
“Systemd should not default to using time{1,2,3,4}.google.com” - polemic
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437
======
nextw33k
Sounds like Mr Poettering hasn't read the vendors page and has just gotten
stuck on the word vendor:

[https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issuecomment-117440963)

"Open Source projects are of course particularly welcome to use the pool in
their default setup, but we ask that you get a vendor zone when using the pool
as a default configuration."

[http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/vendors.html](http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/vendors.html)

~~~
nihsyndrome2
How on earth did the modern linux distro become so dependant on software from
this guy, when he clearly has no real world idea of things. No wonder people
are jumping ship to the various BSDs!

~~~
wyldfire
Perhaps it's generational? Maybe Mr. Poettering is a talented individual who
lacks some specific experiences/history which requires re-learning some
lessons from developing linux?

~~~
jsprogrammer
Unsure feelings when one of the first topics a community brings up about you
is how you might need to be "re-educated".

~~~
anonbanker
This isn't just SystemD. you should ask rasterman sometime about his stint at
RH Labs. There was a great interview with him and Havoc Pennington back in
1999 or 2000 where HP couldn't say a nice thing about the guy or his code,
because he just didn't fit in with the redhat culture (he liked to wear formal
wear to work - a subtle protest of mandatory office attire).

The entire Red Hat corporation has been like this since about the 5.2 release,
when they removed "Redneck" as a system language option.

~~~
digi_owl
I guess someone at a TLA found the option offensive...

------
Lazare
And Poettering has closed the issue with a dismissive comment after utterly
missing the point. I, for one, am shocked.

~~~
oldsj
He just recently provided more info

~~~
cnvogel
I really don't get his points.

    
    
        > Even if the google servers dont provide time that
        > is correct, its good enough to run testcases again.
        > Products however of course shouldnt use it.
    

So, it seems that he wants to run out-of-the-box with _some_ timeservers so
that the developer/compile/testing machine doesn't have to specify them
manually for tests. On the other hand he wants to require vendors to add a
custom configuration so that they abide by the rules of, e.g. pool.ntp.org, by
registering a vendor pool and configure systemd.

The only sane approach for me seems to be to discover the correct ntp-server
in the scripts running the testcases, and leave the ntp-client in systemd
unconfigured and untested if that's not possible.

Forcing developers to have a properly configured system is a much saner
approach, because it affects way less people than potentially millions of
users to whom a broken/wrong timesyncd.conf leaks caused by some snafu during
configuration of the systemd timesyncd when packaging.

EDIT: Typos, wording.

~~~
bitJericho
Systemd is anything but sane.
[http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1408.1/02496.html](http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1408.1/02496.html)

~~~
Anderkent
I love how in one sentence he accuses Poettering of being "convinced he has
all the answers for everyone", and in another he states anyone who approves of
systemd must be "naive or lazy or just plain clueless developers" lured by
"the promise of making their lives easier".

Pot, meet kettle.

------
ajnin
> shitty servers as default are better than none

No, absolutely not. Defaults that can cause subtle errors are worse than a
program abort with an error message telling you to fill in a configuration
value. Especially after reminding that Google servers run "a non standard
concept of time" (what does that even mean?). It is not a reasonable default
by any stretch of the imagination.

~~~
diminishedprime
> Google servers run "a non standard concept of time" (what does that even
> mean?).

I know that one way they do this is through using what they call a leap smear
instead of a leap second. Yesterday, instead of having 11:59:59 twice, they
evenly distributed out the second over the course of the day.

~~~
fixermark
I mean, technically speaking (unless there's an RFC, ISO, or ANSI that I'm
unfamiliar with), having the same time twice is also "non-standard." The most
correct course of action would be to have an 11:59:60, as per the actual leap-
second standard.

The fact that basically no computer system in the world allows for a 61-second
minute is just a failing in almost all time libraries to adhere to the
standard.

(This is a fancy way of saying "Time is a quagmire and writing code to
properly handle time is an exercise in optimizing ulcer generation" ;) )

~~~
dunham
On Unix, (OSX and I believe Linux, too) the man page for the tm structure
specifies that tm_sec ranges from 0-60, so it does support 61 second minutes.
I think this has been the case for a while. I recall noticing this years ago.

