On Tue, Nov 5, 2024 at 12:53 PM o1bigtenor via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: [...] the M$ world loves complexity that is supposed to be hidden from the
user because they are not wupposed to know anything about anything except how to pay someone how to set things up etc etc etc.
In a former life I made decent money from "people paying someone how to set things up" ... on Linux. There are people who just don't care about what's under the hood so long as it works. Apple has arguably perfected products for such consumers even better than Microsoft. In some ways, then, are we witnessing a mutation of the old Stallman complaint? - Some people prefer free software over proprietary because of its philosophy - Some people prefer open source over proprietary because it just works better and more transparently If it's open source, it's not hidden. Bob Young's old analogy is recalled with fondness. Just because your car maker won't weld its hood shut, doesn't mean you need to be a mechanic to use it. (paraphrased) So along comes systemd - - - - espoused by a more than rather arrogant young
'person' which will remove this area (init systems) that was not as neat nor worked as well as it could have except he was espousing changing things to something quite foreign to 'unix' style thinking
A very persuasive person indeed, to swing the preponderance of an entire community behind his path. Or, based on what I can read in the Wiki places, swing Red Hat which put it in Fedora in 2011. It didn't come to Debian until 2014. Then Ubuntu adopted it and I guess you could call it mainstream by then. I'm amused that this is still an annoyance to people a decade later. said individual trampled upon it and then with loud roars of glee declared said
philosophy to be quite dead.
And yet ... after a full-throated debate, the Debian tech committee went with systemd even though that decision caused some developers to resign. Perhaps the functionality trumped the philosophy? After all, there are many other complex systems in a typical Linux distro. Some people still have problems making the audio work well. And let's not even start about desktop environments.
Just to make things more interesting said individual is now directly employed by M$ which, at least in my mind, begs some questions.
The only question begged from me is ... in 2024, is the use of "M$" still a thing? What next? I₿M? (Its like driving a model T or a modern car - - - one you have to think a
bit and the other one want to treat you like an idiot so it will try to do all your thinking for you.
These days I hesitate to call people "idiots" for just wanting their tools to work without needing to know how. Perhaps their expertise and/or enthusiasm lies elsewhere. Indeed maybe this seems also a debate between those who see Linux as just a tool to do something else and those who care about the OS as an end in itself. Heaven help you in stupid conditions if you're in the latter. Think the
modern car with its automatic transmission being driven in 6 to 8" of fresh snow and the temperature is just under freezing - - - if you have to stop for some reason - - - good luck getting going again - - - in a manual transmission - - - piece of cake!!!)
Maybe there's a good parallel here. The simple method has fallen out of favour (I think latest figures have manuals at 2% of sales in North America), while an even more-complex solution (all-wheel and four-wheel drive) has become dominant. It addresses the edge case above without subjecting the user to the hell of using a manual transmission in bumper-to-bumper urban traffic on a hill (a far more common situation for many). I appreciate the high-level explanation of this as being one of simplicity versus complex innovation, but there was a lot more here. - Evan