[LAU] Some disturbing news

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2018 01:51:09 +0200, Dominique Michel wrote:
>Le Sun, 3 Jun 2018 02:17:04 +0200,
>Fons Adriaensen <fons at linuxaudio.org> a écrit :
>
>> What I *do* find disturbing re. the way Linux seems
>> to be going is all those 'kits' and other stuff meant
>> to replace existing system functionality. Who needs
>> rtkit if we have limits.conf, or policykit if we have
>> sudo ?  
>
>I fully agree. I am very happy with gentoo because I can choose how I
>want my system to be managed and I just don't have those *kit stuffs.
>
>The *webkit* are very interesting.

Webkit is not part of that "family" mentioned by Fons.

>It begun with qtwebkit which take more time to compile on my gentoo
>than a monster like libreoffice. lol After that, we have now kdewebkit
>and webkit-gtk which also take an eternity to compile. I just removed
>all the software depending on them. I can understand they are easy to
>use for a developer, but on a system like gentoo that compile
>everything during the installation, I just don't want them because
>they just take too long time to compile.
>
>Also on the long run, I don't think it is a good move for a developer
>to use them because it will have a lot of maintenance to do. qtwebkit
>is marked deprecated, and I think it is just a question of time before
>the other webkits become deprecated.

Half-truth I won't comment, since this "kit" is something completely
different to policykit and co. IOW it's off-topic.

>> And the worst of all is systemd. It was a nice idea  
>...
>> It has become near impossible to find out what
>> your system is actually up to.
>> 
>> A few weeks ago I installed Devuan (Debian fork
>> wihout systemd) on two laptops. A very refreshing
>> experience. Some orders of magnitude simpler. As
>> a user you don't notice any difference and it
>> start up faster than systemd. And for me, as admin
>> of those systems, things have become a lot more
>> transparent.  
>
>When it became possible to easily install it on gentoo, I took a
>fast look on systemd's bugzilla. The list of bugs was so huge that I
>never installed it on my system. It work fine with openrc from day 1,
>and I don't want to take the risk to break a so central part of the
>system.
>
>How I see it is than several leading commercial linux distributions
>like redhat have huge corporations as paid customers, and these corps
>need these kits stuffs and systemd, or at least they was convinced they
>need it... But into a dedicated or home computer, they are just "usines
>à gaz" (gas plant - these manufactures full with pipes everywhere and
>going in all possible directions at the same time) and a complete pain
>in the ass to manage as a result.

There is a difference between being really hit by systemd pitfalls and
baseless bikeshedding. Major distros decided to migrate to systemd for
valid reasons, it's not a conspiracy done by mentally handicapped
and/or evil distro maintainers.

Don't get me wrong, users could have good reasons to be against systemd
and/or against policykit and similar things.