------
Adaptive
As has been noted, this is for timesyncd, usage of which is entirely optional.
Additionally, as boneheaded as it is to use ntp servers from a single
corporate entity when ntp.org exists, you can address this by setting your own
ntp servers in the timesyncd conf file.

[http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/timesyncd.co...](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/timesyncd.conf.html)

FWIW, I really like timesyncd being there out of the box with systemd. It is
exactly what I want, and nothing more, about 99% of the time when dealing with
ntp synchronization.

EDIT:

Let me add that if you want to specify ntp.org servers _right now_ you can add
or edit the following stanza to your /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf file:

    
    
        [Time]
        NTP=0.pool.ntp.org 1.pool.ntp.org 2.pool.ntp.org 3.pool.ntp.org

~~~
bahamat
Every time I see someone point out a problem with systemd the response always
seems to be "that's just <subcomponent>, and using it is _optional_ ".

Why can't systemd developers/apologists take responsibility for their bad
design and horrible decisions?

~~~
reagency
Because Ubuntu become massively successful with its bad designs and horrible
decisions, so now they have imitators.

Except Ubuntu did it by being good first and then attract a bunch of coattail
riders to run the ship aground. Systemd got it backwards.

~~~
oblio
What does Ubuntu have to do with this?

What exactly are these fatal Ubuntu flaws?

~~~
yellowapple
> What does Ubuntu have to do with this?

Another example of a defective software product with an egotistical maniac at
the helm (Mark Shuttleworth)?

> What exactly are these fatal Ubuntu flaws?

Unity? Upstart? Mir? The Amazon Shopping lens? A general failure to listen to
the very community Canonical markets as a selling point? A terminal case of
Not-Invented-Here syndrome? An inability to prevent any Ubuntu-derived device
(Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu TV, and Ubuntu's mobile edition thus far) from
being more-or-less commercial flops stuck permanently in development hell
until they become vaporware?

------
fixermark
Honestly, I think StoneCypher is spot-on with their comment on the thread.

"if you don't take this down, google will just remove the dns, and then you
lose the ability to do this in a controlled way"

Remove the DNS or start filtering by IP address. In either case, the default
is using a service in a way that isn't condoned by the service provider, and
that's just begging for trouble at a time not convenient to the software
maintainer in the future.

~~~
cuillevel3
I disagree, nothing in the issues text says they are forbidden to use the
server. It's not a problem for Google, it's a problem for distributions which
don't change the default.

If Google removed the DNS entry they'd have to reconfigure all of their own
servers, too. Not very probable.

~~~
fencepost
"If Google removed the DNS entry they'd have to reconfigure all of their own
servers, too. Not very probable."

That sounds suspiciously like you're saying "I'm going to keep telling
everyone to use your service because it's too expensive for you to stop me or
them."

I'm not sure it says anything about the other parties involved, but your
willingness to knowingly externalize costs onto others says quite a bit about
you

~~~
fixermark
It's also almost certainly a bad assumption to make about Google, given that
(a) they own the servers (so re-rigging them to just whitelist IPs is entirely
possible) and (b) they are a search engine company (so finding the places
where _they_ used those servers to swap out the names is _entirely possible_
;) ).

------
avian
On a related note, systemd also hardcodes Google's DNS servers:

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=761658](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=761658)

~~~
DiabloD3
That in itself I'm not sure I have an issue with 100%...

It is the only DNS servers that are guaranteed to have accurate results and
respond quickly. The only time I use local DNS inside of my LAN is when I need
local LAN entries.

The issue I have is it not reading /etc/resolv.conf, but if resolv.conf isn't
setup or setup properly, falling back to Google's is a good solution.

Also, at my company (we do DDoS mitigated dedicated servers), we deploy
servers with Google's set by default: we have access to Google over Equinix
IX, going out to 8.8.8.8 responds as fast or faster than it does with bind,
dnsmasq, and unbound, even when the entry is clearly already cached, with the
DNS cache daemon running on a server in the same rack; and for uncached,
Google is usually much faster.

~~~
e12e
Doesn't work so well when you take your laptop with you on travvel to China?

~~~
DiabloD3
You shouldn't be taking electronics in or out of China, to be honest. Too much
evidence that China is successfully MITMing SSL/TLS connections and physically
tampering with electronics.

------
sandGorgon
_Even if the google servers dont provide time that is correct, its good enough
to run testcases again. Products however of course shouldnt use it.

the ntp pool made very clear we cannot use them. As i read what is written
above google just says the servers are crap but doesnt explicitly deny us to
use them. Which is why id like to leave them in place because they are at
least googd enough for testing purposes. Id be willing to take a patch that
adds a big warning to configure if the default ntp server to use is not set
when invoking configure. People who ignore that warning are then on their
own._

sounds like a good enough reason to me

[https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/437#issuecomment-117433553)

~~~
mrweasel
I wonder why they can't use ntp pool won't allow Systemd to use them? Maybe
it's only for testing purposes that they can't be used.

If that's the case, they could maybe ship a product and a testing
configuration file?

~~~
SlashmanX
> Open Source projects are of course particularly welcome to use the pool in
> their default setup, but we ask that you get a vendor zone when using the
> pool as a default configuration.

systemd are perfectly entitled to use ntp pool as defaults.

Source: www.pool.ntp.org/en/vendors.html:

~~~
why-el
As long as they get a vendor zone, that is. LP is against this, since he does
not consider systemd to be a vendor.

------
vezzy-fnord
Linked email from Lennart has some interesting reasoning for this:
[http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-
devel/2014-Aug...](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-
devel/2014-August/022575.html)

~~~
msandford
I basically read that as "this isn't our responsibility so we don't have to do
anything" which is sort-of true.

I think if they didn't configure ANYTHING by default, well, in that case the
distro HAS to figure something out or else it won't work. OK, that's legit.

I think if they wanted to pick an officially blessed config option then they
should go through the necessary steps to have it be official and blessed.
Whatever that means.

But this seems to be the worst of both worlds; we're going to pick something
for you so it'll work without intervention, but then we'll tell you that
you're idiots for not fixing a thing which isn't obviously broken to begin
with.

Ship it broken, or ship it working but don't ship it working poorly and then
tell people it's their own fault.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
It's simpler than that. Knowingly hardcoding someone else's timeservers
without even speaking with the operator of said timeservers is Internet
hostility, particularly when your project is popular enough to be deployed on
potentially millions of machines. D-Link hardcoded PHK's timeserver many years
ago:

[https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/](https://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/)

Netgear hardcoded the University of Wisconsin even earlier than that:

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-
sntp/](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plonka/netgear-sntp/)

The best part about the Netgear one was it hit upwards of a quarter million
packets per second and actively resisted mitigation by admins. Seriously,
don't hardcode. Ever.

~~~
scrollaway
Companies won't learn until the time servers they shipped on hundreds of
thousands of products stop working from one day to the next because the
operator of the server didn't feel like offering _them_ a free service.

------
gizmo686
Somewhat off topic, but in the referenced Google blog describing their leap
smearing technique, they say that their correction factor is "lie(t) = (1.0 -
cos(pi * t / w)) / 2.0" (where w is the length of time over which they are
smearing). Does anyone know why they do not just do a linear correction?

~~~
flashman
There was a discussion about HOW it works, but not WHY they chose that method:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279992/math-behind-
goog...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11279992/math-behind-google-leap-
second-smear-formula)

My guess is they wanted time to deviate less at the start of the smear window,
instead of deviating equally at all points during the window. But perhaps it
turned out not to be an issue.

~~~
davidcuddeback
My guess is that they wanted to avoid a discontinuity in the time's
derivative. At t=0 and t=w, lie'(t)=0, so the clock is smoothly transitioned
into and out of a faster rate.

------
na85
Boneheaded default behavior in the systemd project? How surprising.

~~~
scrollaway
Unnecessary inflammatory comments aren't much better than bad default behavior
in software.

I'd say they're a lot worse, actually.

Edit2: And now the entire thread is getting derailed with inflammatory
comments. This is sad. I've come to expect more from HN.

~~~
Lazare
For good or ill, Lennart Poettering is not well regarded in these circles.

