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I strongly disagree. I didn't need anyone to "show up" to replace my init system in production across several thousand servers, and the way systemd "won" that b

I strongly disagree. I didn't need anyone to "show up" to replace my init system in production across several thousand servers, and the way systemd "won" that battle wrt Debian was, to be polite, controversial, political and extremely divisive. They sure as heck didn't win because "they showed up and no one else did". They showed up and RedHat's money showed up with them. I hold no animus towards the systemd project's goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be shipping in it's current state.

korethr 10y ago
> I hold no animus towards the systemd project's goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be shipping in it's current state. I am, in a way, reminded reminded of PulseAudio. I kept PA of my desktop and laptop for years, having heard about PA being a complex nightmare to configure and make work that caused audio to break. Eventually, there was an application I needed to use that had a hard dependency on PA, so I bit the bullet and installed it. And everything magically Just Worked. My only complaint at the moment is that the pactl command seems more fiddly and verbose than it might need to be. A closer look at the complaints about PA showed that many of them were older. This gives me the impression that PA was in fact a steaming pile that broke audio at one point, but eventually matured into something functional and useful. And I think this is where systemd is at present: perhaps a good idea, but its implementation is not yet production ready, and should not be the default on production systems. And the project's continued scope creep is working against it in that regard.
- kefka 10y ago
  With PulseAudio, I have 1 singular feature that makes most people wow: When I plug in any new audio device, whatever I'm playing/recording automatically sinks to the most recent device. Seamlessly. So if I'm on mail.google.com and a GVoice call comes in, I can take the call, and during the call, plug in my USB headset. It just works. Mac can't do that. Windows can't do that. Linux/PulseAudio can. And that kicks ass.
  - dijit 10y ago
    Mac absolutely can do that, I'm not sure why you think it can't, perhaps it couldn't in the past. I do it almost daily when I come home and plug in my Bose Companion 5 into my Macbook (USB Speakers)
    - kefka 10y ago
      Admittedly, it's been quite some time since I last worked on a Mac. Think 10.6.8 era. It could also have been a borked install as well. But I'm sitting in front of a Win10 install on a Surface 4 Pro, and it can't auto-sink audio.
      - eridius 10y ago
        Mac can do that, but it's also up to the software. Software can either detect when the default audio device changes, or it can grab the device at startup and never change. Google's software, for example, has demonstrated the latter behavior in the past for me (specifically, Google Hangouts has had a tendency to not notice if I plug in headphones+mic and continues to use the built-in mic instead).
      - gman99 10y ago
        Windows 10 can _definitely_ do that (I do the exact same thing with bluetooth/wired headsets frequently; I'm "fairly" sure I used to do that on Windows 7 too -- I remember being quite amazed when my Ubuntu machine "finally" caught up and was able to do the same thing.) In fact, I quite often start music playing on the laptop (chrome/Google Play Music) and then power up my bluetooth headset -- it initially uses eSCO when it routes the audio over (mono) and then switches to A2DP a few seconds later Maybe the issue is something to do with the SW (chrome/firefox?) you use for GVoice? Or maybe there are some edge cases that I'm not triggering (in particular, a USB headset is effectively a new soundcard and not just an audio sink; I can completely believe windows is flaky with them especially with third party drivers)
