Just Need To Vent

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Sometimes the direction of UI development in gnome really angers me.

For example, when selecting a font for the gedit text editor – there is no way to ask it to only show monospace fonts.

It’s a fricken text editor, that should be the default – meaning you have to do something special to get fonts shown that aren’t monospace.

Seriously, who is in charge with the UI design in gnome?

Whoever it is needs to be fired.

/rant

96 thoughts on - Just Need To Vent

  • +1 (or infinity)

    Hint: IMHO the gnome UI devs played to much with MacOS X and Tablets. Seek the missing menu in the top-bar (upper end of the monitor)
    The-Fqu? Extra mouse movement needed, just b/c them devs have touchscreens? RAGE!

    For me switching to XFCE as DE helped enormously in getting work done, not getting angry at the UI all the time was a nice plus.

    But, lets be honest here, not everyone will like XFCE.

    – Yamaban

  • I know, you are not seeking advice or wishing someone to join the rant… which I gladly could do. I was angry when Gnome suddenly switched from logical tree-like menu away to hmm… just search (“as you, stupid, will not be able to follow logic; which we, developers, don’t possess ourselves anymore in the first place” ;-) Well, luckily, there is fork of GNOME
    which is called mate. That is what I use ever since. (It’s easier for me as I myself have FreeBSD both on my workstation and PC laptop, and on FreeBSD you have to put your own effort to add X and desktop environment etc anyway). Incidentally, I just checked on my laptop: text editor that comes with mate (plume is its name) has monospace font which is default, I
    never changed that as I myself just use vi in shell – out of habit. My guess is, the developers that forked mate from GNOME really have a philosophy “do not make any changed unless they are absolutely necessary”. This way our teachers taught us to program way back, BTW. Anyway, maybe switching to mate will help to avoid frustration.

    Good luck!

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Oh I’m so with you on that. I’m good with the developers wanting to adapt to the current state of popular computing, the tablet, but they should be taking into account that not everyone is using one of those toys as their interface. Maybe they should develop a “desktop”, maybe a User Interface would be a better name, for a tablet under some other name, maybe Gnome Tablet for example, that is configured specifically for a small screen with touch sensing abilities. A project fork.

    I’m forced to use MS Windows 7 at work. They have rolled in so much smart phone/tablet stuff that it makes the desktop even more of a pain to use than Windows XP was. Examples include, you can have your applications any color you want as long as it’s gray, and you can no longer search for files by anything other than the file name. I didn’t like Windows before and I like it even less now.

    The main reason I’m still using, nearly obsolete, CentOS 6 is because I
    don’t want to have to deal with Gnome 3. I wish the Gnome developers would stop fixing things that are not broken for people who use real desktop computers to get their work done. Maybe part of the problem is that Fedora/Red Hat have not figured out that the OS should determine if the platform it’s running on is a desktop or a phone/pad of some kind and then select a user interface appropriate to the platform.

    —
    _
    °v°
    /(_)\
    ^ ^ Mark LaPierre Registered Linux user No #267004
    https://linuxcounter.net/
    ****

  • Install Mate on CentOS 7 and you never have to touch Gnome 3. I did, and my desktops don’t look or work any different today than they did under CentOS 6.

  • I gotta agree with you on that (never mind the occasional issue with some Mate component that irritates me). Never could figure out why Gnome would want to take something that was good, then throw it away in lieu of something indecipherable. but that’s just me.

  • A long time ago there was a utility called something like xfontsel with which you could toggle any of the some-two dozen properties of fonts, e.g., you could filter out all italic fonts or show just the 12-pt fonts. Yeah, it took ten minutes the first time to figure out how the utility worked, but then you had a tool that worked, was effective and streamlined, and you didn’t even need a mouse to use. Just looking, I
    didn’t find it with yum, but it looks like it’s still out there, albeit a mousey version: http://linux.die.net/man/1/xfontsel

    I agree with others about the wayward tabletization of what’s supposed to be a productivity tool. Last month, the touch pad on a new laptop getting in way of that productivity big time, I wrote in code on gnome’s website how much fun it wasn’t– i.e., how to disable the touch pad:
    https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Playground/TouchPadPark Alice, maybe you’d drop them a suggestion to include xfontsel, if you find it better than their thinking, to replace the boffotude they’re gifting us with.

    Since I’m in rant mode, who broke the code for ‘whereis’?

    $ whereis xfontsel; echo We need a newline. xfontsel:We need a newline.
    $

    New rule: No smoking the good stuff at work.

  • This is totally off topic, and untrue.

    My opinion is that there’s a silent majority who don’t hate Gnome3, and that it’s not half as terrible as people seem to make out. You can start applications, move windows around, and manage files. What do people really want from a DE? Being able to just type winkey-texmaker and have texmaker start up is suddenly a bad thing?

    gedit broken for offering you fonts that aren’t monospace? I think that’s a really weak criticism, considering it defaults to monospace.

    Spatial nautilus behaviour is a gnome 2 horror feature, and okay and cancel swapping order and all the other fun gnome 2 isms seem to have been forgotten.

    Maybe I’m just hard to annoy,

    jh

  • I used gnome for years. Until gnome 3. It struck me a huge step in the wrong direction, and made me have to fish around to do things that used to be easy.

    I’ve used mate, xfce, and kde since then, all of which I find more user friendly. Gnome devs seem to think that they are empowered to tell users how they should use their systems. I saw a comment by a gnome developer on one of the gnome lists that basically said that people who were complaining about gnome were not using their computers properly. That did it for me.

    The trend of trying to impose touch screen interfaces on desktops is a bad one, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want my desktop or my laptop adapted to look and feel like a tablet or a smart phone. Having an interface that is designed for hardware that doesn’t exist on the system I am using is pointless and annoying.

    Cheers,

    Mike

  • [mlapier@peach /]$ yum whatprovides *xfontsel Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, refresh-packagekit, security Determining fastest mirrors

    xorg-x11-apps-7.7-6.el6.x86_64 : X.Org X11 applications Repo : base Matched from:
    Filename : /usr/bin/xfontsel Other : xfontsel

    —
    _
    °v°
    /(_)\
    ^ ^ Mark LaPierre Registered Linux user No #267004
    https://linuxcounter.net/
    ****

  • Trouble is that when you go from 6 to 7, you also have the delights of systemd and grub 2 to contend with.

    I’m also still using CentOS 6, and currently have no desire to
    “upgrade”. I’m still in shock after trying to upgrade to Red Hat 7 at work, and after the upgrade (apart from being faced with the gnome3
    craziness) finding that many of the admin commands either didn’t work, or only worked partially via a wrapper. (And the added insult that when I shut down the box, it gave a message something like: “shutdown status asserted” and then hung, so that it had to be power-cycled. Then when it came back up, it went through all the fs checks as though it had shut down ungracefully.) I allowed some of the senior developers to try the box themselves for a while, and based on their findings, it was decided to switch to Ubuntu (which (at least then) didn’t use systemd,) together with Mate and XFCE.

    Similarly with others who have commented, I simply cannot understand why the maintainers of crucial components in linux have this thing about making vast changes which impact (usually adversely) on users and admins, without (apparently) any general discussion or review of the proposed changes. What happened to RFCs? Maybe it’s a power thing – we can do it, so we’re gonna do it, and if ya don’t like it, tough!

    It would be very interesting to know how many other users are still on CentOS/Red Hat 6 as a result of reluctance to enjoy all the – erm –
    improvements in 7. Maybe it’s time to fork CentOS 6 and make it look and behave like 7 without systemd (or even better, with some way of selecting the init methodology at install-time and afterwards), and with gnome2 (or a clear choice between 2 and 3). Call it DeCentOS.

  • Every new system I implement goes on C6. Hearing others’ problems on C7
    convinces me C7 is too much time consuming aggro. Everything I do works well on C5 and C6.

    Interesting idea :-)

  • Good idea. You can set up voting site at some free place (surveymonkey comes to my mind). And then disseminate it, say through this list.

    This is something that will never happen. By the definition of CentOS
    project (which I’m not affiliated with, but I do appreciate greatly what they do!) it is “binary replica” of RedHat Enterprise. Any step away from this will scare me much more than wrong (IMHO) steps of RedHat itself. I
    do prefer what I use to be “enterprise-ish”, that is more or less predictable.

    Well, there is Linux distribution which is systemd-free. And that distribution I predict will live for decently long time. It is “Devuan” –
    a fork of Debian, stripped off systemd and friends… well, I should have said: composed without systemd and friends. Devuan was forked off ebian because of systemd. Once Ubuntu was mentioned, which is a replica of Debian (the last _is_ systemd…), then Devuan should be pretty close to yours Ubuntu experience. You, however, may also be tired of often reboots
    (which all Linuxes in my observation suffer from: every on average 45 days there is either kernel or glibc security update requiring reboot… no, I
    do know that ksplice and similar exist, but there are few things I will not do on servers). If that is the case you may look around and find some UNIX system to use for some of your boxes (Open Solaris, BSD derivatives like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD come first to my mind). Search, try, and something will fill the bill. Number Crunchers, clusters, even workstations I set up for my users are still staying Linux, CentOS to be precise, even though servers are migrated away.

    I hope, this helps.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • I’m still on 6.7 and have no plans to upgrade my 20+ servers running it. KVM runs fine, all my services runs fine. Everything is stable, fast enough and I can find my way around a CentOS 6.x system like the palm of my hand.

    I tried installing CentOS 7 when it was released without knowing about all the changes. I spent about an hour trying to understand what had happened and where things where located. And with “trying” I mean searching, googling and just feeling really frustrated.

    I then realised that it was simply not for me – lots of (IMHO unnecessary) changes had been made and I guess when the time comes to really upgrade my servers I will go with Ubuntu, FreeBSD or whatever seems to be the the best option.

    I’m sure there are technical reasons to upgrade to CentOS 7, I’m yet to be bothered to find out though since it’s damn near impossible to actually get work done with it installed.

    A fork of CentOS 6 would be very, very, very interesting to run from my point of view.

    Joacim

  • I haven’t used gnome3, or any Linux desktop in earnest for a long time… But I used to be semi-obsessed with tweaking and configuring various Linux desktops. And back when I was doing that, there were dozens of desktop programs available, from super lightweight bare bones window managers, to full blown desktop environments that do everything under the sun (and of course, everything in between).

    So my question is: while gnome3 might not float your boat, why not try one of the countless other desktops? It’s all open source…

    FWIW, I was never a fan of full blown desktop environments like kde/gnome simply because I had a preference for lightweight, standalone window managers. My favorites were fluxbox and icewm.

    Besides those, off the top of my head, I know of: blackbox, openbox, Joe’s wm, window maker, and enlightenment 16 in the simple/lightweight window manager category. Xfce has already been mentioned, and there’s also lde and the latest enlightenment in the full-on desktop environment category.

    A little elbow grease may be required, but, I’m certain there’s *a* Linux gui out there for everyone.

  • My problem is that Debian and all its derivatives use apt/dpkg for packaging, updating and installing, while Red Hat and derivatives use rpm/yum. I have much experience with the latter, and have frequently set up local installation repositories; I’m a lot less familiar with the apt/dpkg world (although I got a crash course in it when I had to set up an apt local installation repository early last year, and it wasn’t pleasant!) As far as I know, there isn’t an rpm-based distro which is systemd-free.

    The thing which always gets me about systemd is not the thing itself, but the way it was rolled out. When I first installed Red Hat 7, if a window had appeared telling me about systemd and asking me if I wanted to use it, or stick with the old init framework, I’d have opted for the latter (as I was interested primarily in continuity from the previous version.) But I’d have noted the existence of systemd, and would have tried it out on a sacrificial box – I might even have got to like it!
    But having it rammed down my throat just put me off it for life (bit like a kid being force-fed Brussels sprouts.)

  • I don’t mind systemd – but I’m not fully convinced it was a necessary change.

    I still have a lot to learn about it and sometimes that’s a problem, I
    don’t learn things as well as I did 15 years ago.

  • It wasn’t a huge surprise. systemd was in Fedora since f15, and RHEL7 was branched from f18 (iirc). systemd was in the RHEL7.0 beta. The release announcement was filled with information about systemd.[1] Frankly, I was more surprised about XFS and 64-bit-only than systemd.

    I believe that RHEL7 (and CentOS7) both have systemd integrated into them enough that it isn’t as simple as “choose init system” on install. Whether you like it or not, systemd has its fingers in a lot of stuff, like login services, resource management, stuff like tmpfile creation and management. I’m not exactly thrilled with some features (like the way systemd —user was implemented, the inflexibility of cgroup configuration per-unit, remote journal forwarding) but overall, since I was prepared, I think its a step in the right direction.

    If there was one thing I’d love, is for there to be a systemd long term support release. I feel like the systemd in el7.0 was way too early, and it wasn’t until 7.2 that I feel like things are starting to stabilize. Also, thankfully, systemd —user was *completely torn out* in 7.2. :)

    As for Gnome3, I simply don’t use it. lightdm + cinnamon or MATE for me.

    1. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/7.0_Release_Notes/pref-Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-7.0_Release_Notes-Introduction.html

    —
    Jonathan Billings

  • I’ll have to be one who has to say that I really am not bothered by GNOME 3. It is better out of the box than GNOME 2 ever was, at least in my opinion, especially that abomination called Nautilus spatial mode.

    It is a bit irritating that things are either really easy or nearly impossible to do, with very little in the middle that are just a bit hard to do when it comes to desktop customization, but, you know, I’ve not been one to make things too custom. But as far as I’m concerned the Trinity DE is where I’m most comfortable (TDE being, of course, a continuation of KDE 3.x). Yes, there are some packages I can install, but it hasn’t been a major deal for me to make it ‘just like what I’m used to.’

    But no environment is perfect; I’ve used fvwm, lxde, xfce, cde, Apollo DomainOS pads, the UnixPC Office, raw X11 with twm, kde 1,2,3 and 4, and gnome 2 and 3; the only modern DE I really don’t like is Unity. But for the rest; well, no real strong preferences. As long as I can start applications and lots of terminals and get some basic status stuff from my DE I’m pretty happy. And GNOME 3 is light years ahead of where we were back in the Bluecurve days, at least with local displays. Remote is a different ball of wax, at least with GNOME 3.

    I use, and am happy with, CentOS 7 on the both desktop and the server, especially now that I’ve rolled out enough servers to get used to the way C7 does things. Multiple NICs and static IPs are not a problem, and the new installer makes everything easier to get to, even if some things, like setting up RAID and LVM together, are a bit differently set up and are done in a different way than before. Much better than the windows-style ‘wizard,’ reminiscent of InstallShield, of before.

    There are of course corner cases, but my requirements thus far have been met very well with no real problems. The new systemctl way took me all of five minutes to like better than the ‘service’/’chkconfig’ pair, and so far things seem as stable as C6 on the same hardware.

    Yes, it is different, and I know some folks equate ‘different’ and
    ‘change’ with ‘being worse.’ I think different just means different, and it is a separate judgment whether something is better or is worse.
    Or just different.

    Why? Why is it automatic that a text editor should be automatically monospace? (Sure, I use gedit with a monospace font, but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful with a proportional font).

    What I want is a knob in Thunderbird to keep the message font from going microscopic even though I have set a minimum font….. but that’s something I need to take up with upstream, since it is CentOS’ stated goal to be functionally equivalent to upstream EL.

    To get a ‘use monospace font list only in gedit’ you should really talk to or file a bug report with upstream.

  • Because text editors are used to edit plain text files where the only formatting is intentional spaces, and that formatting only works when every character is the same width.

    Things like tables etc. in plain text files do not display correctly when a variable width font is used.

    Therefore when selecting a font to use with gedit, the list should be pruned to monospace fonts unless you specify you want other fonts.

    With how many fonts are installed on a typical desktop system, needing to hunt through the list for the monospace fonts is simply not acceptable, especially when the selection list doesn’t even specify which are monospace.

    It is thus a poorly designed interface, as it makes it incredibly difficult to do what the vast majority of users need to do when selecting a font for use with the application.

  • Most of them were already fired or left cause of under-funding. Like other OSS projects, they are severely understaffed.

  • Gnome has a foundation, with directors and stuff. Wikipedia says the Gnome project is funded by various companies, primarily Red Hat. But I
    also see some blogs by core people that its sort of drifting without a direction, and underfunded and developers are quitting.

  • Spot on.

    I don’t hate Gnome3 enough to get irritated, not when it’s as easy as changing the desktop environment. This is what linux is about for me, if I don’t like something – I’m pretty much free to search for other solutions and use those instead.

    I do understand Alice’s rant though. It mirrored my sentiments with CentOS 7 just when it came out. 8-)

  • I tried to like gnome3 but there were several things that I just could not accept.

    Totem – which they insist on calling Movie Player now. I could not figure out how to get to not be full screen. I use it for playing audio clips I am working on, and don’t want it full screen. In Gnome 2 it was easy.

    Vertical Scroll Bar Sliders. They took away the scroll bars from my applications. No configuration option to turn it on, after searching and asking I found out the only way to turn them back on was with CSS.

    But after doing that, it only came back for some applications.

    On my desktop it isn’t a big deal, I scroll with the scroll wheel. But on my laptops (Thinpad T Series) I don’t have a scroll wheel, I like to grab the slider.

    Those are the reasons I switched to Mate.

    But even in Mate, applications like gedit pull in more Gnome 3 UI crap I
    don’t like. Like no file menu on the left hand side of the window, instead horizontal bars all the way at the right hand hand side of the window – yet a save box all the way on the left hand.

    And the Calculator app – Every damn time I grab the window to move it, the mode selector gets triggered because instead of being in a file menu like it use to be – it is now dead center in the top bar of the window, where I am use to grabbing windows to drag them.

    Gnome3 UI is a disaster that needs to be fixed.

    It’s also rather annoying that I can no longer use my favorite spreadsheet, gnumeric, in CentOS because only old versions without bug fixes build. It use to be that current versions of gnome applications like gnumeric didn’t require the most bleeding edge libraries to build them, but now they do.

  • Oh and as far as a silent majority that prefers Gnome 3 –

    Ubuntu was by far the most common distribution for desktop users.

    It is quickly being overtaken by Mint – with the Cinnamon and Mate builds, not the Gnome 3 build.

    I think that indicates Gnome 3 doesn’t have a silent majority, because the most popular desktop distribution is losing ground fast specifically to a fork with desktops based on gtk2 – one of which is a fork of Gnome 2.

    That seems to me to indicate people are rejecting Gnome 3.

  • I personally love Gnome3 on Fedora. It took me about a week to adjust my mindset though — I did that over a Xmas break.

    It did help that I read the release notes first (so I was not surprised at the major change) and went through the tutorial the developers provided.

    An interesting exercise re-examining and critiquing old workflows and exploring alternatives. It works really well on the smallish laptop that I
    use while commuting and which I plug into a couple of monitors when I get to work. Its great the way it frees up screen real estate and encourages me to focus on “what I am doing” rather than distracting me with “things I
    might want to do”.
    ​
    Reading the release notes before installing an OS is a really good idea.​
    Fedora and RedHat do a really good job with their release notes.

