.

The scary thing is Poettering's new aim, package managers which are at the
core of what makes Linux good.

~~~
pmoriarty
Less buggy? See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449)

~~~
nextos
Yes, I know, and that's terrible. But SysV init was flawed by design as it
didn't prevent e.g. race conditions between services.

~~~
pmoriarty
So systemd is not flawed by design?

~~~
nextos
It is, but it doesn't suffer from some SysV issues.

It brings other issues of its own [1], and it is at odds with the Unix
philosophy.

[1]
[http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/)

------
akkartik
I'm sympathetic to the sentiment that trying to acquire market share has
caused Linux to forget its roots and end up in a sort of uncanny valley.
However it's important to understand the forces that led to it so that we can
do better in future.

 _Amassing a large user-base is a highly misguided aspiration for a purely
academic field like Free Software. It really only makes sense if you 're a
commercial enterprise trying to make as much money as possible. The concept of
"market share" is meaningless for something that's free (in the commercial
sense)._

It took me _years_ to internalize the importance of status in human
relationships. Even if no money exchanges hands, much of human endeavor is
motivated by the gain of status.

We hackers have this strange blind spot: we pride ourselves on focusing on
only what is real, but we forget that 'real' money is just a social construct,
a reified form of status. It's utterly blind to focus on this one form and
ignore the real thing.

Open source software is just geopolitics by other means.

Related link: [http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/02/11/minimum-viable-
superorg...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/02/11/minimum-viable-
superorganism)

------
fidget
> The long litany of examples includes Ubuntu Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE 4, the
> /usr partition, SELinux, PolicyKit, Systemd, udev and PulseAudio

Strange list of examples if you're trying to show how terrible modern Linux
is.

------
M2Ys4U
Since when has free software been a "purely academic field"? Or for that
matter "non-commercial"?

The whole point of the free software movement is to ensure that users have
liberty. That's not something that can be done from academia, it can _only_
happen in the field.

As for non-commercial, did the OP forget to read the zeroth freedom? The
freedom to run the program as you wish, _for any purpose_ \- that includes
commercially.

Hell, the FSF says as much:

> “Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be
> available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial
> distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual;
> such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to
> get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge.
> But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to
> copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

------
sbierwagen
Context: Lennart Poettering is the systemd guy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering)

------
pmoriarty
_" The long litany of examples includes Ubuntu Unity, Gnome Shell, KDE 4, the
/usr partition, SELinux, PolicyKit, Systemd, udev and PulseAudio, to name a
few."_

Add to that systemd's ambition to take the place of package managers now.[0]

Really, I've come to the conclusion that the major Linux distros are no longer
Linux distros. They're systemd distros.

Anyone who wants to continue to use a traditional Linux distro (or even a
traditional unix) is better off looking elsewhere.

[0] - [http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-
linu...](http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-
systems.html)

~~~
nextos
There are some distros that do not run systemd. GuixSD and void linux to name
a few.

~~~
pmoriarty
They're not major, mainstream distros.

Linux on mainstream distros is dead.

~~~
delcaran
Slackware Linux maybe is not mainstream, but is a huge distro...

~~~
LoneWolf
Don't forget Gentoo

------
to3m
Probably needs a (2013).

------
notalaser
The depressing part about all this is that, at the end of the day, _fewer and
fewer things are working_.

The first Linux version I used "full time" was Red Hat 7 (no no, I haven't
forgotten the "EL" part in it). Getting stuff to work back then was an
exercise of relentlessness. It took me about two days of fiddling with crap to
make it boot and start X. After that it was more or less OK, though in Y2K
terms -- there were a lot of things it couldn't do, updates were relatively
infrequent and so on.

The current state is, surprisingly enough, not much better -- and it's
extremely annoying, because ten years ago or so, _it was_! One could install
Fedora Core 3, 4 or 5 and it pretty much worked out of the box.

Nowadays, my latest efforts of installing Fedora involved:

\- Fixing the partition scheme (it somehow managed to mess up the EFI
partition map, and I was literally booting to a black screen -- not even Grub
showed up)

\- Figuring out why PulseAudio randomly decides that my default audio output
is HDMI (I haven't figured this out yet, and it makes it rather unpleasant to,
say, _watch a movie_ ; I wrote a bash script that resets it to audio out and
called it a day)

\- Reverting to good ole' pm-suspend, because trying to make my system suspend
from Gnome requires an extension that sometimes doesn't work (the button
disappears) and doing it via systemd (systemd-sleep) crashes my system.

All of these are basically undebuggable, because those systems are veritable
black boxes. There's no real way to figure out _why_ PulseAudio switches its
default output mid-song, no way to figure out what the fuck is happening with
the "Suspend" button works, and logging systemd-sleep's actions seems to be
broken (there's no trace of it in journald's output).

I'd love to send a bug report, but frankly I don't even know where to begin
tracing the problem, and even if I did, given how they've treated these
reports in the past, I doubt the PulseAudio, Gnome or systemd developers care
about anything that happens on other people's systems.

On Red Hat 7, the desktop used to be a mess because there were like 7 useful
toolkits in existence (Qt, GTK, Athena, Motif, Tk, wxWindows, FOX) and there
was no way to unify their looks.

Ten years ago, this was no longer a problem (due to e.g. QtCurve).

Nowadays, it's a problem again. Even the QtCurve guys gave up on Gtk3.
Ironically, Gtk3 _rocks_ \-- it's a great toolkit with probably the best
theming engine around, but it's strangled by the toxic atmosphere around the
Gnome project and people are either sticking with Gtk2 (e.g. Audacious) or
switching to Qt instead.

