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Cake day: January 29th, 2024

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  • There were several cases of shenanigans from other Red Hat controlled projects yanking upstart configs and sysvinit scripts from their projects and replacing them exclusively with systemd units even though those configs had active maintainers (often people who worked at Canonical or Google). This made packaging those supposedly community owned but de facto Red Hat controlled projects more difficult for any system that didn’t use systemd, since the packagers had to scramble to find or recreate those files and then maintain patch series for them. They also very quickly jumped on adding systemd-specific integrations where similar integrations to make the services work better with upstart had been rejected because services weren’t supposed to favour an init system.

    Something not necessarily (or provably) from Red Hat - a whole lot of misinformation about upstart suddenly started appearing on mailing lists and message boards when Debian was considering whether to use upstart or systemd. While I think they made the right decision to go with systemd, that sudden influx of new accounts complaining about upstart likely influenced the decision in ways I’m really not comfortable with.

    I don’t dislike systemd. I’m happy to use it and think it works quite well for many (though definitely not all) of the things it does. But I am concerned about how it’s yet another case of Red Hat having a large amount of control over the Linux ecosystem and Red Hat controlled projects and the supporters of Red Hat projects using dirty tricks to further that control. And with systemd consuming more and more of how a Linux system works, I am concerned about the influence that gives Red Hat. Are we going to see systemd-packaged that manages your packages, but somehow the patches to make it work with non-RPM packages keep getting rejected or just held up for years at a time? (We’ve already seen similar things with xdg portals, where portals Red Hat wants get approved and merged very quickly, but portals proposed by Canonical or SuSE spend years “in review” with more and more petty changes requested, sometimes to be rejected because a Red Hat backed portal that only implements part of the functionality suddenly appeared and was approved within a week or two.)


  • I’d be fine with several of these.

    Brice: I’ve never understood people’s distaste for that smell. I won’t microwave tuna in an office because I know others don’t like it, but it wouldn’t bother me.

    Wallace: probably has some great stories, but also likely wants to shut up and get things done. Great combination if handled correctly.

    Shiloh: hey, you can play anything on your headphones, I’m cool with that. But if you want to play stuff on speaker it’s only fair that we play 50/50. (My secret: I could totally do up to 75% Radiohead)

    Dayzie: again, not a smell that tends to bother me.



  • I have the following complaints about systemd:

    1. It was created basically by lennart because after RHEL 6 did pretty much the worst implementation ever of upstart he got NIH syndrome about it
    2. Red Hat played a lot of dirty politics early on to get systemd everywhere (my tinfoil hat theory is that Red Hat let Lennart’s NIH syndrome run away with it because they thought having more control over the init system would be beneficial)
    3. It’s subsuming everything, often with no real benefit over what it replaces.

    The first two aren’t actually issues with systemd, but rather are political issues I have around the way Red Hat bullies the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I’m not going to let that become a stopping point for my using what is actually a fairly good piece of tech. The third is actually an ongoing issue, but it’s not enough for me to try throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is, however, IMO a continuation of Red Hat’s sketchy political play.







  • Canonical have made the same mistake three times as far as desktop environments are concerned, IMO:

    1. 2004: went with GNOME
    2. 2010: made Unity as a way to rid themselves of the hostility of the GNOME devs
    3. 2017: Instead of leaving GNOME in the dust, they went back.

    IMO using GNOME is an abusive relationship.


  • Nah, this is just the same “hivemind hates thing” leaking over from Reddit. It’s not that different to the systemd hate. There’s a core of a point, but if a small fraction of the energy spent on the daily Two Minutes Hate were redirected towards fixing the things those folks don’t like, they wouldn’t have any molehills to treat as mountains.