[TriLUG] Linux home directory management is about to undergo major change

[Steve Litt via TriLUG]

On Fri, 01 May 2020 15:34:36 -0400
Pete Soper via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> If somebody held a gun on me and said "rebuild your kernel like you
> did every week or three in '93" I might just take the bullet
> (assuming of course that searching the web wasn't a choice). Unlike
> many of you, Linux is my Windows now. I don't know how the guts work
> any more and don't have time to learn (need to inhale the details of
> a few RTOS flavors instead). So I can appreciate the pain of systemd
> while having been oblivious to just how much it violates one of the
> Unix big rules by being monolithic. What a shame. But I'm just an
> appliance operator now, so the pain is abstract. Pete

That's a perfectly reasonable viewpoint except for one thing: Systemd
makes itself extraordinarily difficult to replace, so those of us who
like to control our machines instead of letting our machines control us
must put in huge amounts of work, probably at every update, to compute
the way we want on "corporationally correct" distros.

Imagine if I created some super-geeky X replacement that replaced
systemd, Gnome, KDE, all the GUI browsers you use. My project has its
own special keyboard-centric browsers, and we even took over Firefox
and made it completely different. Imagine if my new X took over the dbus
program, completely changing the way it runs and its out-facing
interface, requiring it be configured via C source code. Imagine my
project took over Gnome, KDE, Xfce, completely changing their
interfaces to a no-window-decoration tiling interface,
configurable exclusively with Lua programs. Imagine some corporation
spent a million bucks a year to keep this thing working, and plenty of
money for shmoozing to get all the main distros to substitute it for the
stuff you like using. Then you'd know how the rest of us feel.

Vim and Emacs have competed for decades with no hard feelings, because
neither sabotaged the workability or installability of the other. Every
init system in the Linux world was the same: You could plug replace it
with very little work. Systemd is the first piece of system software to
actually sabotage other software.

Pete, this isn't a reply just to you, but to everyone who says "I like
systemd, so tough toast to those who don't like it." The sabotage
(whether intentional or not is immaterial) is the reason systemd and
systemd aficionados will never get a moment's peace until something
newer (and I sincerely hope better) replaces systemd.

SteveT

Steve Litt
March 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother?
http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb