V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 10, 2014 Share Posted February 10, 2014 Well, not just yet... LQ) Right now, there are a number of potentially intrusive technical changes coming to some of the major distributions. How do you feel some of these will impact Linux in general and Slackware specifically? Are there any you would considering merging into Slackware? (55020 & tuxrules) volkerdi) Yeah, I see a few things coming down the line that may cause a shakeup to our usual way of doing things, and could force Slackware to become, well, perhaps less UNIX-like. I guess the two big ones that are on the horizon are Wayland and systemd. Whether we end up using them or not remains to be seen. It's quite possible that we won't end up having a choice in the matter depending on how development that's out of our hands goes. It's hard to say whether moving to these technologies would be a good thing for Slackware overall. Concerning systemd, I do like the idea of a faster boot time (obviously), but I also like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable, and I'm guessing that's what most Slackware users prefer too. I don't spend all day rebooting my machine, and having looked at systemd config files it seems to me a very foreign way of controlling a system to me, and attempting to control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon flies in the face of the UNIX concept of doing one thing and doing it well. To the typical end user, if this results in a faster boot then mission accomplished. With udev being phased out in favor of systemd performing those tasks we'll have to make the decision at some point between whether we want to try to maintain udev ourselves, have systemd replace just udev's functions, or if we want the whole kit and caboodle. Wayland, by comparison, seems fairly innocuous, assuming that they'll be able to implement network transparency either directly or through some kind of add-on compatibility layer. Again, another thing that most desktop users don't have a lot of use for but many users can't do without. I like X11, and would probably stick with it if moving to Wayland meant losing that feature, even if Wayland's rendering method carried with it some benefits like reduced rendering artifacts or increased video performance. I guess we'll just have to see what the overall benefit is when it's far enough along to make such comparisons. *from the Patrick Volkerding interview at LinuxQuestions.org a while back. Never say "never", though... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
abarbarian Posted February 11, 2014 Share Posted February 11, 2014 Faster boot times are the biggest load of tosh ever. Talk about misdirection and propaganda, in the real working world the difference between five seconds to boot and thirty seconds in of no consequence whatsoever. Glad to see the dinosaurs are at least thinking of keeping up with the rest of the world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 11, 2014 Author Share Posted February 11, 2014 Remember, dinosaurs once ruled the world. Now that position is held by the lowly virus. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trigggl Posted February 25, 2014 Share Posted February 25, 2014 Systemd had me looking at FreeBSD. If only nvidia supported BSD, but since they don't... I'm in the process of changing all my systems from Gnome to KDE. I've been using XFCE in the mean time. Systemd is ugly and not well supported by 3rd parties. If you're booting enough to care about the boot time, you're doing something wrong. It wouldn't be so bad if it was untuitive to write your own start up scripts, but even looking at writing a simple one gave me a headache. It reminded me of AIX administration. It's definitely going the wrong way. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 25, 2014 Author Share Posted February 25, 2014 Well, I can't quite agree with your opinion that if someone is booting enough to care, then they're doing something wrong. I boot my systems once or twice daily. Why? Because I don't leave them powered up. It's a waste of electricity and component lifetime; this from an electronics technician with 20+ years component level repair experience. The more a device is used, the less time you have left to use it before something fails. Silly urban legends state that turning something on and off damages the components more than leaving them on all the time. This is just baloney squared. But this is just me. I don't leave my systems on because they serve absolutely no purpose sitting here consuming electricity, adding to the carbon in the atmosphere, and wasting my money. I use them and then turn them off; the same as I do with my coffee maker, my lawn mower, my automobile, etc. Who would leave their car running out in the driveway? No one who is sane. Why do people leave their computers idling for hours and hours, sometimes days and weeks? I've never understood that. Still, I don't care too much about actual boot time. Slackware boots to the command line pretty quickly. Once that happens the computer patiently waits for the smarter being (me) to come and startx. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted February 25, 2014 Share Posted February 25, 2014 Hi Greg! I don't care about boot time these days. As I said in another thread, mine is 7 seconds GRUB > login, another 5 for KDE to load. No big deal. I do agree with Eric on electricity consumption and usually power down when I leave the house. Disclosure: I use systemd already. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mlangdn Posted February 25, 2014 Share Posted February 25, 2014 I've had this computer for 7 years now. It stays on 24/7 except when I leave for a vacation, or will be gone two days or more. It ran Boinc for 2 years. The only thing that has failed on this comp is me. Now I realize its time for another machine. 7 years is a long time and I know that things will fail eventually. Now, all that said, I could care less about boot time. Its about one minute for Slackware-current, and when I boot to Win7, about 3 minutes. Whoop-di-do. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 25, 2014 Share Posted February 25, 2014 Why all the hatred for systemd? I have used it for over a year and I personally like it. Daemons are easy to control and create plus it seems a lot cleaner than the old init system. It seems that most of the people who thrash it, have never used it before (not referring to us here but articles and such). I was sort of the same way about grub2. I liked the simplicity of grub-legacy until I actually started using Grub2 and now I see the advantages of it. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 25, 2014 Author Share Posted February 25, 2014 My only real issue with Systemd is that it's so not Unix. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 25, 2014 Share Posted February 25, 2014 My only real issue with Systemd is that it's so not Unix. Neither is Linux Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 25, 2014 Author Share Posted February 25, 2014 Linux follows Unix structure and basic operations. Systemd kinda' goes against the rules of keeping it simple. I don't see any issues with the old sysvinit rc.bla-bla scripts to control individual applications within the OS. Systemd is fine and dandy, just not necessary. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted February 26, 2014 Share Posted February 26, 2014 If you're worried about systemd services being complicated compared to sysvinit scripts, you should read this. A user couldn't find the kbd rate setting for systemd, so wrote his own service, looks very simple to me. http://forum.siduction.org/index.php?topic=4332.0 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 26, 2014 Author Share Posted February 26, 2014 Actually, I'm not worried about systemd at all. I don't think P. Volkerding will be instituting it any time soon in Slackware. I had no issues with it in Arch. I'm just a traditionalist (read as staid old fart) and I don't like new-fangled stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted February 26, 2014 Share Posted February 26, 2014 Linux follows Unix structure and basic operations. Systemd kinda' goes against the rules of keeping it simple. I don't see any issues with the old sysvinit rc.bla-bla scripts to control individual applications within the OS. Systemd is fine and dandy, just not necessary. I knew what you meant but I disagree, I think systemd makes things simpler to manage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted February 26, 2014 Author Share Posted February 26, 2014 Simpler to manage, maybe. However, not simple in its design. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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