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    USB headsets are a technological abomination. You are talking about a headset welded to a soundcard, that you then insert into a data bus each time you want to use it.
- merb 10y ago
  Well without production testing a product can never mature. It just depends how fast things will get shipped and fixed.
- Twirrim 10y ago
  PulseAudio took ages to get to a stable and reliable state. There are still warts (try and make your machine act as a bluetooth audio receiver. It's horribly ugly.) systemd wasn't reliable or fit for purpose for servers when it got shoehorned in to everything. When it comes to production servers you need stable and reliable. Not new and shiny. You're ideally rarely having anything happen on the server other than "run this software"
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Sadly there are two definitions of server floating around these days. There is the classical "box in the corner sending and receiving data over the network". And then there is the new "bunch of software in a container in the cloud somewhere". And with the latter definition, stable and reliable seems to be of lesser importance in the eyes of the faithful. This because they can just fire off a new instance of the container if the existing one falls over (Uptime by machinegun as i like to think of it). http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a-self-ddos/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a...
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      On either case, a fault means that at least one person will get a bad interaction with your service. And usually a few. On either case, respawning time and scalability are limited by data coherence needs.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Best i can tell, Poettering cooked up PA back when ALSAs dmix was something you manually enabled on cheap soundchips. Frankly i think it would have gone nowhere if Canonical didn't decide they needed to copy Windows' "one volume slider pr program" thingy that was introduced in Windows 7 or there about. Note btw that these days Poettering is no longer involved with PA development. BTW, the main goal of systemd seems to be to create a single baseline for desktop Linux in code rather than spec. It is a "continuation" of the -kit mentality that spawned within Freedesktop (or frankly within Fedora, at it seems said distro is basically the Petrie dish for anything under the Freedesktop umbrella).
  - korethr 10y ago
    I find the 'one slider per program' frequently useful. Different programs can be outputting at wildly different levels. I might have my music playing at a comfortable volume, then discover a video on YouTube I want to watch, and it comes in painfully loud, such that I'm immediately reaching for the volume control on the speakers or yanking off my headphones. Then when the video's over, I get to turn my speakers/headphones back up. With only a single master volume control I'm often fiddling with it to keep things at a reasonable level. With per program volume, I'm fiddling with levels less often and spending more time just listening.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Frankly the problem there is that browsers, even though they are becoming a second OS, do not have a central volume control. Heck, i swear Youtube resets the volume setting at near random (or maybe its some kind of insane AB testing?).
- boobsbr 10y ago
  I'm still bitter about PulseAudio... It completely fucked up the audio on my desktop at the time. Lots of cracking and hissing, some really weird delays as well.
  - ansible 10y ago
    Up to Ubuntu 14.04, PulseAudio worked just great for me. To the point that I didn't notice it was running, because everything just worked. With 16.04, PA has decided to not recognize the analog ports (headphone, microphone) on my motherboard. They are still there, and I can use ALSA programs to control the volume and play audio. But they just disappear after a couple seconds. It is annoying enough I might just move back to Ubuntu 14.04.

