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466 points CoolCold | 6 comments | | HN request time: 0.876s | source | bottom
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kbar13 ◴[] No.40208219[source]
systemd has been a net positive for the linux ecosystem. remember when you had to write bash scripts to start, stop, restart services and handle any other signals you want to send it? nowadays it's a unit file (basically just an ini file) away with relatively straightforward API. and you can actually declare startup dependencies and other useful relationships past just "prepend a number signifying when it should run globally to the front of the filename". it's provided an extensible platform with which higher level orchestration frameworks like ansible / ignition can easily templatize services or other system configuration.

since the beginning of systemd people have moaned about how complex it is and how we're reinventing the wheel. yet time and time again the people actually working on the project show that the solution they've come up with is the result of the problem they're facing on a daily basis. it's quite annoying that the armchair linux experts complain about how "lol systemd is so stupid for reinventing the wheel, give me my shell scripts back", maybe think about whether or not you have a legitimate issue not being addressed by the solution proposed or if you are just getting rage baited by a headline.

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esoterae ◴[] No.40214704[source]
No, it hasn't.

You forget, the reason systemd was originally rationalized for its insertion into our trees was "boot times are too slow". Its chameleon-like nature and ability to solve the hastily described problem du jour seems to be its only consistently touted feature.

Bash scripts that start processes are ephemeral. If it's signal handling you want, that was your program's problem. Either that or your program didn't fork itself, which is a fish of an entirely different feather.

And now we have this sprawling mess of complexity and headache.

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1. riddley ◴[] No.40216989[source]
Same thing is happening with Wayland. It reduces features adds complexity and solves no new problems but here it comes.
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2. themerone ◴[] No.40217464[source]
How is Wayland more complex than X?
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3. roenxi ◴[] No.40217835[source]
Wayland was a mis-fire in terms of user friendliness for the first decade or so. But it is still a big step up from the mess that was a typical xserver back in 2010.

> It reduces features adds complexity...

The irony here is Wayland is part of a huge effort to decomplex an xserver into component parts. A really commendable initiative; the path forward while maintaining the X protocol probably was impractically hairy.

The Wayland protocol design had some glaring flaws, but saying that it adds complexity is unfair. It oversimplified; it would have benefited from some flexibility in providing a standard mechanism to let people inspect the buffers graphics buffers to be composited.

4. gmueckl ◴[] No.40218136[source]
The resulting wayland environments are more complex because wayland itself refuses to define/include features that desktop systems are expected to have. This results in a sprawling mess of competing and incompatible interfaces for those gaps that other parts of the implementations (desktop environments) now have to compensate for by including multiple implementations of the same thing based on all these different interfaces.
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5. j16sdiz ◴[] No.40220328[source]
Wayland by itself is simplier -- it is done by "outsourcing" everything a window system should do to the window manager. There is where the complexity kicks in.
6. imtringued ◴[] No.40221194{3}[source]
Stop using the wrong words. You're saying Wayland is too simple and feature incomplete.