[Discuss] SysVinit vs. systemd

[Mike Small]

Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Mike Small <smallm at panix.com> wrote:
>> I wouldn't call Slackware fringe. Maybe that's just me.
>
> From point of view of history, it's certainly core to the evolution of
> our culture.  Instant street cred at LUG meetings if you run Slack (or
> Gentoo).
>
> From a commercial/IT usage point of view, the firms offering Slackware
> virtual hosting are pretty fringe, and no major IT suppliers are
> shipping it. Red Hat, Ubuntu, and maybe still Suse are the only major
> providers to IT. (There are others in the embedded spaces of course.)

This is kind of what I think the systemd soap opera is at least partly
about, this split of user category.  linuxdesktop.org, er, I mean
freedesktop.org also seems to have this problem.  Gnome has it in
spades, witness the popularity of Mate, etc. It seems like an open
question whether Linux can be what hobbiests (hobbiests that don't make
the jump into making a living on their hobby) want and what commercial
users want.

IMO OpenBSD manages this better, perhaps because their take on security
as simple understandable designs and (relative, not plan9 level)
minimalism coincides with the interests of the hobbiest/learner.  And
then they probably don't have as diverse a set of commercial users
either.

Since I've been back, it doesn't look to me like this is working out
well at all in linux land. The commercial people have way more resources
to draw on so are bound to always win. People like Pat Volkerding can
only do so much. As he would put it, at some point you have to swim with
the current.

-- 
Mike Small
smallm at panix.com