  • Some people adapt to new workflows easily, others do not.

    But regardless of the workflow – back to my original point – it’s pretty damn stupid that choosing a font for a text editor not only includes all fonts regardless of variable width or monospace, but doesn’t identify which fonts in the selection are monospace.

    How can something like that be missed by their QA / UI testing?

  • Ubuntu switched to their Unity interface, which seemed to aggravate a lot of people. To me, who uses neither, it seemed rather similar to Gnome 3.

    I think a large part of Mint’s popularity was less because of the desktop and more because it included a bunch of proprietary drivers and codecs out of the box (although these days, it won’t play libx265 encoded video without adding a ppa.

    I prefer different desktops, so never got involved in the argument–it does seem, judging from Fedora forums that avoiding Gnome (and this goes back to the days when it was Gnome 2) saved me from a great many problems I saw and see on their forums.

  • That’s because of systemd. Even if most of the linux distros don’t, giving the choice is a bit less difficult with any other init system.

    The main problem is systemd makes (often badly) more and more things that, as a “simple” init system, it should not do (login, and “su-ing” now, journaling, device management via udev, and so on), violating the KISS principle. If you use systemd, you have to use all the systemd tentacles, even if you don’t want. Worse, more and more programs hardly depend on systemd now. Gnome 3 is an example, and that’s why I don’t, and won’t, use Gnome 3.

    I don’t use any systemd-based distro personally. Sadly, professionally, I have to, since RedHat/CentOS and Debian adopted it (and Ubuntu LTS will do soon). And systemd makes my job uselessly more complicated. For exemple, why must I deal with journald and its fancies when I setup a syslog server (and I have to, because journald don’t even know what are centralized logs…) on my servers ? Why systemd maintainers continuously change big parts of its behaviour, without any consideration of major-minor versionning, and why RedHat/CentOS maintainers dismiss this fact (the CentOS 7.1 to 7.2 update is painful, because systemd switched from 208 to 219) ? Why, more generally, the answer is often “systemd” when I encounter a problem on a server ?

    Sylvain. Pensez ENVIRONNEMENT : n’imprimer que si ncessaire

  • Part of it is marketing. Most of it is ego.

    Depending on how the systemd drama plays out CentOS-6 may well be our last RH derivative, and perhaps our last Linux. At the moment we are withholding any judgement on the matter for want of clear empirical evidence respecting systemd’s benefits and risks.

    On our test CentOS-7 systems we eventually switched to Mate. That in itself sorted out most of the most visceral negativity to RHEL7. But systemd, rightly or wrongly, remains a controversial issue here. And, being more interested in stability than features we will await further developments on that front.

    Maybe someone could convince Linus to embed an init processor into the kernel in a manner similar to how KVM made its way.

  • Once upon a time, Peter Duffy said:

    That’s not really practical for something as core as the init system. Trying to support two init systems in parallel, especially for as long as Red Hat supports a RHEL release, would require a massive amount of work. A distribution is about making choices and implementing them in the best way possible; for “leaf” packages like an editor or a web browser, it is easy to have multiple options (where they don’t conflict), but core stuff like the kernel and init system don’t leave lots of room for choice.

    I remember people complaining about SysV-style init too, “what’s with all these scripts” and “why can’t I just add a line to /etc/rc”. systemd is a different way of thinking, but it isn’t exactly original
    (Sun and Mac have similar launchers); practical experience has shown that this can be a better way of managing services. daemontools has been around forever, haphazardly implemented for some things; now that behavior is where it makes the most since (PID 1 is guaranteed to get the signal). systemd makes implementing one-off services much easier, makes local modifications of service startup better (include another service and add the line you need), etc.

    One note: when I talk about systemd, I mean systemd-the-init-service that runs as PID 1. I’m not a big fan of systemd-the-project, that seems to have unlimited scope creep and reimplements every wheel in sight (years of work on NetworkManager, decades of work on NTP? we can do better!).

    Nobody is forcing you to run systemd; you can continue to run CentOS 6
    and earlier for years. But if you are a system administrator, your job is about learning and adapting, not trying to keep a static setup for life. systemd is different (just like SELinux was years ago), but I
    suggest you learn it. It can make your admin life easier. Is it perfect? No, nothing ever is; I do think it is a big improvement though.

  • It is pertinent. It is lucidly expressed and many concur.

    That can be an onerous burden especially when one lacks knowledge and time.

    Of course Alice can. All of us can. Hopefully it is constructive criticism. Seeing good software being replaced by less good, less useful and more awkward software usually provoke the software’s users to protest.

    Free software should be funded. In the European Union (28 member states)
    funding could easily be provided by the EU to support Open Source Software. Just consider how much government cash M$ has received (USD
    billions). A few million Euros to OSS is certainly desirable.

    As a C5 Gnome 2 user I dread G3 when I move my desktop to C6. Mate seems an alternative. Anyone know more about the G2 folk ?

  • If that is the case, why do you run CentOS 7 on the server? You can stay with CentOS 6 for now and either wait till Linux systemd-free distribution mature enough to be run on server is available. Which it almost is: Devuan
    (systemd-free fork of Debian) has released “alpha” version about half a year ago. If you feel “married” to Linux, maybe it is a good idea to play with Devuan, provide them feedback thus helping them to become system-free Linux acceptable for servers. Simultaneously you can explore other options which would be to migrate away from Linux (Open Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD will be much smaller step than stepping up to CentOS 7 – that is my experience, though FreeBSD migration of servers I started came much earlier than CentOS 7 and for different reason).

    Good Luck!

    Valeri

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • That’s were I am, CentOS 6.7 with a 3.18 LTS kernel from the Xen4CentOS
    repo on machines with hardware too new for a 2.6 kernel. I plan to stay there until CentOS 6 goes EOL (and if my past history is any guide, probably quite a while beyond that — I’d been running a patched-up Fedora 12 until late 2014, 4 years past its EOL).

  • +1. To be constructive, the criticism would need to be done ELSEWHERE. On this list, it is just whining.

  • The default _is_ monospace (specifically, the monospace system font). You _are_ doing something special by changing the font – and gedit happens to work just fine with proportional-spaced fonts, which someone might even prefer for whatever they’re doing.

    Having another option to filter the font list might be a nice enhancement, but I think it’s pretty easy to see why it wasn’t a priority.

    This isn’t the way GNOME works, or open source in general. Nor is this an effective way to create change. I recommend, instead, filing an RFE
    at <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gedit> — although leaving the hyperbolic rhetoric and simply presenting the case is a lot more likely to be effective. (Bonus effectiveness: provide a patch!)

