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Comment by mksaunders | Hacker News Reader

"So there was, in fact, a PR campaign."

Er, how do you think the Systemd developers convinced these technical teams to use Systemd? With bribes? Sexual favours? Or perhaps, you know, using the software itself?

It's funny. The lead developers of Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, Debian etc. etc. etc. have all chosen to use Systemd. Yet for some reason, many commentators assume these people -- distro technical leads -- simply don't have a clue, and have switched their projects to Systemd because Lennart is somehow forcing it on them.

All these distro developers, people a LOT smarter than me, and putting in more work than me, have chosen Systemd. That says a lot to me, and I'm not going to judge them. I'm still on the fence about a lot of Systemd, but to say that major distros have switched because of "PR campaigns" is ridiculous.

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Hold up. Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work. The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes (Debian with cdrkit, sticking with libav for too long, the PRNG bug, etc.) and they may not be fully in line with the intricacies and conceptual differences between process management, init, supervision, hotplug and so on. There's lots of misinformation from both sides and a lot of knowledgeable people (like those maintaining powerful daemontools derivatives) have never been ones to proselytize, but stick to their inner circles.

Furthermore, how are you sure the decision to adopt was entirely technical in nature? Perhaps they realized that the incoming systemd-integrated Linux desktop userland wasn't worth the maintenance hassle of trying to avoid it?

The way Lennart worded those sentences sounded funny. He is known to distort and exaggerate when promoting, for which I don't blame him, since his goal is to get his software adopted, but nonetheless. systemd proponents have been all too eager to completely dismiss any political meddling on part of systemd's adoption as totally unsubstantiated, insisting it was purely "technical merits". Lennart's words paint a subtly different picture, at the least.

Most people don't fully grasp the state of Unix process management, so it's no surprise they're susceptible. For example, the only alternatives that have been debated primarily were Upstart and OpenRC. That's a red flag.

"Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work."

Even when almost every distro has switched? If the situation were 50-50, I'd agree with you. But given that Systemd has been overwhelmingly adopted by distros, I think that says alot.

"The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes"

Yes, but again, they surely haven't all made a giant mistake, right? I don't buy the "they've switched because of upcoming desktop userland" argument either. Distro devs -- like Linux users in general -- aren't ones to roll over easily.

With overwhelming support from distro developers, the people who know their stuff, Systemd must be doing something right. And if you look at the Benefits section here, you can see a lot of things that are appealing to distro devs: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

I believe there's a lot of worry about systemd because what Pottering is doing is relatively new. To grossly oversimplify; the ecosystem of inits among Linux distros looked something like "sysvinit -or- spin your own." So when systemd comes along and starts getting integrated into damn near everything, there's naturally some alarm. There have been endless flame wars about init systems for almost 25 years now. It's almost unfathomable that every major distro has managed accepted systemd with relatively little drama.

I feel like "the marketing is too aggressive" or "they're being astroturfed" or "they're being forced" are all expected responses to what's going on.

Well Fedora/RHEL and the systemd people have something of a relationship.

I don't know the politics that went on with opensuse for it to be accepted there.

Debian has had a big dustup going about it for some years.

Ubuntu was pretty much waiting to see what Debian went with.

Arch was pretty much a dictatorial decree (and one "respin" is not adopting systemd iirc).

Gentoo is trying to stay init agnostic, and so has ended up forking udev to eudev (and Poettering has taken to making verbal pokes in their direction in systemd release announcements).

Slackware is making the choice if it ever comes to a head, but then it has been using BSD init rather than sysv or upstart.

The distro developers likely all 'chose' systemd because they were forced to to continue using GNOME, which is the experience people expect as end-users on Linux.

Arch was one of the first to switch and while a decent number use gnome I sincerely doubt they made the choice because of gnome. Arch has a long history of alternative WM/DE It's not likely any individual one could force their hand on an architecture change like systemd.

The Arch switch was a decree from on high as best i can tell, with a very "deal with it" style forum posting.

And i think at least one Arch offshot is not adopting systemd at this time.

that's the arch style "deal with it". i run it on several machines but that's always the feeling i got from the arch devs.

Actually, the Arch devs said that if anyone stepped up and maintained the sysv scripts it would continue to be officially supported, no one did, and that was that.

Distros mostly made the switch because,

1 Redhat pushed systemd into Rhel7 2 Crucial system parts were pr'd into hard dependencies on systemd 3 It's base idea and vision which is currently replaced with broader ones was good evolution. (better init system with woos) 4 technically most of these woos are only implemented with it

I am not trying to say systemd does not have it's merits. It has. It is trying hard to bring what it promises on the table. Unfortunately these promises mostly comes with traps like vendor lock-in and forced technicalities on other software like kernel.

It tries to be everything in a single pack with no space for other contenders.

These may be thought as well refuted ideas But I believe systemd cabal has the ability to refute with half assed realities. Like "It is not monolitic. it is modular." Reality it has compile time modularity like it is 70's.Also people report that modularity is oversold.

RHEL actually was one of the later distros to adopt systemd, so that line of reasoning doesn't make much sense.

> Crucial system parts were pr'd into hard dependencies on systemd

Can you tell which crucial system parts you mean? The thing with udev was that it's hard/impossible to build without systemd, however there is no dependency on it. The other thing that is brought up in this context is gnome 3, but that was already covered in the interview.

Gnome and logind is a crucial one. Also it brings it's pam dependency. It is a show stopper for slackware. Kdbus and udev is and will be other parts in this category.

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