Recently I came up to read this thread the initial proposal is to add systemd in some kind of fashion to gnome, with Lennart suggesting new and many features coming from that.
That alone isn’t a problem until people not caring about a broken toy from him (both systemd and pulse had been and are considered as such) can keep playing with gnome with their toys (e.g FreeBSD, any non systemd linux distro). The thread then evolved in something that could be sort of summarized with systemd developer not caring about anything else but Linux and so Gnome should do as well, with extremes from other people suggesting to ditch distributions and have a Gnome OS alone.
In the light of what happened before with HAL and on a minor degree with pulse that makes me wary.
So people willing to use Gnome in Lennart opinion must probably:
– Use Linux
– Use systemd
A quick reality check tell me that:
– Sun contributed a lot to Gnome, there are plenty of BSD users hacking on Gnome and/or using it.
– systemd is still a broken increasingly complex mess and the fact it needs _that_ many linux specific features to try to work tells a lot (Remember the UNIX way: small simple things you can understand and replace quickly)
– Gnome isn’t something that doesn’t have good or better replacements (Unity and Xfce come to mind if we want to consider gtk+)
I already switched from Gnome to e17 long time ago since I want that the WM/visual shell doesn’t get in my way and let me do what I want as I want.
Keeping Posix as baseline is important. Having your software working in different environments help you spot bugs quickly, get a more wider audience and generally improve. Even if I don’t particularly like KDE still I consider their approach to make porting KDE everywhere as easy as possible laudable.
***Update***
Sebastian asked me if there could be something constructive about this post since it looks pretty much a rant. Well, most of the post IS a rant (and categorized as that) and a not so humble request to not rush adopting/forcing upon people random technologies as they are sound and tested when they are not at all.
There isn’t anything constructive to be said, I just hope that we don’t have yet another situation like the one we had with other unproven technologies forced upon people like HAL had been.
On a side note, not completely related I wonder why people wants systemd and doesn’t ask us to adopt upstart then. It is from Ubuntu as systemd is from Fedora, and Ubuntu at least tries to be present in non-desktop environments while Fedora is quite focused on the Desktop and only that.
Gentoo has OpenRC as init system. It is simpler and smaller. Works well in quite a good number of environments and for a quite large deal of situations. Surely there is space for improvements but at least does not require daemons to be written for it and had been tested in years.