  • I’d say they played too *little* with OS X. That, or they tried to clone it without grokking it first.

    The standard Mac OS X font picker *does* have a Fixed Width option.

    The only GUI text editors on my Mac OS X box that don’t use this mechanism to select fonts are cross-platform apps that make you edit a JSON file to change fonts. (Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code.)

    And ironically, editing a config file to change fonts is more Unixy than Mac OS X.

    CentOS has a GUI? Since when?

    My CentOS GUI is called SecureCRT. :)

  • Given a choice between Helix GNOME [*] and GNOME 3, I’ll certainly pick Gnome 3.

    However, it is also a fact that GNOME has some longstanding design misfeatures that should have been fixed long ago.

    Take GNOME Terminal. (Please!)

    Its biggest problem is its nonstandard settings mechanism, called Profiles. Every other standard GNOME app puts this under Edit > Preferences, but this one weird oddball app calls it Edit > Current Profile. What are profiles, and why should I care about them? Yes, I know they have a purpose, but forcing the user to operate through this abstraction layer amounts to exposed plumbing.

    Compare Terminal on OS X, where essentially the same dialog is available from the standard Preferences menu. OS X’s terminal program also has profiles, but it takes you right to the current default profile, rather than give you two different paths to the same configuration screen.

    I wouldn’t even care about this if GNOME Terminal had better defaults. Its 500 line default scrollback limit is a joke in 2016. OS X’s Terminal has a much smarter default: available memory. You can limit it to a fixed number of lines, but you have to go out of your way to do that now.

    I ask you, seriously now, when was the last time your system ran out of RAM due to GNOME Terminal?

    The standard GNOME monospace font is not the only good monospace font in the world.

    That said, I wonder if the complainers know how good they have it? I wonder how they’d fare if sent back to the days of xfs, blocky fixed-size pixel fonts, and X font strings?

    Buncha spoiled brats not appreciating their antialiased resizable sensibly-named fonts, installed by default and working out of the box. :)

  • Yes and I needed a larger font size but only in gedit and the only way to change the font size is to select the font itself.

  • And, I can see that filtering the font selection would be a nice filter, there. It seems like a reasonable request. But of all the things to demand that someone be fired over….

  • If I had the choice… The OS and the version are decreed by the contractor, I’m just a maintainer.

    Sylvain. Pensez ENVIRONNEMENT : n’imprimer que si ncessaire

  • I appreciate this “venting” thread. I am still on 6.7 with plans to move to CentOS 7 in a few months.

    I know CentOS 7 is systemd — ok, maybe I can deal with that having had some exposure to it, though I’m VERY fond of good ole system V
    init scripts. And I actually had been looking forward to gnome3, but now I’m not too sure about that. Well I could go back to KDE in any case. But — grub2 ?! Oh boy — no joy from that in my previous experience! :( I’m hoping I can stick with grub 1 some way if I DO
    migrate to CentOS 7.

  • It’s not like there’s a lot of love for grub 2, but bootloaders are really pretty hard, and no one is maintaining grub 1, and it doesn’t handle UEFI, so…. I’m not sure it’s worth your trouble.

    If you really want something lightweight (and don’t need UEFI), you can replace grub with extlinux/syslinux.

  • Ultimately it’s all software, and software can be written/changed/updated to do anything required – all that’s needed is the skill and the motivation. If systemd is so “core” that it can’t be unplugged and plugged easily, and glues together a lot of otherwise unrelated components, then it’s just bad software – end of story (the problems with tightly-coupled components were first identified over 40
    years ago, and modularization has been the watchword ever since.)

    In my view, it’s high time someone independently analysed systemd down to basic code level, and understood why it’s so invasive (if it actually is.) Then the way forward would be clear – fork it, and produce a new version which wasn’t so invasive, and which could be swapped in/out. I’m not saying it would be easy! (“We do not do these things because they are easy – we do them because they are hard!”)

    No one is saying that sysvinit is perfect. What I can’t grasp is why replace it with something which is no less imperfect, and is almost certainly worse in at least some respects – and to make that replacement unavoidable and mandatory.

    I’m also still trying to figure out in what way systemd is supposed to be “better”. I’ve seen the following things claimed for it:

    – faster boot time (this was apparently the main motivation behind it.)
    My experience with systemd-managed systems has been limited – but so far, I’ve not noticed faster boot times with systemd (maybe because the boxes booted fast enough previously.)

    – parallel startup of services. Not sure that I’d want that anyway – too much risk of two services trying to grab the same resource at the same time – I’m absolutely happy with the sysvinit approach of one service startup completing/failing before the next one happens. That way, things are nice and orderly.

    – better handling of hot-plug devices. I’ve not yet seen that in action, but that is the one thing which makes me inclined to investigate systemd in more detail.

    My job as a system administrator is to serve the users who use the servers I manage and administer, and to keep those servers and services in suitable condition for the users to do their work and earn their daily bread.

    As we all know (don’t we just?) sysadmin work and responsibilities are heavy, and frequently eat into evenings, nights, weekends and
    (so-called) holidays. Anything which increases the sysadmin workload –
    e.g. suddenly faced with a vertical learning curve just to do the tasks they did yesterday, or a GUI which leaves them unable to find anything on their screens – is a major issue, and prejudicial not only to the sysadmin’s own work, but also to that of the users to whom he/she is responsible. And when you’re talking about systems used by hundreds and thousands of users, that’s a big problem.

  • Might be more convincing if they stuck to reasoned argument, rather than propaganda. “Systemd is straightforward”; “systemd is incredibly fast (1
    second to boot)” – reminds me of first installing windows 95 (by the choice of my then employer, not me!) and seeing the message that it would completely change the way I related to my computer.

  • But it did!
    I got really fast in shuffling those 3,5″ install-diskettes every time the OS puked and trashed the filesystem necessitating a reinstall. 8-)

  • Discuss it all you like. But “constructive criticism” (used earlier)
    isn’t terribly useful on the CentOS list, because CentOS has very little control over the implementation of init systems or desktop environments. I’m probably the 123123th person on the list to say this, but if you want a hand in the direction CentOS goes, get involved in Fedora.

  • I’ve seen these counter-arguments. It’s not really a direct response to Debian’s arguments. Its just a list of “fallacies” used to support systemd. I agree that some arguments pro-systemd are poor arguments, but many of the technical arguments anti-systemd seem to boil down to:
    “You can do this will SysVinit/xinetd/something else. Its just that nobody has done that yet” or “SysVinit can do this if we just fix all the init scripts.” I agree that it is possible, but years of trying have never managed to do it.

