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

[Paul Boddie]

On Wednesday 7. December 2016 12.56.06 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> 
>  not sure i fully understand what you're saying, but i'm aware that
> devuan is supporting a huge alternative range of init systems: the
> only one they *don't* support is... systemd!
> 
>  now, it may surprise you to learn that i've spoken to them and
> pointed out to them that if they want to not appear to be hypocritical
> (i.e. directly at odds with their stated goal of being "inclusive"),
> they really, *really* need to include systemd as one of the options.
> 
>  however, because they've gone the "reacting against" polarisation
> route, which is just as equally bad as the forced-adoption route done
> by pretty much everyone else, there's still a lot of bad blood that
> needs to be healed first before anything like that can even *remotely*
> be considered.

I can understand where the Devuan people are coming from, though. It is a 
reaction against a form of change that they feel undermines choice and, for 
many, causes work for work's sake.

Consequently, if they are to resist demands by people to change their code to 
work with the systemd ecosystem (because it is more convenient for the people 
making the demands, for instance), and since systemd as an ecosystem itself 
rather seems to make demands on others but not yield to any itself, then the 
most effective strategy is to eliminate all parts of that ecosystem from the 
distribution and not give people the excuse to foist the various systemd 
technologies on others.

I actually don't have a strong position on systemd, but I do note that it does 
cause extra work because I recently had to guide someone through a Debian 
Jessie installation on an embedded system, and without them going through the 
effort of building a newer kernel (with all the accompanying quality assurance 
to see if a new kernel works as well as the old one, once they set up cross-
compilation toolchains, of course), I had to find out how to switch out 
systemd because the system will refuse to boot with it enabled, thanks to 
systemd's additional demands on various kernel features.

Fortunately, Debian does still support sysvinit, and enough time has passed 
that it is possible to multistrap and just specify sysvinit-core and have 
everything realise that you want sysvinit and not systemd-initd (or whatever 
they've called it) as the init system, but I gather that various hacks were 
previously needed to persuade apt and other things of such intent. In contrast 
to claims of choice, it really doesn't inspire confidence that warnings appear 
about using other init systems, however, nor indeed does the apparent delay in 
getting the tooling up to speed with such choices.

(I'm a bit aghast at the need to have libraries lying around to test for 
things, especially things that aren't there. I remember bizarre suggestions in 
ancient discussions about opening graphical programs in a generic fashion on 
Free Software desktops, where the suggested interface to such capabilities was 
to dynamically load such shared libraries and then call functions in them, 
clearly optimised for the random C-only developer who thinks that raw 
performance must take a back seat every time and that a request to open a Web 
browser must be done in as few cycles as possible, even though that request is 
a miniscule portion of the time to actually fulfil such a request. Eventually, 
common sense prevailed and xdg-open - a *program*, like one would expect in 
the Unix tradition - was born.)

[...]

>  y'know... the current hypothesis i'm floating in my head is that the
> full-time paid-up software libre projects are running at such a faster
> pace than the volunteer-driven ones that the full-time paid-up
> developers completely swamp and overwhelm the volunteer-driven ones.

I've had that impression for a while now. Indeed, the phenomenon of the well-
resourced organisation dominating or capturing a Free Software project is long 
understood: you have that kind of thing with stuff like WebKit, for instance. 
Combine that with permissive licensing advocacy where the only thing 
encouraging cooperation with the "upstream" of a permissively-licensed project 
is if upstream is well-resourced, and you have a mechanism for a kind of 
pilfering of the commons.

And then there's this cultivation of the noble "open source" developer who 
gives their work away (permissively licensed, of course) to curry favour with 
their corporate betters. Either that or the software they write is a purely 
hobbyist endeavour to "scratch their own itch" or whatever. It all adds up to 
putting the individual in their place in some kind of neoliberal narrative 
posing as altruism.

Paul

P.S. Where Devuan might be interesting, regardless of the systemd aspect, is 
the way it has needed to find ways of filtering Debian. Such activities are 
also done by FSF-compliant distributions and there may be some benefit in 
those distributions evaluating the Devuan tools for their own purposes.