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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • kbity@kbin.socialtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldI love systemd
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    1 year ago

    The biggest problem people have with systemd is that it’s constantly growing, taking on more functions and becoming a dependency of more software. People joke that some day you won’t be using Linux anymore, but GNU/systemd, (or as they’ve taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd) because it’s ever-growing from a simple init daemon into a significant percentage of an entire operating system.

    People worry that some day, you won’t be able to run a Linux system that’s compatible with much of the software developed for Linux without using systemd. Whether that’s a realistic worry or not I don’t know, and I don’t really have a horse in the systemd VS not-systemd race, but I can appreciate being worried that systemd might end up becoming a hard requirement for a Linux system in a way that nothing else really is - you can substitute GNOME for KDE, X11 for Wayland (or Mir, I guess), PulseAudio for PipeWire and most stuff will still work, so the idea that systemd could become as non-negotiable an element of a Linux system as the Linux kernel itself rubs people the wrong way, as it functionally makes Linux with systemd a different target platform entirely to Linux with another init daemon.





  • In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn’t really anything comparable from other companies. It’s unironically the best compact tablet I’m aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!_OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can’t put Linux on one of those and even if you could it’s ARM-based so most proprietary apps won’t work on it.

    In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don’t want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft’s devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.


  • On the flip side, it’s a rolling-release distro, so you don’t have to play a game of “what broke?” whenever you do a major version upgrade or do a clean install to avoid it, because there are no major version updates. And the AUR is pretty much the reason to use Arch outside of being at the cutting edge (which is mainly useful for using brand new hardware that hasn’t got the best support in the more conventional distros yet, like a new laptop).





  • I can only imagine how thin the margins will be on laptops that are physically incapable of running their own operating system and basically don’t qualify as general-purpose computers. The computer itself will be streamed to you over the internet and you’ll just have an IPL that handles your keyboard and mouse, the display, the network connection and the encrypted memory buffer you use to send files to your cloud PC or receive them onto a Microsoft-authorised USB device for external transfer.

    Will also be so much fun in 5-10 years when only enterprise customers are allowed the luxury of being sold a local version of Windows, so your whole laptop freezes up every time your connection is interrupted and trying to turn it on without an internet connection just takes you to a 404 page baked into the bootstrap ROM.