    For what its worth, I’ve already seen one vendor (to be left unnamed)
    provide AWFUL systemd service units that seem to prove Douglas Adams famous quote: “…a common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

  • Definitely. But please don’t show up ranting about systemd unless you genuinely have something new and insightful to add. We have literally been discussing moving to an improved init system since 2005:
    https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/Y6PUIY3HOPVKA5IUJQ5TL6WAVTE3G4KY/
    and in that decade, pretty much everything to be said _has_ been said and considered. That is, we’ve *been through* the independent analysis of systemd.

  • Of the three things you list, hot-plug is certainly an important one. But, it’s not the big deal. The big deal is that systemd is not just a fire-and-hope startup system, but a service manager. It knows which processes came from where. That means it can:

    * insure that when something is stopped, it’s actually stopped. (If
    you’ve ever managed an HPC cluster and had processes escape the
    scheduler, you know this problem is real.)

    * track process lifecycle, and restart (or take other action) on
    failure. (If software were perfect, this wouldn’t be needed, but as
    is, this can save you being paged in the middle of the night.)

    * actually securely connect output to the process it came from for
    logging — both stdout/stderr and actual log messages. (This is why
    journald is closely integrated.)

    There are other advantages (real dependency ordering, resource management/reservation with cgroups, etc.), but process supervision is the big deal. There are other alternative systems which _also_ do this, but overall, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, and others eventually decided that systemd was the technically best choice.

  • I know only one attempt : uselessd. Unfortunatly, the project is dead. http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/

    I agree. There are other init/service managers (no, init and service manager are not one same program) that combine the best of System V (simplicity, lightness, minimalism), and interesting ideas used by systemd (“BSD-style” dependencies management between services, for example). On Gentoo, the duo sysvinit/openrc works well, for example.

    My professional experience shows me systemd is by far lower than, for example, upstart. But… let’s be honest : is the OS launch time so important to make a software like systemd so revolutionary when it promises to save a handful of seconds ?
    On servers, which spend much more time checking and starting the hardware components than really booting the system, the difference is negligible. A bit less on virtual guests, I agree, but, anyway, they’re always on, and the lonely reason to reboot them is normally to update the kernel… This kind of intervention is normally scheduled, and the announced unavailability time is often overestimated, to be able to get round Murphy’s laws. Benefit ? Zero. On stations, maybe, systemd might potentially be useful. I don’t know, I don’t have systemd-dependant stations to hand. And I reboot my stations as often as my servers.

    Especially when the obvious directives are not respected. Tell systemd to start sshd AFTER network, for exemple, but forget to say sshd REQUIRES network, and systemd starts sshd… BEFORE network ! And says network isn’t started, by the way. Anyway, one more time, why this obsession to gain one or two seconds ?

    Why does systemd care about devices pluging ? It’s not its rule, it’s the device manager’s one. Udev, for example. Oh, wait…

    So I learn… I adapt… And I update… So I learn… I adapt…

    But it didn’t say us how, then. :)

    I don’t think systemd was designed for servers… But sysadmins have to deal with it though. When we need simply, robust and reliable softwares, systemd offers us lots of useless, incomplete, and buggy features, replacing other softs that really work as we expect. So we learn… we adapt…

    Sylvain.

    Pensez ENVIRONNEMENT : n’imprimer que si ncessaire

  • So don’t use it then .. EL6 has support until 30 Nov 2020.

    SystemD is not better, the 3.x and 4.x Linux kernels are not better, Gnome 3.x is not better, KDE 4.x is not better. Blah, Blah, Blah.

    Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 with the 1.2.13 kernel .. now there was an operating system.

    I have been doing this stuff since 1981/82 time frame, starting with AT&T Unix on an 3B system
    (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3B_series_computers) that had floppy disks, 10 MB hard drives, real-to-real tapes for backups, and used a brand new UNIX System V (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_V).

    Now, your cell phone has hundreds of times the computing power and storage and it literally fits in your front pocket.

    So tell me about long nights doing sysadmin. Tell me about change in the way the OS or the Desktop or the hardware works. Been there, done that.

    If you don’t like it, every bit of the source code is available. You and everyone else who doesn’t like can take that and build ‘something else’. And before you accuse me of being an ass .. that is EXACTLY what I (and the rest of the CentOS team) did 12-13 years ago. That’s why you have CentOS today, and that’s why it’s free. If you think you can do it better, then show us. Maybe you can.

    Thanks, Johnny Hughes

  • # systemctl list-units | grep -c abandoned
    453
    # uptime
    15:53:58 up 11 days, 21:03, 1 user, load average, 0,01, 0,02, 0,05

    No. A software which falls down is buggy, and needs to be fixed. Period. Masking the problem is the best way to never fix it. With this “feature”, systemd (and other init systems providing it) will just make GNU/linux more unstable.

    Driving sysadmins unable to read logs just because the file is corrupted, or to send logs to a dedicated server, is a real security improvement, indeed.

    Redhat employs Lennart Poettering. Redhat derivates have to follow. Ubuntu and Debian choose systemd, on one hand, because more and more softs depend on systemd (Gnome 3, for example), and on the other hand, to save maintainers time, dropping their own init system. The technically best choice, you say ?

    Sylvain. Pensez ENVIRONNEMENT : n’imprimer que si ncessaire

  • It is true that Red Hat employs Lennart. But, the rest is false. It’s not the way Red Hat works, and it’s not the way Fedora works.

  • I like hard core arguments. I will try to not push _this_ argument in the direction of one or another side. Even though I myself am on one of them. I will try to show “different dimension”.

    Basically, being sysadmin, even though I did program quite a lot, I prefer not to put my dirty hands into somebody’s else nice clean code. As a sysadmin, leaving mostly thanks to open source developers, whose highest reward often is just to see the fancy thing they have created, I do my best to hold myself from criticizing their results (unless they go way out of line IMHO). This helps me to convince myself to adjust to minor changes all the time pretty much like Johnny suggests. However, things sometimes go grossly out of “normal”, which makes me start arguing against these changes for some time, as, like Peter, I don’t like gross changes where they are not needed. But after some period of arguing I start realizing that there is rather large crowd that thinks differently than I do. HERE
    is where extra dimension comes in:

    I just find the replacement for something that went awfully out of normal
    (again, just IMHO) that is withing my views of what that should be. Way out of normal, yet it has big crowd of supporters. So, here is what happened to me and allowed me to keep harmony of the World for myself:
    servers are migrated to FreeBSD when upgrade time comes (there are other systemd-free choices: Open Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and soon to be solid release of Linux: Devuan); Mate instead of GNOME and KDE (but there are were other choices mentioned here). So, when something has already happened that we grossly unhappy about, let’s find extra dimension, and move there (it exists!).

