Crap like systemd gets ton of corporate funding, versus tens of really beautiful apps getting slowly neglected.
Not a good direction in general.
Desktop Linux seems stale or abandoned all over the place. There are a lot of updates in some corners - desktop environments like Mate and Budgie and the developer side of things like git, cmake, vim, GCC, Clang... they all get regular updates. But overall I feel like 10 years ago things were more exciting and would change all the time with new features and functionality. I remember being really excited to install the next 6-month release of Ubuntu. Now I run Arch and the only updates I seem to see are to python-setuptools.
Maybe it's the overall slowing down of the PC market. The people who should have grown into maintaining all this are doing something else. Like when the Mule messed up the Seldon Plan, smart phones have wrecked the Free Software plan. Everyone is too busy looking at Instagram or playing Candy Crush to write Free Software nowadays.
As i grow older i learn the value of mature software. Software that knows its place in the grander scheme of things. That do its job quietly and reliably, with clear information when something goes wrong.
Yes, for a young newcomer said software may look boring, many not be utilizing their latest GPU to draw rectangles on screen, but said software has been doing what it has been doing reliably for a decade or more.
Damn it, just look at systemd-resolved. It keeps pulling the trigger on footgun after footgun because someone decided that he could do DNS better than existing, battle tested, software, and lumped it in with the rest of the systemd shoggoth for good measure.
What seems to happen with most of these projects is that the initial developer gets discouraged when he bumps into the 10% of remaining functionality of what he is replacing. The 10% that is hard, and that has lead to the large amount of gnarly code in the old and "stale" project he was gunning to replace in a caffeine fueled weekend.
But sadly this threadmill that FOSS is saddled with will continue to spin, because as a culture software development has come to value LOCS pr hour over reliability. And we keep punting the old guard into middle management, and replace them with youngers that hammers out said LOCS rather than stop and consider what the old code is actually doing.
You can disable this in logind.conf
> Desktop Linux seems stale or abandoned all over the place. … But overall I feel like 10 years ago things were more exciting and would change all the time with new features and functionality.
Sometimes it feels a bit like that. On the other hand a lot of things work a lot better than 10 years ago. Maybe we simply reached a point where you basically have what you need most of the time and new features are either not necessary, minor refinements instead of big jumps or more specialized so you don't notice them. Then the Linux desktop still has this fragmentation problem where a lot of work is duplicated unnecessarily and the problem of breaking libraries/frameworks where applications without the manpower to keep up simply degrade or outright die.
> Maybe it's the overall slowing down of the PC market. The people who should have grown into maintaining all this are doing something else. Like when the Mule messed up the Seldon Plan, smart phones have wrecked the Free Software plan. Everyone is too busy looking at Instagram or playing Candy Crush to write Free Software nowadays.
Yeah the catastrophic failure of a true free software ecosystem on the smart phone while starting so promising may have pushed the moral down. The desktop may also feel a bit boring for many now. It basically does the job and you now have things like the web, smart phones or incredibly cheap and capable embedded devices which may seem more interesting to them.
Yeah yeah, Gnome can work without logind. But doing so is not easy and require ongoing patches as new versions of Gnome rolls out.
And Gnome is THE gorilla in the Linux DE world.
i also like journald, logging is a pleasure now, even to syslog, and other syslog servers.
well what I don't get is timedatectl i.e systemd-timesync and many more. they are mostly not needed for init itself and already had a really really good counterpart.
I haven't seen many vulnerabilities in the PID 1 part of systemd that concerned me. The last vuln I recall was the UID parsing issue, which isn't really exploitable.
The systemd-resolved vuln was pretty bad, but that's an optional component that I've never used anyway. (It's not used by default on Debian.)
Hell, it seems that only as systemd people started talking up nspawn as a way to do containers did the business side sit up and take notice. Before then it was mostly considered a bikesheding runaround between nerds.