Is Linux About Choice?

http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

>where to me, running Linux is about choice.

Quote :

"From: Adam Jackson
To: Development discussions related to Fedora
Subject: Linux is not about choice [was Re: Fedora too cutting edge?]
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:58:45 -0500

> Linux is about choice.

If I could only have one thing this year, it would be to eliminate that
meme from the collective consciousness. It is a disease. It strangles
the mind and ensures you can never change anything ever because someone
somewhere has OCD'd their environment exactly how they like it and how
dare you change it on them you're so mean and next time I have friends
over for Buffy night you're not invited mom he's sitting on my side
again.

As a consumer, yes, you have lots of choices in which Linux you use.
This does not mean Linux is in any sense _about_ choice, any more than
because there are so many kinds of cars you can buy that cars are about
choice.

The complaints up-thread about juju and pulse are entirely valid, but
the solution is not to try to deliver two things at once. If you try to
deliver both at once you have to also deliver a way of switching between
the two. Now you have three moving parts instead of one, which means
the failure rate has gone up by a factor of _six_ (three parts, and
three interactions). We have essentially already posited that we have
insufficient developer effort to have 100%-complete features at ship
time, so asking them to take on six times the failure rate…

> systemd goes out of its way to fix the massive integration failures we've had for decades (and seen as almost unfixable) because Linux is so focused on modularity to a fault.

Windows goes out of the way to fix the massive integration failures we've had for decades (and seen as almost unfixable) because Linux is so focused on modularity to a fault. And yet, Linux users don't clamor for Windows because of this.

> http://islinuxaboutchoice.com/

This is exactly the attitude the author is arguing against. Reaffirming this without justification doesn't make you right. Again, Windows is the operating system for people who don't want choice.

> Feel free to make something better than systemd, document it as extensively as systemd, spend years writing guides to its most compelling features that get people eager to switch, and do as much work as the systemd developers did to help the entire Linux ecosystem adopt it with shockingly few technical problems. There's nothing stopping you; you can even leverage the entire systemd codebase in the process. Fork it and change what you don't like, if you think you can keep up. Good luck; you'll need it.

Honestly, sysvinit and the existing userspace does all I need it to do. The extra benefits systemd offers I can do using existing tools. Need to reliably kill a service? Use the cgroups tools and put the service into its own cgroup, and then kill all processes in the cgroup later. Need tamper-evident logging? Use the rsyslog tools.…

systemd goes out of its way to fix the massive integration failures we've had for decades (and seen as almost unfixable) because Linux is so focused on modularity to a fault. And because of systemd, we're finally starting to get a level of integration that previously only appeared in proprietary operating systems. http://islinuxaboutchoice.com

So, basically you're advocating for a walled garden approach, then you link to a novelty domain that points to a Red Hat mailing list discussion where some person rants like a demagogue in a disjointed fashion that doesn't prove jack shit.

Quite impressive.

Linux is good at evolutionary changes, but not nearly as good at escaping local maxima via large-scale cross-project changes. Not least of which because anyone attempting to make such changes has to be prepared for the anti-change "but the UNIX way!" flames.

Or because Linux userland developers have historically been bad at cathedrals? The bazaar has always been more suited to the Linux community, and makes Linux distinct and refreshing compared to BSDs (which are an example of cathedral done right, by the way).

I've also found that well-articulated and well-founded arguments about problems in systemd don't tend to last long, because systemd will fix them. I'd encourage people who see a legitimate technical problem with systemd to go discuss it on the systemd mailing list; you might be surprised how quickly it gets fixed, if it has substance.

If the systemd team's insistence…

>Besides all this, the main issue, for me, is how it managed to spread and ingrain itself into distributions making them dependent on it.

Because it's better than the alternatives?, don't remember systemd buying distro maintainers lol

>If you want to use an alternative to systemd on those distributions, you are usually on your own, constantly trying to fix it whenever there are breaking changes.

Of course they aren't being paid to support everything under the sun and http://islinuxaboutchoice.com/

>So is Windows :)

Then use it if it's better for you

For sure it is valuable feedback for Mozilla, but honestly as a long term user of Firefox and based on following various controversies and criticism my aggregate opinion is that many Firefox users often chose the strangest arguments.

A pinch of how "linux is not about choice"[1] would improve the discourse around Firefox.

I understand that many choices Mozilla made are dubious and that the browser is one of the most important pieces of software on a modern computer... still that xkcd looked quite relevant

[1] http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

> http://islinuxaboutchoice.com/

Hands down, this is the one of the most retard "arguments" in the whole debate.

>"ship everything and let the user chose how they want their
sound to not work" starts with fallacy and ends with disaster.

Ok, if you think so use OS X, but stop braking linux, please. (By the way, it's 2014 and my network-manager does not work, it randomly crashes and needs to be restarted. Thanks god there is wird and linux is actually about choice.)