    This is not intended to feed more flames between sides. Calmly walking away to something that suites the task better (in your opinion) is more productive, and makes better statement (even though no statement is intended). And we can keep CentOS list for technical CentOS related stuff
    – we still use CentOS where it fills the bill (even if just our of habit):
    workstations, laptops, number crunchers.

    Good luck everybody, and be happy with YOUR choices!

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Once upon a time, Peter Duffy said:

    Well sure, and I can build a rig to replace a wheel on your car while you’re driving down the highway; doesn’t mean it is practical to do so. You could also build a distribution with both Linux and FreeBSD kernels
    (and IIRC somebody tried with Debian), but that doesn’t mean it is a practical thing, especially for a comercially-supported, long-term distribution like RHEL.

    Nope. I said “the init system” is core, not “systemd”. Someone building a coherent distribution has to make choices about what is practical to support (and nobody has unlimited man-hours to build magic tools that can swap out init systems with zero outside impact). And once you include systemd, there are features that it makes sense to take advantage of, rather than ignore because somebody has a “multiple init systems” requirement.

    Sun and Apple already figured out that a “know nothing” super-simple init didn’t handle all that was really needed for a modern OS. The Linux world had some earlier attempts, like Upstart (used in RHEL 5 and
    6 IIRC), but it never got the critical mass to use its functionality
    (and IIRC fairly early on, it became apparent it took some wrong approaches).

    The init system being PID 1 does have a bunch of “magic” abilities on a Unix-like system, so trying to strip it down to a minimal thing turns out to not be the best approach. Of course, a lot of the crap that is in systemd-the-package (and there is a bunch, although RHEL ignores some of that at least for now) is not in PID 1.

    So, the parallel startup has shown a few issues along the way, where there were undefined dependencies. There have always been dependency issues with SysV-style init – service deps can’t always be described properly as an ordered list, more of a directed graph (which systemd’s unit files allow and handle). Was it annoying if you encountered such a bug? Yes, but those types of bugs came up with SysV-style init repeatedly over the years anyway. You had poor solutions like init scripts calling other init scripts to make sure they had the things they needed (and “soft” deps, like on a database server, were really a mess).

    For example, AFAIK it is still the case that RHEL 6 and before don’t enable quotas on a filesystem on an iSCSI device. The only way to “fix”
    that would be to copy all the quota code from rc.sysinit to another, post-netfs, script. With systemd, I’m pretty sure the same quota unit can re-trigger after new filesystems are “discovered”.

    On the flip side, when I need to add a new one-off service, I can write a dozen line (or more often less) systemd unit file much easier than writing an init script. All the odd corner cases are handled for me, I
    don’t have to worry about something like daemontools if I want the service restarted on fail (one line in the unit file), standard out and/or error can be redirected to log files (without having to pipe to logger), etc.

    Okay, but change is the only constant in this business. I agree you should not be running into the learning curve significantly on production systems, but if you are running systems with thousands of users, you should always be looking ahead to new technologies all the time. I’ve always worked in the Internet service provider “world”; when I started, a T1 and a router you could fit in a backpack made you an ISP. Now we have a router that is a third of a rack, requires a lift to move, with a couple of 10 gig ethernet links to the world, and that’s still considered a “small” ISP.

    It is so much easier now to lab up new versions for testing and learning
    (just fire up some VMs). If you want to have an idea of “what is coming”, run some Fedora releases now and then. I personally have used Fedora on my desktop since the project started (and Red Hat Linux for many years before that).

    It is called professional education; lots of jobs require you to learn new skills on an on-going basis.

    I’ve been running CentOS 7 on all my new server installs for a year now. Is it perfect? No, but I haven’t seen the perfect OS yet. Am I still learning? Yes, always. Do I think it is worth the higher learning steps than say from CentOS 5->6? Yes, I do.

  • Is systemd the beneficial, reliable, useful and workable “improved init system” or something with circa 275,000 lines of coding compared to init’s circa 10,000 lines ? Things I have learned in programming include modular is better than monolithic, and less code better than M$-style bloatware which systemd appears to be.

    Just what is Fedora’s and Red Hat’s Plan B when the revolt against systemd escalates ? Whom is going to apologise for fouling-up Red Hat’s EL and our beloved CentOS ?

  • There is no plan B .. use it or use something else. Its not like Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE have decided to not use systemd.

    EL6 is good for 4 more years, it does not have systemd.

    BSD doesn’t use systemd.

    systemd is even more important with containers.

    That’s just how it is. If people don’t like what Linux does to the kernel .. they can fork it and do something else. If people don’t like systemd .. they can fork it and do something else. That’s what open source is all about.

  • This is a typical comment which clearly indicates very little actual knowledge of systemd. There’s really not much to say other than that.

    Well, that’s certainly dramatic.

    But the answer is simple: show us the code. If it “escalates” to the point where we have better options, that’s a huge win for everyone.

  • Once upon a time, Always Learning said:

    You should also have learned in programming the lines of code is a virtually useless measuring stick. OMG, the kernel has over four million lines of code! BREAK IT UP!

    There is always a trade-off between modularity and functionality. Sometimes modularity comes with a functionality and/or complexity cost. PID 1 on a Unix-like system really does have special properties, and so some functionality can only be implemented (at least in a practical fashion) in PID 1.

    Would you rather a bunch of that “magic” of PID 1 that systemd handles get shoved into the kernel (so that PID 1 isn’t so special)?

    Yawn. I haven’t seen that there’s a “revolt” except for a vocal minority. Some of the “no change” arguments sound very much similar to the SELinux, xfs/ext4/ext3, Apache 2, gcc/egcs, glibc, ELF, etc. arguments over the years. A vocal group doesn’t like change, argues against it, and presents itself as the voice of the silent majority
    (that somehow keep upgrading to new versions with all the terrible changes).

  • Or, to put it another way, systemd _is_ plan B. Plan A was upstart. If plan C comes along and is even better, that’s pretty much what Fedora is all about. If you want to put the work into making it so, make something, and come to Fedora and advocate for it — just like Lennart did six years ago.

