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Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

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pedropt
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Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#1 Post by pedropt »

Implementing systemd in debian distribution .
Systemd is full of bugs , no one have a good idea how it works , and changed how linux by default works .

All of this just because Systemd boots fast because do parallel computing .

Ridiculous , and even the main creator of Linux does not like it much .

My point of view is that Debian denvelopers had no big idea to post new changes in the new OS , so they decided to implement Systemd on it and say "News , news , news , now we have implemented systemd in Debian" . Ridiculous .

If you have a server with simple tasks and you do not work on it everyday , then systemd is good for you .
But if you work everyday on a debian jessie OS , installing stuff and changing configurations , then you better change to Wheezy distro before you start formatting your debian jessie every week .

My linux machine that i work everyday doing a lot of stuff that no one imagines , is on Wheezy , and i like it very much , because i do not need to change to jessie just because i want to update a tool , and this is why the "source code exists" .
However , i have a local webserver (file sharing & http server) that i installed jessie , but this last one i rarely touch to not fck it up .

The most interesting thing is that you to update your kernel do not need systemd , all you have to do is get the kernel source code and compile it on your distro .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#2 Post by stevepusser »

Why would installing prebuilt kernel deb packages bring in anything to do with systemd?
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#3 Post by Bulkley »

pedropt wrote:. . . even the main creator of Linux does not like it much .
Do you have a source for that?

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#4 Post by golinux »

Dead horse getting beaten again. Many of us figured that out years ago and DID something about it. Whining here is a useless waste of bandwidth.
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#5 Post by eor2004 »

AFAIK, Linus Torvalds nor Richard Stallman have a strong opinion or stand against systemd, they just let it be and don't worry about it too much!
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#6 Post by Bulkley »

eor2004 wrote:AFAIK, Linus Torvalds nor Richard Stallman have a strong opinion or stand against systemd, they just let it be and don't worry about it too much!
That is my understanding.

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#7 Post by pedropt »

In debian conference , systemd topic was discussed , and in his point of view the current init system of wheezy and distros before that one could be fixed and speed up the process , but the guys from systemd did it first but changed all the way the init system works and not much people knows how the process is done , and this is not good .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c80yIJQJO8s

Why would installing prebuilt kernel deb packages bring in anything to do with systemd?
You dont break systemd using "apt-get" , you may break systemd if you install something from source code that requires more older libraries than the ones that systemd needs to work .
My friend , on my wheezy distro i do not do "apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)" , and after all i dont even have on my sources.list the jessie repositories .
If i need to install some new kernel for some reason then i compile it from source , by getting the source code at kernel.org .
But since my hardware is working fine then i do not need to install some recent kernel .
By default new kernels have more drivers for new hardwares , you can install a new kernel to fix your driver issue , or you can build the driver from source and install it in your current kernel .
Prebuilt packages on apt repository is just to avoid the user to compile every update from every lib or tool from source code , and this is the reason why exists .

This next video shows the creators of systemd explaining it , and at first look it seems pratical , systemd uses less memory , when you kill a process in systemd , the service will kill everything connected to that process , witch in sometimes could be good or bad depending on what you are working .
Most of the detailed configurations of services were removed by systemd , a good example on the next video is the tftp example , where in system V (wheezy) you can setup the port on the daemon configuration , but on systemd you must make that change in the program configuration file .
One of the things that bothers me most is the way we start services with systemd and create services , witch was changed from top to bottom .
I agree that systemd have many good things , but a drastic change from an OS to another is complicated for users to adapt to new commands or even know their names .
Systemd will only be "the best" thing in 10 years , but in 10 years someone create anything better than systemd and change again everything how the init system works and how things must be configured , and it will be again a start from beginning .
A person that did not knew how sys V and start for the first time in systemd in linux it is just fine , but for someone that is already use to sys V and change to systemd "just like that" is complicated , and even when errors appear and we need to fix them , if you knew how to fix that particular error in Sys V , forget it because it will not work in systemd the same way .
They could do something more similar to old system in the way we interact with the OS on systemd commands .
These are some of the reasons i have debian 8 on 1 of my servers , but i rarely touch it (to not break things) , because the machine where i like to work and know how to deal with its problems it is a wheezy distro of debian , and witch i will not upgrade to jessie , and when wheezy repositories stop be updated , what i have to do is to do everything manually from source code , but since this wheezy machine is not exposed to the web , then i do not need to worry much about vulnerabilities except (web browser and plugins) , and these 2 i can do the upgrades manually without any issue .
After all i have a very tight iptables config that even if some intruder get to my hardware firewall , very difficulty will have to check any open port on the OS to get in .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YmaNuvw5U

