Re: [LAU] Synths for live use

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 09:06:29PM +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> Regarding to a distro I recommend to take a look at the Arch general
> mailing list. At the moment I avoid using Arch. There's a hard
> censorship regarding to questions about how to get Arch working stable,
> after it's needed to switch to systemd, there are still enough requests
> regarding to issues caused by the transition. People who did criticize
> the transition to systemd too much were banned. No, I'm not one of the
> banned users. For sure, the time will come when I'll use Arch Linux
> again, but at the moment I prefer to go with a more stable distro.

Sure, Arch users have been going through some non-trivial changes lately,
and the way the Arch devs have sold systemd to their users was a complete
marketing disaster, on the same scale as LP's own efforts. And they know
it.

Currently the list is moderated (it wasn't before), and any discussion
of 'political' objections to systemd is banned. But support for technical
issues is still OK. And I've had some very interesting discussions on
controversial issues related to systemd in private email exchanges with
some of the Arch maintainers. There's no bad intentions on their side,
and they're having a hard time themselves.

Of course the current state of of affairs *does* completely ignore
that there may be valid 'political' objections to what RH is doing,
which is basically to make Linux 'corporate friendly', even if that
hurts the individual user. And it's being done by spreading a lot
of disinformation. None of the systemd advocates ever mentioned for
example the real reason why it uses such an ugly configuration syntax
and Windoze format files. But you can read it on LP's blog pages: it's
because there's a lot of Windoze based 'corporate IT management tools'
using that format. It's a detail of course, but quite revealing.

The Arch devs also completely ignored the fact than many objections
to systemd are not about the way it replaces pid 1 and the init scripts.
That aspect of system is actually quite a good thing. But it also pulls
in the (IMHO) braindead 'seat and session' based access control and a
security model (based on polkit) that if taken far enough completely
subverts the native 'unix' one. It may be very convenient for a distro,
or for a corporate IT manager, to be able to bypass an existing security
policy by just dropping a package-specific file in some directory when a
user installs that pacakage. But it's a nightmare for an admin who wants
to stay in control of his system, in particular on a distro that assumes
frequent routine updates such as Archlinux.

-- 
FA
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia.
It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris
and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)
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