This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I’m not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.
It’s not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.
Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.
At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
All of the technically-minded posts I’ve read about systemd have been positive. The only detractors seem to be the ones with less technical knowledge, complaining about “the Unix philosophy” and parroting half-understood ideas, or worse, claiming that it’s bad because they have to learn it.
I know xorg has problems, but it was good to get some insight into why Wayland is falling short. Every argument I’ve seen in favor of Wayland has been “xorg bad”.
X code is convoluted, so much so that the maintainers didn’t want to continue. AFAIK, no commercial entity has put any significant money behind Xorg and friends. Potentially unmaintained code with known bugs, unknown CVEs and demands for permission system for privacy made continuing with Xorg a near impossibility.
If you don’t want new features and don’t care about CVEs that will be discovered in future as well as the bugs (present and future), then you can continue using Xorg, and ignore all this. If not, then you need to find an alternative, which doesn’t need to be Wayland
Oh, and you might need to manage Xorg while other people and software including your distro move onto something else.
So yeah, “xorg bad” is literally the short summary for creating Mir and Wayland
To be honest, systemd does treat its own services specially when I don’t think there’s a good reason for it. Systemd as a whole is a huge improvement over the old bash script mess, but there is something to the “Unix philosophy” take.
The solution isn’t “switch back to writing hundreds of sh scripts”, though, it’s “improve systemd”.
As for the X11 vs Wayland topic: there’s still tooling missing for some use cases. X11 forwarding over SSH doesn’t work as well even with Waypipe. Just yesterday I encountered a bug that caused any attempt to run Waypipe to freeze the entire display.
Again, the solution is to fix Way land’s tooling, not to abandon it for X11 because change is scary.
This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd
You’ll one day learn the difference between Popular and Correct.
Trump is popular, for instance.
and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
This is a “everyone tells me to get smoke detectors and I’ve never had a fire in all my 23 years of life” comment.
There’s a reason we have building codes, seat belts, traffic lights, emergency brakes, FDIC, and pilots’ licenses.
Systemd isn’t “correct” what does that even mean? If you don’t agree with the standards and practices of the systemd project, that’s fine, but don’t act like there is some golden tablet of divine standards for system process management frameworks.
I wasn’t making an argument that systemd is perfect or that other frameworks like runit are inferrior. My argument was that I’ve been running a lot of Linux servers and desktop systems for years and I’ve never experienced the “huge stability problems and nightmare daemon management” that multiple systemd haters claim I will inevitably experience.
Maybe I’m incredibly lucky, maybe I’m not actually getting deep enough into the guts of Linux for it to matter, or maybe systemd isn’t the devil incarnate that some people make it out to be.
And also, free software is a thing. So I absolutely support and encourage alternatives like runit to exist. If you want your distros and servers to only use runit, that’s totally fine. If it makes you happy, or you have some super niche edge-case that makes systemd a bad solution, go for something else, you have my blessing, not that you need it.
This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I’ve ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I’ve never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.
Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I’m not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.
It’s not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.
Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.
At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.
Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn’t care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.
All of the technically-minded posts I’ve read about systemd have been positive. The only detractors seem to be the ones with less technical knowledge, complaining about “the Unix philosophy” and parroting half-understood ideas, or worse, claiming that it’s bad because they have to learn it.
I know xorg has problems, but it was good to get some insight into why Wayland is falling short. Every argument I’ve seen in favor of Wayland has been “xorg bad”.
X code is convoluted, so much so that the maintainers didn’t want to continue. AFAIK, no commercial entity has put any significant money behind Xorg and friends. Potentially unmaintained code with known bugs, unknown CVEs and demands for permission system for privacy made continuing with Xorg a near impossibility.
If you don’t want new features and don’t care about CVEs that will be discovered in future as well as the bugs (present and future), then you can continue using Xorg, and ignore all this. If not, then you need to find an alternative, which doesn’t need to be Wayland
Oh, and you might need to manage Xorg while other people and software including your distro move onto something else.
So yeah, “xorg bad” is literally the short summary for creating Mir and Wayland
I get it.
But as far as I can tell, there are just two xorgs now, one of them is just spelled “Wayland”.
To be honest, systemd does treat its own services specially when I don’t think there’s a good reason for it. Systemd as a whole is a huge improvement over the old bash script mess, but there is something to the “Unix philosophy” take.
The solution isn’t “switch back to writing hundreds of sh scripts”, though, it’s “improve systemd”.
As for the X11 vs Wayland topic: there’s still tooling missing for some use cases. X11 forwarding over SSH doesn’t work as well even with Waypipe. Just yesterday I encountered a bug that caused any attempt to run Waypipe to freeze the entire display.
Again, the solution is to fix Way land’s tooling, not to abandon it for X11 because change is scary.
You’ll one day learn the difference between Popular and Correct.
Trump is popular, for instance.
This is a “everyone tells me to get smoke detectors and I’ve never had a fire in all my 23 years of life” comment.
There’s a reason we have building codes, seat belts, traffic lights, emergency brakes, FDIC, and pilots’ licenses.
Systemd isn’t “correct” what does that even mean? If you don’t agree with the standards and practices of the systemd project, that’s fine, but don’t act like there is some golden tablet of divine standards for system process management frameworks.
I wasn’t making an argument that systemd is perfect or that other frameworks like runit are inferrior. My argument was that I’ve been running a lot of Linux servers and desktop systems for years and I’ve never experienced the “huge stability problems and nightmare daemon management” that multiple systemd haters claim I will inevitably experience.
Maybe I’m incredibly lucky, maybe I’m not actually getting deep enough into the guts of Linux for it to matter, or maybe systemd isn’t the devil incarnate that some people make it out to be.
And also, free software is a thing. So I absolutely support and encourage alternatives like runit to exist. If you want your distros and servers to only use runit, that’s totally fine. If it makes you happy, or you have some super niche edge-case that makes systemd a bad solution, go for something else, you have my blessing, not that you need it.