korethr 10y ago

> I hold no animus towards the systemd project's goals or aspirations, but I have yet to hear a compelling reason for systemd to be shipping in it's current state. I am, in a way, reminded reminded of PulseAudio. I kept PA of my desktop and laptop for years, having heard about PA being a complex nightmare to configure and make work that caused audio to break. Eventually, there was an application I needed to use that had a hard dependency on PA, so I bit the bullet and installed it. And everything magically Just Worked. My only complaint at the moment is that the pactl command seems more fiddly and verbose than it might need to be. A closer look at the complaints about PA showed that many of them were older. This gives me the impression that PA was in fact a steaming pile that broke audio at one point, but eventually matured into something functional and useful. And I think this is where systemd is at present: perhaps a good idea, but its implementation is not yet production ready, and should not be the default on production systems. And the project's continued scope creep is working against it in that regard.

kefka 10y ago
With PulseAudio, I have 1 singular feature that makes most people wow: When I plug in any new audio device, whatever I'm playing/recording automatically sinks to the most recent device. Seamlessly. So if I'm on mail.google.com and a GVoice call comes in, I can take the call, and during the call, plug in my USB headset. It just works. Mac can't do that. Windows can't do that. Linux/PulseAudio can. And that kicks ass.
- dijit 10y ago
  Mac absolutely can do that, I'm not sure why you think it can't, perhaps it couldn't in the past. I do it almost daily when I come home and plug in my Bose Companion 5 into my Macbook (USB Speakers)
  - kefka 10y ago
    Admittedly, it's been quite some time since I last worked on a Mac. Think 10.6.8 era. It could also have been a borked install as well. But I'm sitting in front of a Win10 install on a Surface 4 Pro, and it can't auto-sink audio.
    - eridius 10y ago
      Mac can do that, but it's also up to the software. Software can either detect when the default audio device changes, or it can grab the device at startup and never change. Google's software, for example, has demonstrated the latter behavior in the past for me (specifically, Google Hangouts has had a tendency to not notice if I plug in headphones+mic and continues to use the built-in mic instead).
    - gman99 10y ago
      Windows 10 can _definitely_ do that (I do the exact same thing with bluetooth/wired headsets frequently; I'm "fairly" sure I used to do that on Windows 7 too -- I remember being quite amazed when my Ubuntu machine "finally" caught up and was able to do the same thing.) In fact, I quite often start music playing on the laptop (chrome/Google Play Music) and then power up my bluetooth headset -- it initially uses eSCO when it routes the audio over (mono) and then switches to A2DP a few seconds later Maybe the issue is something to do with the SW (chrome/firefox?) you use for GVoice? Or maybe there are some edge cases that I'm not triggering (in particular, a USB headset is effectively a new soundcard and not just an audio sink; I can completely believe windows is flaky with them especially with third party drivers)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  USB headsets are a technological abomination. You are talking about a headset welded to a soundcard, that you then insert into a data bus each time you want to use it.
merb 10y ago
Well without production testing a product can never mature. It just depends how fast things will get shipped and fixed.
Twirrim 10y ago
PulseAudio took ages to get to a stable and reliable state. There are still warts (try and make your machine act as a bluetooth audio receiver. It's horribly ugly.) systemd wasn't reliable or fit for purpose for servers when it got shoehorned in to everything. When it comes to production servers you need stable and reliable. Not new and shiny. You're ideally rarely having anything happen on the server other than "run this software"
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Sadly there are two definitions of server floating around these days. There is the classical "box in the corner sending and receiving data over the network". And then there is the new "bunch of software in a container in the cloud somewhere". And with the latter definition, stable and reliable seems to be of lesser importance in the eyes of the faithful. This because they can just fire off a new instance of the container if the existing one falls over (Uptime by machinegun as i like to think of it). http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a-self-ddos/ http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/07/08/true-story-fixing-a...
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    On either case, a fault means that at least one person will get a bad interaction with your service. And usually a few. On either case, respawning time and scalability are limited by data coherence needs.
digi_owl 10y ago
Best i can tell, Poettering cooked up PA back when ALSAs dmix was something you manually enabled on cheap soundchips. Frankly i think it would have gone nowhere if Canonical didn't decide they needed to copy Windows' "one volume slider pr program" thingy that was introduced in Windows 7 or there about. Note btw that these days Poettering is no longer involved with PA development. BTW, the main goal of systemd seems to be to create a single baseline for desktop Linux in code rather than spec. It is a "continuation" of the -kit mentality that spawned within Freedesktop (or frankly within Fedora, at it seems said distro is basically the Petrie dish for anything under the Freedesktop umbrella).
- korethr 10y ago
  I find the 'one slider per program' frequently useful. Different programs can be outputting at wildly different levels. I might have my music playing at a comfortable volume, then discover a video on YouTube I want to watch, and it comes in painfully loud, such that I'm immediately reaching for the volume control on the speakers or yanking off my headphones. Then when the video's over, I get to turn my speakers/headphones back up. With only a single master volume control I'm often fiddling with it to keep things at a reasonable level. With per program volume, I'm fiddling with levels less often and spending more time just listening.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Frankly the problem there is that browsers, even though they are becoming a second OS, do not have a central volume control. Heck, i swear Youtube resets the volume setting at near random (or maybe its some kind of insane AB testing?).
boobsbr 10y ago
I'm still bitter about PulseAudio... It completely fucked up the audio on my desktop at the time. Lots of cracking and hissing, some really weird delays as well.
- ansible 10y ago
  Up to Ubuntu 14.04, PulseAudio worked just great for me. To the point that I didn't notice it was running, because everything just worked. With 16.04, PA has decided to not recognize the analog ports (headphone, microphone) on my motherboard. They are still there, and I can use ALSA programs to control the volume and play audio. But they just disappear after a couple seconds. It is annoying enough I might just move back to Ubuntu 14.04.