~~~
scrollaway
Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial
ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions
and defaulted.

And for creating software that simplifies the lives of distros and _gets
picked up_ , he is "not well regarded" as you say. But don't mince your words,
people fucking hate him for it. They don't even _know him_ yet they despise
every fiber of his being. Have you seen some of the hate that goes on even
_here_?

And _everything_ he does or writes is getting analyzed like a teenager
analyzes every character in his girlfriend's texts because "oh god I'm so in
love". Look at this issue. He mis-presses send on a github comment and
immediately you have 10 comments without even waiting for an explanation,
calling the guy "absurd and stupid".

He's not the only one getting treated like that by the community. One day, one
of those devs will kill themself, and people will rush him to talk further
about them like they know them. Exactly like what happened to Aaron.

Yeah I sure would love to get treated like that for working full time on
improving foss. /s

Edit: It's fucking appalling how I get immediately downvoted, without any
reply, just for _defending_ the guy as a human being. Really proves my point.

~~~
beedogs
"Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial
ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions
and defaulted."

He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in
distributions.

That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of
assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in
light of his own behavior.

~~~
scrollaway
> He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up
> in distributions.

As an archlinux TU, an LXDE/LXQt developer and someone close to a lot of
distro maintainers, I can assure you, it's not. Systemd got popular because
it's good, and it fixes and standardizes a lot of pain points.

Red Hat being behind the development just means the product gets actively
developed. Not all software has the chance to flourish like that.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
As a multi-platform Unix developer and someone often responsible for system
administration, I can assure you that systemd does in fact "standardizes [sic]
a lot of pain points." It being good is where we certainly disagree.

Red Hat funding the product means more than it being actively developed. It
also implies control over the offering's compatibility, functionality, and
direction. It means control over _everything an OS using it can do_ as _all_
processes will have systemd as its parent.

------
jdub
His reasoning is absolutely fine: It's an okay default which distributors
should change (for which adding a configure warning would make sense). Direct
users of the source don't have to care, or can make the configuration change
themselves.

------
jimktrains2
Wait, why is systemd running an ntp client?

~~~
to3m
Because, ultimately, PID 1 runs everything?

~~~
digi_owl
Nope. But everything depends on a specific binary running as pid1, something
that is quite new in Linux history.

Especially when thanks to dependencies on dependencies, desktops start
requiring a specific binary as pid1.

------
beatpanda
Can someone explain to me what systemd detractors are actually worried about?
In practical, not purely philosophical terms?

~~~
toast0
I haven't yet used systemd, so maybe it works great, but here are the warning
flags:

0) pulseaudio 1) there used to be many choices for startup that were
relatively easy yo switch between. Systemd seems to be hard to switch to and
back. 2) systemd seems to keep reimplimenting old things in its suite, without
any regard for the previous experience.

Fundamentally, I worry that one day when in update my debian box, things are
going to be super broken as a result of systemd subsuming many pieces of the
system with new buggy versions that are not easy to stop using.

This is in contrast to openbsd: Their developers also have a poor attitude,
and reimplement old ideas, but they develop in a modular fashion, and are
conscious of past experience. By modular, I mean I can take their ntp server
if i like it, without switching everything. And it's relative easy to switch
between their https and others, etc.

~~~
beatpanda
So, a lot of that sounds like philosophical disagreement. The one practical
concern in there is "I worry that one day when I update my debian box, things
are going to be super broken", and it appears that by "broken" you mean
"requiring systemd".

I still don't understand what the problem is.

~~~
digi_owl
How is this for practical:

Update box, get systemd, fail to boot because of a fstab entry you barely
remember was there that was acceptable to mount for years, but systemd stops
the boot dead on.

Or stall on reboot/shutdown because they still can't get straight that NFS is
a mount over the network, and so needs to be unmounted before taking the
network down.

their DNS client that quietly grew a cache was found to be susceptible to
cache poisoning. A issue that has been known about and protected against for a
decade by more mature DNS implementations.

And i think their dhcp client (yep, it has that to) ignores a bunch of best
practices/security in the name of speed.

The whole edifice is a NIH of cards.

This even though the project leadership is supposedly very keen on security...

