Attitudes develop over time… his may indeed be a defense mechanism or simply a response to all that hate.

things before were way worse… why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?

My earliest memories of Linux audio were in Slackware in the mid 90s, reading and re-reading the HOWTO that started off with a bunch of attitude about how real computer users don’t need audio, but we can do it anyway “so, if you must hear Biff bark…” and then a bunch of very unhelpful things to try following that never ever worked on any system I ever tried to use them on. Diverse systems that, of course, all played audio through Windows flawlessly.

But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.

You mean like Linus Torvalds?

Linux audio has been a cluster^$%< of epic proportions since the mid 1990s. At least you can make single application systems work well these days, but Windows has really whipped the llamas ass on the audio front for 30+ years now, in terms of “it just works” user experience - without being hyper-draconian on the application ecosystem.

I see most often that it’s the people who live in init.d - interact with it multiple times a day - who are most vocal about systemd hate. I’m going to call “old dogs don’t like new tricks” on that one.

I do get into that layer of system maintenance, but it’s maybe 1-2% of my time, mostly a set-it and forget-it kind of relationship. There was a time when the old ways were easier due to more documentation and guides on the internet, which I lean on heavily because I interact with this stuff so rarely. Those days passed, for me, 8-10 years back.

Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system.

One reality of the world is: the developers choose what hardware/OS configurations they target. If the makers of your game don’t target your RAM efficient system, you’re outta luck. Developers make their choices for their own reasons, but even with the ever-growing FOSS communities, the majority of developers work for a paycheck, that paycheck comes from profitable businesses and those businesses have very strong influence on what the developers work toward. The businesses only exist because they are profitable… FOSS may not be bound by those realities, but it lives in a world dominated by them.

90mb ram

If you’re in a system where 256mb of RAM is the limit, sure - go for the RAM efficient OS options, they’re out there.

Can you even buy less than 2GB of RAM in a desktop system anymore? Even the Raspberry Pi 5 starts at 2GB (and, yes, the older models have less, but I did say desktop system, implying: reasonable desktop performance.) Maybe if you feel the need to use a RasPi 3 as a desktop for something then you should dig around for one of your more efficient OS configurations, but I’ll note… back when RasPi 3 was the new model, Raspbian came default without systemd, but offered a systemd option. The systemd option booted to a desktop (such as it was) in about 1/3 the time.

With AI, you can be 100% sure you can use the image however you want, without any repercussions.

For now… maybe. The courts haven’t really settled that issue yet.

AI should be able to do a really good systemd debate by now, the available training material is immensely huge.

So, I don’t like the guy either, but for a little devil’s advocacy:

The stuff that already “just works” was developed during a very different era in terms of computing power, tasking of the computers which were running the systems, etc. Nobody (serious, and he is serious) develops something different because “why not?” they, at least from their perspective, feel that they are improving on the status quo, at least for the use cases they are considering.

one-size-fits-all mentality is

being decided by the distro maintainers, not the developers. Sure, developers promote their product, but if a distro thinks that multiple flavors are a better path, they distribute multiple flavors. It’s not like the systemd developers are filling billion dollar war chests with profit because they’re using strong-arm tactics to coerce distro maintainers to adopt their products.

stuff everything into one bin

When one bin serves the purpose, it’s a lot easier to maintain, modernize, security harden, etc. than ten bins.

the community and its users will not always be able to freely develop FOSS.

Fork it and your loyal users will follow.

Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency

Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.

FOSS shouldn’t work like that.

FOSS, by its very nature, should be expected to work all the ways. If a particular way can’t get enough developer traction, it stagnates but never really dies, not until the ecosystem it is dependent upon can no longer find hardware to run on and users willing to run it.

IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good.

I am very glad that I walked away from CentOS about 8 years back, its proximity to Red Hat never made me happy. I have been trying to walk away from Canonical (toward Debian) for about 3 years now, but it still has some hooks that keep our professional team happier than Debian. If the unhappy ever outweighs the happy, we’ll execute the move.

Sorry if I can’t rejoice

Never asked you to. End of devil’s advocacy. I still don’t like the guy, but I never really interact with him. I do interact with his products and the alternatives, and in my use cases the products speak for themselves. There’s nothing about systemd that makes me dig around for systemd free alternatives - they are out there, but for my use cases I don’t care. YMMV.

You are saying it’s Grok TACO Wednesday, again?

My distro isn’t the best, but it’s at least a good starting point: Debian + XFCE.

Was using Ubuntu from about 12.04 through 20.04, but it is getting too snappy and support contract happy for me these days.

I don’t think the system has that much sophistication.

I do think they can “weight” the training set and feed it endless variations of “approved content” to be regarded as correct, and maybe also feed it other content to be identified as “incorrect” and rebutted from the approved content.

Last time I checked, Grok was still ‘woke’ (meaning: repeating the most common opinions published around the internet) - that’s been a couple of months. I was shocked that it was permitted to be accessed by the public back then.

I’m beginning to think those people are already lost… anyone who is going to fall for this has already fallen for similar things and reflexively distrusts anything that doesn’t back up their world views.

I also think people who are opposed to this are very unlikely to change their minds based on something controlled by someone like that.

Finally, we’ve been at this hard for almost a decade, I’m pretty sure the undecideds are lying to the pollsters.

Took 'em long enough to get around to this result, I’m shocked that the boy genius would let it operate in “bash me because that’s what the majority of the world thinks” mode for so long.

Yeah, I agree. Canonical seems to think “snaps are for everyone” so, for both my personal and professional applications they have decided: “Canonical is not for me.”

I view the delays during launch and the extra time spent during updates as a “load on the system.”

Also, it entirely depends on your deployment environment. I develop system images that go out on thousands of devices deployed in “Cybersecuity Sensitive” environments, meaning: we have to document what’s on the system and justify when anything in the SBOM (list of every software package installed on the machine) is identified as having any applicable CVEs… soooo… keeping old versions of software anywhere on the machine is a problem (significant additional documentation load) for those security audits. Don’t argue with logic, these are our customers and they have established their own procedures, so if we want their money, we will provide them with the documentation they demand, and that documentation is simplest when EVERYTHING on the system has ALL the latest patches.

The most secure systems are those that don’t do anything at all. You can’t hack a brick.

i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.

I agree. The agents also need to mature more to handle multi-level structures - work on a collection of smaller modules to get a larger system with more functionality. I can see the path forward for those tools, but the ones I have access to definitely aren’t there yet.

The more exacting the shop, the better they pay.

That hasn’t been my experience, but it sounds like good advice anyway. My experience has been that the more profitable the parent company, the better the job security and the better the pay too. Once “in,” tune in to the culture and align with the people at your level and above who seem like they’ll be sticking around long term. If the company isn’t financially secure, all bets are off and you should be seeking, and taking, a better offer when you can find one.

I knocked around startups for 10/22 years (depending on how you characterize that one 12 year gig that ended with everybody laid off…) The pay was good enough, but job security just wasn’t on the menu. Finally, one got bought by a big fish and I’ve been in the belly of the beast for 11 years now.