It's kind of a recurring thing in Linux, that there's always that one thing that's kind of fucked. If nothing is fucked, Canonical (the Ubuntu people) will pick something that's merely not very good, and "fix" it by pushing out a new solution that's not ready yet, thus transitioning it to a fucked state. This unites the entire Linux community around fixing that feature, and over a few years they eventually settle on a good solution and the cycle begins anew. The thing does actually get fixed during that though.
It's package management's turn now. It was audio when I switched to Linux, then Gnome 3, then I think there was a scheduling thing that I missed somewhere in there. I assume it was printers at some point, because of how eerily well they work now.
So give it another couple years and there'll be a good solution, and we'll all be complaining about something else instead.
I actually haven't had trouble with Pulseaudio since like 2010. But I don't do anything super in-depth audiowise, so maybe it's worse if you're trying to use a DAW or something.
who says pipewire is broken buggy shit? it's been flawless and a marked improvement over pulseaudio for me since Fedora switched to it by default, with the exception of one short-lived bad release.
f nothing is fucked, Canonical (the Ubuntu people) will pick something that’s merely not very good, and “fix” it by pushing out a new solution that’s not ready yet, thus transitioning it to a fucked state
Red Hat is a worse offender - they're the shitheads that resulted in pulseaudio and systemd, among others. The former started being somewhat usable barely a few years ago (and even then, not always); the latter is still in the "fucked up state" phase.
I hugely disagree with systemd being in a "fucked up state." I actually will now avoid some community run distros (Void, MX, etc) because they don't use systemd. I find systemd unit files intuitive to understand and pretty easy to write, and even easier to use.
I agree with the user friendliness aspect for sure. But systemd still sucks right now. A few examples; do you use full disk encryption / LUKS ? its passphrase request module is 1. vastly different than the initramfs one, and less secure; 2. given to presenting you the prompt for different volumes in random order; its LUKS closure module screws up about 50% of the time, having to timeout after 1:30 for each volume it failed for.
When I started using Linux in the 90s, something that was extremely common was a minor issue (due to BIOS compatibility IIRC) where Linux wouldn't be able to shut down the computer; it'd end up with a console saying "you can now cut power" - much like Windows 95 at the time. This disappeared more than a decade ago; and yet for the first time in more than 10 years, due to systemd, this is now again the case on 2 out of 3 laptops I own.
Some other issues are due to the automated systemd scripts generations for services that didn't support it natively yet, mind you (uwsgi under debian comes to mind); but a lot aren't. Moreover, systemd means loss of compatibility with legacy hardware, and a lot of embedded stuff; the RAM usage of that thing is awful for a simple init system. It has a lot of feature creep, too; and binary format for logs, while it's a more minor issue, can be a pain in the ass on - again - legacy or exotic systems.
Finally, I'm having a hard time trusting such a new, needlessly complex software at such a critical position in a system security-wise. Feedback on security issues from the dev team on their tracker didn't always inspire confidence, either.
Ultimately I'm sure eventually it'll mostly be OK, of course, just like pulseaudio; and I wholly agree about the easiness of the syntax. But I am absolutely convinced you could've implemented something far far cleaner, simpler, and just as user friendly without all the bullshit on top of it. For me ultimately it's far removed from the unix philosophy: it is over engineered, makes it harder to integrate with other tools, and reminds one more of proprietary software than free software in the way it was designed.
I do use LUKS on my laptop, but not my desktop. I guess I don't encounter those situations because I just use the default encrypted setup the Fedora installer gives me on one hard drive and one volume. Nor have I seen messages from any computer I've used Linux on telling me to shut down the computer because it couldn't handle it itself.
My impression of systemd is very different than yours. I think it's a godsend unifying group of technologies that harmonizes different distros, just as the kernel itself puts everything under the "Linux" umbrella. I can take common unit files, concepts, and ideas and share them from Arch to Debian to Fedora and others as well. Things like binary logs don't trouble me because tooling exists to decode them, just as cat and zcat exist to print text and compressed text files.
You know what's a bit funny to me? I actually just had an experience recently where I was rewriting a docker-compose file as a script to work with podman and for the containers to reside properly in a pod. If you don't know, podman doesn't officially support the compose files, they have more natural support for kubernetes kubes which looks pointlessly complicated... Anyway, so I went from the declarative config file (docker-compose.yml) to my own little handwritten mishmash.sh to create the more podman-centric script and I felt like it was a reverse of my experience of going from sysvinit to systemd.
it means that you turn modules on and off and configure the whole system from a single git repo. it's declarative in that you don't write scripts, just provide the features you want turned on or turned off. I've been using it for years and at least as a professional it's much better. idk about as a layperson. there's a steep learning curve the second you have to like write a custom package or something. if you're a developer, I'd try it out as an env manager for code projects first - it's one of the most useful features the package manager provides.
