I'm really starting to hate the sub-community in Linux that tries to constantly change it.
I don't want to learn a new network config alternative with every update (Ubuntu changed its net config tool again with 24.04). I don't want an immutable os. I don't want to learn to write new config files. I just want to do what I've been doing but with new packages. If there's a problem with something, just fix it. Don't throw out the whole thing.
I moved to FreeBSD and am happy for its reluctance to change. If there is any, it's usually offering something genuinely new to me as a feature and to boot I only need to learn about it if I need it.
Hardware support is much lower but it's worth it IMO. I had the same irritation with macOS. Every release breaking something essential that was part of my workflow and i didn't want to change. Eventually I did change but away from Apple.
This is the main reason why I'm still on Slackware. Pat is keeping the same thing for the last 20-30 years. Sure, he had to introduce some stuff, like NetworkManager or PulseAudio, to keep up with the latest software versions, but every major change is postponed as much as possible. Hell, even systemd is not there yet, and I'm pleased about that.
To help myself to understand others better, I made some efforts to look and keep looking outside my bubble.
That's not simple though- humans tend to think THEY know better for all others while it's often not.
Say you don't want to have immutable distros, but many want. Android or Talos or even OS for network switches are nice examples.
Linux based solutions and products related community is wide and to keep up with evolution one needs to adapt and adopt changes.
We already see what happens for immutable/stale systems like FreeBSD - even TrueNAS is abandoning it, dying as predicted by experts since 2008-2010.
On other side - nothing stops you from keep using sudo or even choose disto vendor which doesn't use systemd, there is a choice, not thing set in stone.
Say I don't plan to switch to run0 in any near future - first it's not gonna be in any LTS disto, 2nd - it seems to be lacking LDAP based rules and very much likely other important features.
I really think you need some time away from a PC. You seem to be taking this incredibly personally. You can feel how you feel about the general public, but knowingly and willfully staying in a bubble is only detrimental to yourself. You will ultimately become what you hate. A person unwilling to move with the current change of society.
> A person unwilling to move with the current change of society.
Well if society goes towards fascism like the Netherlands, then yes I'm very proud of not moving along with that.
The best remaining option is to live side by side with those people and interact with them as least as possible, and hinder them as much as possible in their attempts at legislating, like using the first chamber to block things. Mind you, this is already the status quo in the US where the democrats and republicans use whatever means at their disposal to undermine the other.
We didn't really have this phenomenon in the Netherlands because we don't have this "the winner takes all" kind of political system but parties need to collaborate. But the rise of the extreme-right makes it impossible to cooperate any longer.
It's very fair to eschew change for negligible improvements.
But I've also seen the community defend terrible stuff just because.
Look at what happened with the init system. System V, fstab, etc was awful. Doing anything with a reasonable level of robustness was grotesquely obtuse and complicated. And yet it was "perfectly fine" to the greybeards. Alternative proposals were near zero.
I don't have a dog in the networkmanager/netplan fight. It could be that one is irrelevant; given history, I have a hard time trusting what I hear.
sudo has quirks for sure (which is why you see a number of alternatives).
Daemontools was pretty popular with greybeards, actually. But yeah, daemontools/runit/s6 and company have always been for handcrafted server setups, where the thing about init scripts and unit files is that they're a standard thing a package can supply and have work out of the box with minimal tweaking across distros.
Any serious challenge to systemd nowadays is probably going to have to at least offer compatibility with it. No one is going to rip it all out and start over again (again).
I love it when new and better ways are found to do things.
I love it that Linux is constantly improving and moving forward.
I’m willing to accept along the way some things seem to be mis steps (I’m looking at you snap packaging).
I love it that improved network configuration systems are being adopted because network configuration is a pain.
I love systemd and when new stuf comes out from the systemd project I think “gee I’m glad finally someone is taking a wholistic look at and fixing that messy inconsistent evolved corner of Linux and replacing it with well thought out powerful and integrated solution.”
Bring on the change, change is the best thing about computing and software. I own vintage computers but wouldn’t want to live there.
> I love it when new and better ways are found to do things.
I do, too. But I also really hate it when those new and better ways make things worse for me. Systemd does that in a couple of important ways. There is even some network-related startup stuff that I can no longer make work automatically at all. For me personally, systemd is a regression, not an advance.
But I also recognize that the Linux world is not duty-bound to make sure it remains excellent for me, and I've pretty much given up on advocating for my needs in the Linux space. There's no point, particularly with the systemd crowd.
I’ve been running Ubuntu boxes in prod since 12.x — there is no “improved” way to put an ip address on an interface besides writing something to a file in /etc, but every update this file changes, or it’s format does.
It’s bullshit and I wish it would end.
Alas, keeps the consultant bucks flooding in when we have to rewrite a load of cfgmgt to go to 24.04 I guess..
I just switch every system to systemd-networkd immediately. The same .ini sytax as for service files, and dependencies are easy to handle, e.g. on one system I have two physical Interfaces eth0 and eth1, I want two vlans on eth0, and then bridge one of those vlans with eth1 and then run a DHCP client on that bridge but at the same time assign an additional IP address. This is dead simple to describe with one .ini file per vlan/bridge. Seriously the first time I feel like I'm not fighting an archaic config syntax, fixing up crap in some post-hook.d script, or give up entirely on any config language and just have a convoluted script setting up everything manually.
It's also easy to explicitly express "weird" stuff like "run DHCP client and use all the config options except the default route". Seriously a couple times I needed to do dumb shit and was like "there's no way they let you do this" but no, there's a way to do it.
And I'm pretty positive the config files will stay stable over the coming years and any new networking features will get appropriate config options in newer versions.