~~~
the_why_of_y
Systemd correctly implements the "noauto" and "nofail" keywords in fstab(5) in
the way they have always been documented: if neither of these is specified for
a filesystem, then that file system will be mounted at boot time and a failed
attempt to mount that filesystem implies a boot failure.

The fact that previous init scripts gladly ignored these failures does not
reflect negatively on systemd but on those init scripts.

By the way, FreeBSD has the same options, except that "nofail" is called
"failok".

~~~
digi_owl
Odd, i find nothing in the fstab man file about nofail.

And all that the mount man file says on it is that it suppresses error
messages.

Neither dictates any specific behavior when said errors show up.

~~~
the_why_of_y
Ok, it is younger than I thought, it was added in 2008 so more conservative
veteran UNIX admins might not have heard of it:

    
    
      Util-linux-ng 2.14 Release Notes (09-Jun-2008)
      ==============================================
      
      Release highlights
      ------------------
    
      mount(8) supports new "nofail" mount option.
    

Then it wasn't documented for 2 years, the commit that adds it to the fstab.5
man page is from 2010:

[https://github.com/karelzak/util-
linux/commit/abe3d704b6aeb6...](https://github.com/karelzak/util-
linux/commit/abe3d704b6aeb6b82ff32e8599edb56525cdfd72)

Interestingly, it pre-dates the similar FreeBSD parameter by 3 years:

[https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=22283...](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=222832)

    
    
      Add a special mount option "failok" to indicate that the administrator wants
      the system to proceed to boot without bailing out into single user mode,
      even when the file system can not be successfully mounted.
    
    

Oh and people are of course invited to down-vote me again, I've got karma to
burn, and the evidence that systemd is doing things in exactly the same way as
FreeBSD clearly needs to be suppressed if we want to maintain our regular
rituals of pointless outrage on this site.

~~~
digi_owl
And the fstab line is a copy and paste of the mount line on nofail. Basically
it just suppresses the error code, and do not dictate any behavior for the
larger system.

------
kowdermeister
"poettering locked and limited conversation to collaborators 41 seconds ago"

LOL, what a solution :)

~~~
jryan49
It should be only with collaborators. Just take a look at how useful this
entire thread is. /s

------
jryan49
Arch doesn't have it set to google's servers by default. Do any of the other
distributions? If that's the case I see most of the points on this thread
being moot. In practice google's server's might be used much at all...

~~~
htns
Ubuntu and Debian are using their own pools
([https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-
systemd/systemd.git/tree...](https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-
systemd/systemd.git/tree/debian/rules?h=experimental)). Fedora and RHEL are
using their own pools as well
([http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/systemd.git/tree/systemd....](http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/systemd.git/tree/systemd.spec)
ctrl+f ntp). A lot of noice about nothing.

------
userbinator
I wonder if there is also a privacy angle to consider here, as in the "yet
another thing that phones home to Google".

~~~
0xCMP
Google was saying something along the lines of "please don't use our time
servers. They're not correct for your purposes and only if you know that and
take that in to account (like we do) it'll mess everything up by about 0.04 at
the moment"

They also mentioned it was not a public service that was meant to handle
public loads.

------
anonbanker
I've been very critical of Poettering in the past, but after reading all the
replies here, I'm starting to wonder if all if his terseness could be chalked
up to extreme autism combined with social anxiety coping mechanisms (complete
with memorization of pithy replies). This makes me feel really bad about that
time he was "heckling" the guy at the conference, saying things like "if you
don't like logind, you must hate the disabled"; he was taking the insults of
his program very personally, and went for the political angle/fallacy as an
attempt to shield a deep wound.

I now kinda feel bad for the guy a little.

------
andmarios
These choices are the reason for the criticism on systemd. It tries to do too
much in too short. It seems to me that their moto is “code first, ask
questions later”.

Another example is their choice of words for the mount units. Instead of
standard industry terms (source, destination, device, directory, mountpoint,
path) they chose to use the words “what” (for source/device) and “where” (for
directory/mountpoint).

~~~
digi_owl
I have taken to consider it the devops/web mentality.

I see it in how Google does Android (and to a lesser extent Chrome) as well.

------
sudioStudio64
LP needs to know that there is basically nothing that he can say that the
vitriolic people will accept. He will always be evil and out to get their
"free-dums".

This is such a non-issue. How many people build systemd from scratch? Distro's
all do their own thing for system time.

------
0xCMP
Pottering has said his explanation was lost by github that he typed on his
phone.

