kinda glad I bounced off of the suckless ecosystem when I realized how much their config mechanism (C header files and a recompile cycle) fucking sucked
kinda glad I bounced off of the suckless ecosystem when I realized how much their config mechanism (C header files and a recompile cycle) fucking sucked
Because it looks cool. That’s seriously the only reason.
And it does look cool, although yeah, it is also harder to parse visually, which I suppose is why CSS has a media query specifically for asking whether the user wants reduced transparency.
As for suckless, the biggest target of their hate seems to be systemd, and there are quite a lot of reasons to recommend it. A few off the top of my head (all but one of which I have used at one point or another):
systemctl --failed)systemctl status)systemd-cgls) and optionally cleaning up (KillUserProcessesinlogind.conf) user sessionsloginctl enable-linger)ProtectHome,InaccessiblePaths,SystemCallFilter,CapabilityBoundingSet, etc)Requisite=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan.device+WantedBy=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan.device= “don’t starthostapdunless the Wi-Fi dongle is plugged in, and stop it if the dongle is unplugged”)journalctl -p warning -b -u smbd= “give me all log entries made bysmbd, of warning level or higher, since the last reboot”)it has to be said that a lot of systemd’s features are broken if you’re operating a system without a dbus-enabled desktop manager or are running in an embedded environment. that describes all my systems except my Steam Deck, where I’m thankful for the parts of its game console-like features that systemd enables, though I do wish there were a good alternative that did not (via network effects) give firm control over a big portion of the Linux userland to a big corporation like IBM and its associated development practices
with all that said, suckless init ain’t it. it’s an extremely simple init that reminds me of the deterministic init systems you’d usually see in something like an android phone — ideal if you need to work around broken hardware with a strict boot order, but awful for almost everything else. there are much better options for an alternative init out there, and I’d prefer to use any of them
Huh? Most of systemd’s features, including all in the above list, work even if you have no GUI installed at all.
I’m not seeing it. This isn’t Chromium, where it takes an army of world-class developers just to keep it up-to-date enough to be fit for its purpose. If systemd were hard-forked right now, and the new maintainer did little more than the occasional bug fix, systemd would still be useful for the foreseeable future.
user session features don’t work properly unless your DE sends session start/end information to systemd (and when I found this out, only gnome, kde, and enlightenment did). this breaks various systemd features in surprising ways; I found out about this when my user services wouldn’t work, but I stopped keeping track of what was broken when I realized it was all WONTFIX anyway
historically, hard forking systemd has gone about as well as hard forking bitcoin, for very similar reasons. technologically, systemd forks tend to accumulate compatibility issues with the rest of userland very quickly due to breaking API and functionality changes in the interdependent systemd process ecosystem (and these breakages can very quickly propagate to downstream programs — a breakage in logind can be expected to be catastrophic for auth in general, for example). note too that breaking changes in the systemd API are rarely signposted in advance, which makes the job of a systemd fork and its dependent distros even harder. practically speaking, this means that a systemd fork must either excise the service ecosystem entirely (and would probably be better off just being a completely different init system at that point) or must have the wealth and support of a very large corporation behind it. this is similar to the technological means by which cryptocurrency projects maintain control: in a fork, the chain with more wealth behind it quickly becomes the longer one, and the shorter chain is extremely vulnerable to various attacks.
socially, both cryptocurrency projects and systemd possess notably toxic communities which severely punish forks and dissent, which is also used as a mechanism by which control over the project is maintained. the upshot to this is an additional high cost to the morale and community resources of a fork, which particularly harshly punishes forks run by individuals and small teams.