a good solution to new users on systemd that arrived from sys v , is doing what i did for tar commands .
Everytime i wanted to extract some tar file with some different extention i needed to go to web to found the correct switches to apply , so , sick of going to web everyday , what i did was a batch file called "tarhelp" witch contains a bunch of "echo" lines with the switches i need to use for every type of extension i get in tar files .
Now when i need to extract a tar file on terminal , i call on shell "tarhelp" and it shows how i must do to that type of help .

Now if we apply this technique to systemd like "systemdhelp" , everytime we need to do anything on OS that interacts with systemd , like start a service or whatever , we call "systemdhelp" the batch file popup with the instructions .
It is simple and never breaks until you erase your partition and forget to copy that help file to somewhere so you can put it on your new installed linux os /usr/local/bin or sbin .

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#8 Post by Bulkley »

pedropt wrote:In debian conference , systemd topic was discussed , and in his point of view the current init system of wheezy and distros before that one could be fixed and speed up the process , but the guys from systemd did it first but changed all the way the init system works and not much people knows how the process is done , and this is not good .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c80yIJQJO8s
That was enlightening. Thanks. I'll watch the second one tomorrow.

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#9 Post by stevepusser »

Newer Debian kernels can be backported to Wheezy by rebuilding the debianized source packages--3.16 is already in wheezy-backports, but kernels from jessie-backports should also be rebuildable.
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#10 Post by RU55EL »

No disrespect intended, but it seems Linus has acquired a bit of a beer belly.

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#11 Post by Hallvor »

RU55EL wrote:
No disrespect intended, but it seems Linus has acquired a bit of a beer belly.
That is good to know.
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#12 Post by pedropt »


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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#13 Post by pedropt »

anyway , i just found on last video the fork from debian that does not have systemd implemented .

https://devuan.org/

Well , it looks that there is a light at the end of the tunnel

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#14 Post by None1975 »

pedropt wrote:Well , it looks that there is a light at the end of the tunnel
You can also check antix linux (systemd free, Jessie based) http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page, or Refracta linux http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta/. Starting with version 8.0, Refracta has gone whole-hog at banishing systemd, not to mention PulseAudio. All that plus the fact that Refracta's installer currently works better than the Devuan one, one could say that Refracta is actually more Devuan than Devuan.
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golinux
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#15 Post by golinux »

None1975 wrote:All that plus the fact that Refracta's installer currently works better than the Devuan one, one could say that Refracta is actually more Devuan than Devuan.
The two installers are entirely different. Refractainstaller merely copies the files rsynced at the time of the snapshot from a current installation. Devuan installer builds a system your way from scratch from the Devuan repos.
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#16 Post by vbrummond »

There was a ridiculous rift in the Linux community especially Debian over systemd. Bottom line is enterprise uses it, you need to know it.
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#17 Post by Segfault »

Not so fast. First, somebody using it somewhere because they didn't have the choice does not mean much, does it? Second, there is an army of RHEL-6 installations all over the world and I hear sysadmins in charge of those resist upgrading to 7 for this very reason.

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#18 Post by bw123 »

ok, let's play
Systemd is full of bugs ,
The whole distro is full of bugs, see:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgrepo ... t=unstable
no one have a good idea how it works
85 million hits say NO ONE have a good idea how anything works in linux, see:

How Does Linux Work
Related Articles on How Does Linux Work. 85+ Million Visitors - Search Now.
About.com/How Does Linux Work
changed how linux by default works .
Since no one knows how it works by default, the added complexity shouldn't affect your mood this way.

But one question I have is, where would debian be today without systemd? What desktop environments would we have?

Would we all be using fluxbox or what?

p.s. I love fluxbox, but not on my little netbook
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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#19 Post by Segfault »

All desktops run without systemd, although you need to use a fork if you want to use Gnome 3.

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Re: Biggest mistake ever made by Debian

#20 Post by bw123 »

Code: Select all

# aptitude why libpam-systemd
i   kde-plasma-netbook Depends udisks2       
i A udisks2            Depends libpam-systemd
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