[Arm-netbook] new development laptop needed, looking at dell xps 13 9350

[Philip Hands]

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> writes:

> On 12/5/16, Julie Marchant <onpon4 at riseup.net> wrote:
>>>  by contrast: fvwm2 is an 8 *megabyte* install size.  gnome is...
>>> what... several hundred megabytes?  latest versions force you to use
>>> wayland?  and systemd?? fuck that!!  absolutely no way i'm tolerating
>>> that.
>>
>> GNOME does not force you to use Wayland. I don't know where you got this
>> idea from. Wayland is still supported experimentally (X is used by
>> default, Wayland support is quite buggy) last time I checked. As for
>> systemd, GNOME requires logind, but not the entire systemd package.
>
>  that requires libsystemd, which i refuse to have on any machine that
> i am managing.

I really think that you should draw a line between libsystemd0 and
systemd itself (whether running as init or not).

One of the functions that libsystemd provides is the ability to check
whether systemd is available, so if you want there to be a vibrant
ecosystem of packages that do not require systemd, then it's probably
worth encouraging people to write programs that check if systemd is
available, and then behave sensibly if it is not.

The alternative forces the systemd refuseniks to fork every package that
might find any (even optional) use for systemd services, which a) there
is not sufficient manpower for, and b) removes any pressure for the
upstream to put effort into accommodating your needs, so they don't
bother to maintain/add the conditional code.

That said, I don't have a lot of time for Gnome either, but that might
be because a) I prefer Xmonad so I'm not their target audience, and b) I
run Debian, and we're making life difficult for Gnome maintainers by
continuing to ensure that using systemd as init is optional (unlike most
other distros), and also constraining systemd when it is running as init
to be backwards compatible with sysvinit in various ways, which means
that there are things that Gnome can safely assume on the likes of
Fedora which might not be true on a particular Debian install, so I
guess Gnome on Debian has interesting little bugs that don't appear
elsewhere.

If everyone that doesn't like systemd runs screaming away from Debian,
shouting about libsystemd0, and doesn't bother to report bugs where our
ambition to support other inits falls short, then they just ensure that
the future they fear comes to pass.

A more nuanced response might be wise.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
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