I find myself using KDE applications because at least they don't assume
everything is a tablet now (see Rhythmbox's silly slidable menus and the
toolbar-thats-also-a-titlebar because hey, I know, let's save space that way
instead of by not creating themes with a 48px-thick titlebar!) and they can do
more than just look pretty. But they're buggy as hell (e.g. Amarok manages to
misread id3 tags, Kmail corrupts its own files and so on). I found myself
going back to frickin' mutt like it's 1997 again, just because every single
other thing crashes (hi, Evolution!) or breaks the mailboxes (except, I guess,
for Thunderbird, but we never really got along). I have an encrypted partition
which I mount manually, because at one point Dolphin suddenly stopped asking
me for the root password before trying to mount it. I have no idea why -- I
didn't change any setting! -- I have no idea what to do in order to get it
back, and it took me like two hours to understand what's happening, because
all KDE said was that it couldn't mount the disk, without any indication as to
_why_ (wrong password? Corrupted partition header? Wrong phase of the moon? I
had to strace Dolphin to figure it out). I moved to using WindowMaker in the
meantime because Plasma periodically "forgets" its widget's settings (e.g. the
number of rows and columns in the pager).

I'm running Emacs compiled with the Athena widgets. Not because I like it, but
the GTK3 version has a weird bug where holding the mouse button down in the
window and dragging (e.g. to select a region of text) moves the whole window
instead. Basically, I can't select text with the mouse. I don't know if it's
actually a bug in Emacs, but frankly, given GTK's recent history, I doubt it.

And don't even get me started on all that xdg mess, which basically results in
every other application on my system thinking that I want to open JPEGs with
something else (e.g. Thunderbird actually think I want to open JPEG pictures
with Wine's Internet Explorer. I had to manually set it to Gwenview, despite
the fact that querying xdg via the CLI also says Gwenview should be opening
those things).

It doesn't work anymore. And not because of design flaws. Systemd not
following the Unix philosophy or some other esoteric crap like that has
nothing to do with this. OpenVMS also didn't follow the Unix philosophy and it
worked better than Linux ever has. It doesn't work because:

* People worship philosophy above all else. There was an infamous bug report regarding the volume control slider in Gnome (or PulseAudio's applet? I don't remember right now), I think, that was almost tragicomic: users complained that the default step setting was too high for their speakers (they had high-power audio systems, where you have to increase the volume slowly in order to not get a heart attack or physically destroy your speakers) and asked for a feature that allowed them to set that step to be added back. Developers insisted that wasn't a bug -- it was a feature, because users might find that confusing, and besides, it worked fine on their systems. Apparently, having a high-power audio system is a bug nowadays.

* People add features, because that's nice and shiny, but no one wants to fix bugs. It's unglamorous and icky. I know. That's programming, people.

* People don't test their code. E.g. Dolphin still doesn't properly apply icon settings theme in KDE 4.14. It's extremely obvious. There's no way you can miss that.

* Not playing nice with the community is treated as irrelevant by teams that have a good corporate backing -- because, at the end of the day, developers are responsible to their employers, not the community. That's how systemd or Gnome got their reputation of being "Red Hat's". What's worse, contributions from these companies often get entirely unfiltered, because they're hiring the maintainers or large parts of the development team. They dump a pile of bad, unportable, barely readable code and the development team either doesn't have the uncommitted manpower to say no, or they can't review and improve the code because the contributing company isn't accepting patches.

At this point I'm seriously contemplating the possibility of getting a Mac
just to get away from all this bullshit. I'm so frickin' tired of
troubleshooting crashes everywhere and in finding refuge in applications I
haven't used since 1280x1024 was high resolution. My desktop looks like it's
2001 again, all because of development teams not being able to say no to bad
contributions and because of people treating their code as if it were an
appendix of their egos.

/rant

~~~
digi_owl
In essence, systemd is the tip of the "UX designer" iceberg that has lodged
itself in Linux in recent years.

Meaning that people involved with Gnome and Freedesktop related projects are
cock sure that they know better than the person before the keyboard how to run
the system.

Or perhaps it is a rerun of the old admin vs developer duel. Where the admin
knows it will not work because he has seen it fail time and again, but the
developer insists it will work because thats what his carefully optimized code
is supposed to.

Meaning that admins are dealing with everyday reality, while developers are
contemplating platonic ideals.

[https://xkcd.com/1172/](https://xkcd.com/1172/)

When most people see the strip above, they laugh at the crazy user. What i see
is someone who has found a way to work his computer that fits him, and a
developer that has taken that away.

The most accommodating action the developer could take at this stage would be
to implement a timer that approximate the old behavior. But if he was a
Gnome/Freedesktop school dev, he would likely make a snarky comment about
"holding it wrong" and close the report wontfix.

~~~
notalaser
> Where the admin knows it will not work because he has seen it fail time and
> again, but the developer insists it will work because thats what his
> carefully optimized code is supposed to.

Dude, I'm offended :-). Not all programmers build castles in the sky.

But seriously, I tend to concur with this view. I've seen many programmers
unwilling to accept the limits of their own ability to grasp the full scale of
reality. I've seen it in myself countless times, and I still do it, sadly.
Complexity is very often overwhelming, and you think you have it under control
because "you designed it", but you don't.

I think we'd all benefit from insulting the meat [1] every once in a while.
Twenty years from now, there's a good chance there won't even be computers
that can run our code anymore, except maybe for prized collectors' items. Why
be so stubborn about it?

[1] [http://drleannawolfe.com/kung.html](http://drleannawolfe.com/kung.html)