  • Why should the systemd monolithic bloatware be shoved into the kernel, especially when you claim the kernel has “over four million lines of code!” ?

    Seems like a tactical diversion to deflect genuine concerns about the vast plethora of alleged systemd advantages.

    When something new is proposed and it is substantially and conspicuously superior, then everyone wants it. Never noticed that enthusiasm with systemd’s imposition – an imposition nurtured and promoted by the non-everyday business work environment of experimental Fedora.

    Most dedicated users of RHEL and CentOS, Scientific Linux too, want stability which includes not changing everything every 6 months (á la Fedora) or learning alternative methods of doing well mastered tasks (á
    la Systemd – does the ‘d’ stand for dunce ?)

    Good things quickly and easily attract supporters yet systemd lacks the hordes of anxious and eager users demanding systemd replaces the fundamentals of their smooth working computer systems. Instead we have a few systemd-ers, avoiding the contentious absence of adequate discussion before the systemd imposition, trying to hypnotise us into loving their systemd. Meanwhile those who adore stability and dislike bloatware worry about convoluting systemd tentacles protruding into their well-running systems. One dreads a systemd malfunctioning especially when everything could become inoperable.

    I genuinely and consistently embrace improvements. I remain unconvinced system-dunce fulfils my change-advantage criteria.

    —
    Regards,

    Paul. England, EU. England’s place is in the European Union.

  • What makes you think that having a supervisor makes you ignore problems?

    First off, a restarted daemon process is likely going to lose some kind of runtime state. Logged in users will be bounced out, work may be lost, etc. You will get calls about this.

    Second, it’s not like systemd invented this idea and is now trying to convince the rest of the world that it’s a good one. systemd was preceded by launchd, xinetd, inetd, Erlang supervisors… My company has prior art on that, for that matter, and I assure you, we don’t just ignore spontaneously restarting servers.

    All a supervisor does is replace human working time — “service badboy restart” — with a tiny slice of computer time, reducing the impact of the downed service. If the daemon doesn’t immediately fail again, the total downtime charged against that daemon might be a fraction of a second.

    Yes, you still have to fix the underlying problem. But are you saying it would be better if your users were completely shut out while emails made their way through the tech support loop?

    Then explain why Ericsson’s Erlang-based AXD301 telephone switching system achieved *nine* nines of uptime, in large part due to a supervisory process restarting framework:

    https://pragprog.com/articles/erlang

    If the supervisors were just restarting frequently-dying processes, don’t you think all the Ericsson based telephone systems in the world would be noticeably less reliable than, say, the AT&T ones?

    Well, in fact, mirroring logs to a trapdoor log server *is* a good security practice. It makes auditing a pwned system much less uncertain.

    I’m no huge systemd defender. It reeks of second system effects, god modules, and other antipatterns of software design. However, this is not the place to fix it or replace it.

    I’m here because I have no intention of fixing it or replacing it.

    Archimedes said he could move the world given a long enough lever and a firm place to stand. Maybe you think this mailing list is your lever of change, but you’ve forgotten that you also need a firm place to stand. All the force you put on that level will just push you out of position, rather than move your target.

    You need a firmer place to stand.

  • Maybe you’re not aware of it, but there are a LOT of things that systemd fixes that people are happy about. A lot of people just don’t care because it works well enough that they don’t notice it.

    Like anything in the IT world, you only hear about it when it breaks.

  • I suggest reading the previous emails (SOME OF WHICH YOU REPLIED TO)
    that listed many of the features people are happy about.

  • Jonathan Billings wrote:

    I don’t take a position in the systemd argument, but you said that systemd fixes lots of problems. It is perfectly reasonable to ask you to name one of these problems, perhaps the one you think is most important.

    I would say exactly the same to anyone who said systemd causes lots of problems, without specifying any.

  • Compare any average sysv init script with a systemd unit file. The magnitude of gross bash required to do what systemd elegantly accomplishes with a mere few configuration directives in a more reliable way is enough for me.

    Personally, I think systemd is the single greatest accomplishment Linux has had in so long I can’t recall.

    jlc

  • Sylvain CANOINE wrote:

    Agreed. The speed of boot and shutdown? Whoop-de-do. I’ve got HP servers that take about 70 second BEFORE THE LOGO ever comes up, just blank screen, before POST. And my servers – for at least a lot of them, I’ve got once a month maintenance windows to reboot. Some, maybe once every three months. Why should I care about speed of reboot? That matters on someone’s laptop, but the rest?

    Or the annoyance with NetMangler, that in 7 is not only noisy, but keeps wanting to do stuff with wifi… on a wired workstation, and I have yet to figure out how to shut it up.

    Or systemctl restart somethingorother, that gives *ZERO* warm fuzzies while running, just nothing, and you have to run another command to find out what happened. Or the non-plain-text configuration files, which are just *wonderful* NOT when you’re in linux rescue.

    Just because you *can* do something does not mean you *should*.

    mark

  • Joseph L. Casale wrote:
    Sorry, I don’t understand this. I *think* I’ve written one or two init V
    scripts. Overwhelmingly, I just edit .conf files. What I’ve seen of systemd files are complicated, and multi-multi level.

    mark

  • Can this thread just end, it’s been hashed and rehashed. If there is a moderator out there can we just kill the topic?

    Lets move along. :)

  • Jonathan Billings wrote:

    Well, that’s interesting, about making sure it’s stopped. I’ve asked here a month or two ago, and got no responses: my manager has me using pmount/pumount to mount the hard drives I’m putting in the eSATA drive bay for offline backups. Formerly, I used mount/umount, and when I umounted it, and walked downstairs, mostly, esp the green drives, were spun down. I
    pumount… and *nothing* spins down. They stay spinning, which is obvious, as I can feel the gyroscopic action as I pop them out immediately after hitting the button to turn off the power to the drive.

    That box is running CentOS 7.

    mark

  • +1 here. Who can’t stand systemd, explore other systems. Ask me off the list, I’ll do my best to advise on some. And let’s focus on technical CentOS related topics here.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • Not entirely useless. Not everyone has to deal with systemd yet. For such people, “How hard should I work to avoid it?” is an important issue.

  • Michael Corleone, the God Father Part I: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Those who consider systemd ‘the enemy’ should learn it thoroughly…..

  • Unless you can afford to live where they can not reach. Be it South America or Solaris, FreeBSD, etc ;-)

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • … And what “who” answered.

    Sylvain. Pensez ENVIRONNEMENT : n’imprimer que si ncessaire