Eh, I could. But I'm quite sure that the method of switching to systemd-networkd also requires the same if not much more maintenance as simply changing the ifconfig template every few years...
I really don't care about interface configurations that much. It's an annoyance, but one that's quite easy to fix. I think introducing yet another network configuration here isn't the answer, but my linux fleet just run k8s anyway and network config on the linux level is quite simple before we get into cillium/istio/etc :}
Sure, I made that choice at a time where after upgrading, Ubuntu suddenly wanted netplan, debian stayed with /etc/network/interfaces and I think fedora went with networkmanager. So I though f- it, they all have systemd so I'll give networkd a spin. And never looked back.
So maybe don't just switch out of the blue right now if you've got a working setup, but maybe keep it in mind for the next time. :)
But I do. So I use one, and contribute to a project that tries to create one. Am I a part of some sub-community that wants constant change? Or do I just have an unusual use-case and want to support it?
The beauty of OS is that anyone can decide which tool to use, contribute to it, and even fork it.
> I don't want to learn a new network config alternative with every update (Ubuntu changed its net config tool again with 24.04).
That's really just Ubuntu's fault. Between upstart, Unity, netplan, and snapd, Ubuntu likes to go off and do its own thing for a few years before coming back to what everyone else picked in the first place
I so want to ditch Linux for bsd, but hardware support, both for my current laptop and future pain in searching for compatible hardware is the only thing putting me off. And my server needs cuda for my AI shenanigans, so probably no bsd there either ...
That's funny. It's like there are two camps, conservatives, and progressives. ;)
Jokes aside, I just think that life is constant change and the programming industry is a good example of that. Coding practices have improved a lot in the last few years and will continue to improve with new knowledge and new technology. Sometimes it's better to start anew from scratch than trying to adapt old code into new practices.
Btw this is not a young whippersnapper saying this. My first IT job was on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I was a full-time FreeBSD user from 04 to ~10.
And I remember exacty this gripe back in 2011 when Debian was using one network config, RHEL another. Today I actually enjoy the progress made with systemd, and I'm that annoying co-worker who will give you crap for disabling SElinux.
Well, some things are improvements. But many are not, and are just changed for the sake of it.
I'm a fan of SELinux (and the similar mandatory access control on BSD) because it gives strong security but the user or admin keeps control. This is a much better solution than things like immutable OSes where the user can't control anything and just has to trust the developer of the OS.
What complaining. There weren't paved paths before. Whatever one person learned was different from how anyone else did it. Few of the tools had anywhere near the essential capabilities, serving o ly some tiny niche of the use cases in some tool specific limited way.
Look at all the different netsevs supported by systemd-networkd. https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... This is a huge list of tools that required a huge assortment of tools to do before, few of which had even part way decent management & fewer still had good init scripts. You used to have to learn from 0 each time, with each tool. Nothing was alike, nothing was as capable, nothing was integrative.
Don't listen to these complainers, for God sake. Your life is too short to get pissed off about well built work together featureful tools being built in a mono-repo fashion.
I'm so tired of the sabotage, so tired of broadscale general refusenik attitudes. This post is absurd. There was nothing to learn before, everything was 100% special snowflake & distinct. None of it was great, all of it was limited. Systemd mono-repo is built of many small pieces, but they couple together and are 100x more learnable. What you learn today will work across whatever system you run across. It's such a a better world, and these "pry it from my cold dead fingers" attitude can keep to that path for all I care, but I wish they weren't poisoning kinds with absurd incorrect negativity & being such magnets for disdain. The world today is fantastic & you rarely see these folks with even an iota of appreciation for how good we have it, never a drop of balance. But hate sells, & unites, powerfully.
> so tired of broadscale general refusenik attitudes
You can use whatever software you like on your computers, but you're not entitled to have everybody else follow your choices because everybody else has exactly the same freedom to choose as you do. And if you want to persuade people to follow your lead, name calling is a bad strategy (much less ethnically charged name calling...)
The anti-systemd crowd dishes it out like crazy & gets minimal blowback. I'm done letting them be monsters with small minded attitudes, ragging & raging with old crusty attitudes that refuse refuse refuse.
I have heard people use refusenik numerous times & never once has it crossed my mind or seemed remotely related to any ethnic matters. There does appear to be a definition though. Alas. It's a great fucking word, makes me smile, feels well crafted & spry, & I detest giving it up, relinquishing it: but I hereby renounce my previous usage & give it up. Blast. Now there is only absence.
(Also, usually name calling is bad because your insulting someone for being something. New here, but I don't think refusenik in the ethnic sense is at all slanderous or insulting though? It's a comment more upon the totalitarian state & a contravention of Declaration of Human Rights than it is a comment on the person? So I'm not sure that there's any victims to the modern reuse & repurposing of this word, unlike most terms that had some ethnic aspect. Indeed, the extensive & adaptive history of usage of this word seems to show ever growing rift in meaning from it's original use, & little fear that just because there was an ethnic situation we cannot use it... I begin to think you protest too loudly.)
I don't want to learn a new network config alternative with every update (Ubuntu changed its net config tool again with 24.04). I don't want an immutable os. I don't want to learn to write new config files. I just want to do what I've been doing but with new packages. If there's a problem with something, just fix it. Don't throw out the whole thing.
I moved to FreeBSD and am happy for its reluctance to change. If there is any, it's usually offering something genuinely new to me as a feature and to boot I only need to learn about it if I need it.
Hardware support is much lower but it's worth it IMO. I had the same irritation with macOS. Every release breaking something essential that was part of my workflow and i didn't want to change. Eventually I did change but away from Apple.
I don't want to change to LennartOS either.