Systemd Controversy Not Going Away Quietly

If you thought the systemd argument was settled, I'm not sure you'd be correct. Paul Venezia is back on the case today saying folks are continuing to blog, thread, mailing list, and forum about their problems with systemd. Katherine Noyes noted the trend in her Blog Safari today as well. Her first example says Linux is being turned into "OS X or even Windows."

Paul Venezia said today that although the systemd controversy seems to be settled, "the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise." systemd has been a part of popular distros for a couple of years now and users complained to deaf ears about the lack of control and usable logs.  But Venezia says it's still "not too late to speak out." He noticed some saying that "BSD is looking better and better." But he hit upon the wide-reaching trend that's been disturbing most old-school Linux users:

A larger trend toward users who appear to believe that reading manuals and learning OS internals is bad, and we should plaster over all of that mumbo-jumbo with a nice, sleek -- and completely opaque -- management layer. This "learning is hard" mentality is very damaging for Linux as a service platform.

Venezia is primarily concerned with the server side of Linux, but many desktop users would have never left Windows if Linux had just been a different horse of the same color. He says developers are trying to "reinvent Windows" and concludes, "It's not pretty."

Katherine Noyes set out on a similar course recently and found not just server users having issues with systemd. She said one blogger says he feels "stuck" and he doesn't like feeling "stuck" with Linux. That was the whole point of moving to Linux for many of us. Another said, "I really like the idea of text file configurations, of simple tools that do one thing well and can be combined. And binary blobs? Seriously?" Another blogger Noyes quotes said, "Ultimately it throws away everything that worked and offers very little in return." He added, "When something goes wrong, it is far harder to troubleshoot."

In other news, Linux kernel developer arrested in Russia, For 50 percent of developers, open source is a 9-to-5 job, and Rebooting on Mars.