~~~
stock_toaster

      > Pottering has said his explanation was lost by
      > github that he typed on his phone 
    

Clearly, it's up to the vendors to ship a completed explanation.

------
e12e
Between this and _this_ :

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=761658](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=761658)

I think I'm just going to have to remove systemd from my Debian installs after
all. Better to do it while the documentation on doing so is clear and old-
stable etc is still fresh.

I had decided to give it a shot, but this is just absurd.

------
optik88
I agree with the fact that systemd is not a distribution to be honest however
when I play devil's advocate I can totally see the reason they should be
considered a vendor.

Suppose it is all interpretations at the end of the day :(

------
just2comment123
wow... there's a lot of people being really rude to each other in here. too
many chefs in the oss kitchen these days.

------
vbezhenar
I don't understand his reasoning. What's wrong with registering systemd
vendor? Does it put any obligations? It's just a DNS record.

------
fapjacks
Well, that's a surprise. Lennart just locked it.

------
cbd1984
[https://devuan.org/](https://devuan.org/)

Just so everyone knows that the anti-systemd crowd has somewhere to jump, as
opposed to just sitting around being angry about decisions which have already
been made.

~~~
busterarm
I jumped to OpenBSD. That's certainly a cool project and I point other people
there, but it's not production ready yet.

------
bitJericho
Wtf is the matter with these systemd guys? Why on earth does anybody put up
with this software?

~~~
RexRollman
SystemD is a Linux cancer that continues to grow uncheked. If this keeps up, a
base Linux system will be nothing more than the Kernel, Systemd, and Bash.

~~~
jimktrains2
My biggest concern is that distros like Debian and CentOS, whose goals
normally include stability to the point that they are often railed against for
including old, sometimes too old software, have adopted Systemd before it had
any real rollout and experience.

I could see distros like arch, that want to test new stuff and are known to
work on bleeding edge software would make sense.

~~~
toupeira
> My biggest concern is that distros like Debian and CentOS, whose goals
> normally include stability to the point that they are often railed against
> for including old, sometimes too old software, have adopted Systemd before
> it had any real rollout and experience.

That's a bit disingenuous, Fedora 15 (released May 2011) was the first
distribution to enable systemd by default, so there were at least 2 years of
"rollout and experience" when Debian 8 (April 2015) and CentOS 7 (July 2014)
switched. And at least in the case of Debian, it was already available as an
option since 2012.

~~~
jimktrains2
2 years on one distro (that as far as I know, isn't popular for server-based
infrastructure) is not what I would consider "real rollout or experience".

And yes, while available in debian, very few people used it for the reasons
I'm talking about: it hasn't been heavily tested.

------
MichaelCrawford
I dont want google knowing where I am all the, uh, time.

------
beedogs
Is it too late to extricate systemd from distributions? I am really sick and
tired of this project ruining Linux.

~~~
vidarh
Feel free to fork a distro.

It's only "too late" in the sense that most distro maintainers appear to
disagree with you about it ruining Linux so you'd face a very steep uphill
battle to convince people (thankfully, in my opinion, given how much more
pleasant systemd has been to deal with for me than the other existing
alternatives so far)

~~~
digi_owl
Yep, lets appeal to authority...

~~~
vidarh
There's no appeal to authority in my comment. While I believe systemd is a
step up, I here merely pointed out that most distro managers disagree with
him, but that this also only precludes him from using those distros - nothing
stops him from forking one, or finding some suitable niche distro.

------
reagency
That Lennart fellow is running an intentional DDOS attack on Google's servers.
Google has every right to call for help from criminal authorities in Lennart's
jurisdiction.

At the very least, Google reps should ask Red Hat reps to defend their
reputation and reign in or sanction their rogue employee who is attacking be
Internet in their name.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I seriously wouldn't be surprised if this ends up with google officially
providing free "Google Time" for everyone.

