On Sun, Oct 27, 2024 at 03:42:52PM -0400, Steve Litt via talk wrote:
Boy, don't I wish Linux would still be just a niche toy for geeks, rather than an increasingly entangled mess aimed at those who refuse to learn.
However, rather than "just a niche toy for geeks", I'd phrase it as "a powerful tool for those willing and able to use that power intelligently."
Systemd, Gnome, dbus, networkmanager, pulseaudio, and a whole lot more complexifications have been added to Linux in the name of those without the desire or ability to boss their computer instead of having their computer boss them. This complixification has made it hard for people needing to configure/program/script their computer to do things their way.
Well systemd has solved actual problems. It does a much better job starting and monitoring services than anything else linux has ever had by far. I wasn't a fan initially, but after looking at it and using it I have realized I was wrong, and it is definitely a good idea. It still has some feature creep issues that certainly should be monitored, but as far as launching services, I absolutely don't want to consider going back to any of the garbage init systems we had before. Gnome is a disaster these days. Best ignored. The developers don't give a crap about what users want at all. network manager is helpful in some cases and hugely annoying in others. Depends what purpose the system serves. Pulseaudio always seemed like a confusing buggy mess. It seems like it is being replaced by pipewire. Hopefully that will work better. It seems promising. I think out of those, only gnome and to some extent network manager were at all possible intended to aim for less experienced users. The rest definitely were trying to solve real problems nothing else was solving.
The sad thing is this: We added all these ubercomplexifications to attract windows desktop users; that goal failed, but now we've weakened Linux for those who need simple POSIX access.
Fortunately for me, Void Linux still exists, as does OpenBSD, and if worst comes to worst, Slackware.
Slackware was the second linux distribution I ever used. The first was SLS. SLS died because it really didn't update. If I remember right slackware forked from it and switched to supporting shared libraries with a newer libc and SLS didn't. However the garbage package management system from SLS stuck around and as far as I can tell is still used in slackware to this day. It seems the change in libc was the only time slackware inovated at all. I moved to redhat after that because it was clear RPMs were much much better than what slackware and SLS had been doing. A few years later I discovered Debian which was just starting to become useable at that point, and redhat was extremely buggy in many places and their package dependencies were often rather sloppy and not as complete as they should have been, so I switched to Debian. I haven't found anything that has done better than that yet so I have stuck with it for about 25 years now. I have tried the various BSDs. Unfortunately if you have ever used a GNU user space, you can never tolerate the pathetic lack of features in a BSD user space. I don't care how good the code stability might be, it's just too annoying to try to do any work on BSD systems. -- Len Sorensen