It's kind of a recurring thing in Linux, that there's always that one thing that's kind of fucked. If nothing is fucked, Canonical (the Ubuntu people) will pick something that's merely not very good, and "fix" it by pushing out a new solution that's not ready yet, thus transitioning it to a fucked state. This unites the entire Linux community around fixing that feature, and over a few years they eventually settle on a good solution and the cycle begins anew. The thing does actually get fixed during that though.
It's package management's turn now. It was audio when I switched to Linux, then Gnome 3, then I think there was a scheduling thing that I missed somewhere in there. I assume it was printers at some point, because of how eerily well they work now.
So give it another couple years and there'll be a good solution, and we'll all be complaining about something else instead.
deleted by creator
I actually haven't had trouble with Pulseaudio since like 2010. But I don't do anything super in-depth audiowise, so maybe it's worse if you're trying to use a DAW or something.
deleted by creator
who says pipewire is broken buggy shit? it's been flawless and a marked improvement over pulseaudio for me since Fedora switched to it by default, with the exception of one short-lived bad release.
Red Hat is a worse offender - they're the shitheads that resulted in pulseaudio and systemd, among others. The former started being somewhat usable barely a few years ago (and even then, not always); the latter is still in the "fucked up state" phase.
I hugely disagree with systemd being in a "fucked up state." I actually will now avoid some community run distros (Void, MX, etc) because they don't use systemd. I find systemd unit files intuitive to understand and pretty easy to write, and even easier to use.
I agree with the user friendliness aspect for sure. But systemd still sucks right now. A few examples; do you use full disk encryption / LUKS ? its passphrase request module is 1. vastly different than the initramfs one, and less secure; 2. given to presenting you the prompt for different volumes in random order; its LUKS closure module screws up about 50% of the time, having to timeout after 1:30 for each volume it failed for.
When I started using Linux in the 90s, something that was extremely common was a minor issue (due to BIOS compatibility IIRC) where Linux wouldn't be able to shut down the computer; it'd end up with a console saying "you can now cut power" - much like Windows 95 at the time. This disappeared more than a decade ago; and yet for the first time in more than 10 years, due to systemd, this is now again the case on 2 out of 3 laptops I own.
Some other issues are due to the automated systemd scripts generations for services that didn't support it natively yet, mind you (uwsgi under debian comes to mind); but a lot aren't. Moreover, systemd means loss of compatibility with legacy hardware, and a lot of embedded stuff; the RAM usage of that thing is awful for a simple init system. It has a lot of feature creep, too; and binary format for logs, while it's a more minor issue, can be a pain in the ass on - again - legacy or exotic systems.
Finally, I'm having a hard time trusting such a new, needlessly complex software at such a critical position in a system security-wise. Feedback on security issues from the dev team on their tracker didn't always inspire confidence, either.
Ultimately I'm sure eventually it'll mostly be OK, of course, just like pulseaudio; and I wholly agree about the easiness of the syntax. But I am absolutely convinced you could've implemented something far far cleaner, simpler, and just as user friendly without all the bullshit on top of it. For me ultimately it's far removed from the unix philosophy: it is over engineered, makes it harder to integrate with other tools, and reminds one more of proprietary software than free software in the way it was designed.
I do use LUKS on my laptop, but not my desktop. I guess I don't encounter those situations because I just use the default encrypted setup the Fedora installer gives me on one hard drive and one volume. Nor have I seen messages from any computer I've used Linux on telling me to shut down the computer because it couldn't handle it itself.
My impression of systemd is very different than yours. I think it's a godsend unifying group of technologies that harmonizes different distros, just as the kernel itself puts everything under the "Linux" umbrella. I can take common unit files, concepts, and ideas and share them from Arch to Debian to Fedora and others as well. Things like binary logs don't trouble me because tooling exists to decode them, just as cat and zcat exist to print text and compressed text files.
You could move sysvinit files from distro to distro, mostly, too, mind you; that being said perhaps I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in their habits.
True.
You know what's a bit funny to me? I actually just had an experience recently where I was rewriting a docker-compose file as a script to work with podman and for the containers to reside properly in a pod. If you don't know, podman doesn't officially support the compose files, they have more natural support for kubernetes kubes which looks pointlessly complicated... Anyway, so I went from the declarative config file (docker-compose.yml) to my own little handwritten mishmash.sh to create the more podman-centric script and I felt like it was a reverse of my experience of going from sysvinit to systemd.
deleted by creator
it means that you turn modules on and off and configure the whole system from a single git repo. it's declarative in that you don't write scripts, just provide the features you want turned on or turned off. I've been using it for years and at least as a professional it's much better. idk about as a layperson. there's a steep learning curve the second you have to like write a custom package or something. if you're a developer, I'd try it out as an env manager for code projects first - it's one of the most useful features the package manager provides.