Sadly he has more influence on the distros than you seem to think. And still he displays the mentality of why they all fail.

You do realize initd is a huge problem right? It sort of prevents the entire "just working" thing for the non-tech savy people who don't have a lot of spare time on their hands.

Then you got lucky, statistically speaking Linux has a very crappy track record. And I've installed Linux on a lot of different hardware over the years. Always there is one thing that hangs up unless you buy specific hardware and have some luck finding configuration files of somebody else.

Weird eh, worst case scenario I download the driver from the manufacturer website and install it. And that generally does the trick on Windows, no configuration and digging through files required. Though I suppose this is something which could actually be fixed by systemd.

Saying Windows 8 sucks fell out of fashion ages ago, especially since 8.1 came around.

Apple/OSX, lol. That summarizes my comment about Apple software and hardware. And Acer is still a lot better than Compaq used to be.

Its Intel, sadly the driver again requires specific configurations to be fully functional. And there's no hope of ever getting WiDi to function properly either.

Again, not going to shop for specific hardware just to make an OS work. If you can't even support Rockwell/Conexant and Realtek properly I wouldn't you have good hardware support.

On servers its not uncommon, but you'd be amazed what's out there. Contrary to common belief web servers aren't the only thing being run. On super computers its usually a heavily customized version, you could just as well use BSD as starting point to be honest. On smartphones it has been so heavily modified that you wouldn't recognize it if you start taking a closer look at it. And in terms of embedded systems I commonly run into non-Linux things. In fact when we step away from ARM I very often see very specific RTOS implementations that have nothing in common with Linux. NetBSD is very common, custom things even more so. You'd be amazed how far you can get with a few lines of assembly and a C or Ada compiler in a few hours.

He's a prime example of the mentality that keeps Linux from achieving mainstream desktop and laptop use.

Now if the default worked I'd love to do that, sadly it rarely does. (Disclaimer: I don't shop for linux compatible hardware, I just shop for what gives the best performance for the least cash like most people do.)

Then break it, afraid to take a leap of faith? People with more control over this than you have chosen systemd, if you don't like it do something about it: make an alternative available. If enough people agree they'll take you into account, if they don't then you were clearly wrong and you'll have to drop it in a year or two. Instead you're now wasting several hundreds of man years on complaining about it. And by pointing at Gnome you're not exactly convincing me. Gnome is a pest that should have died aeons ago,

I suggest if there is ever an event nearby where he speaks that you talk to him for half a minute, lets see how much of your view of said person is left standing. He's an annoying jerk who lives in the eighties who didn't yet get the memo that not everyone is spying on him or is strictly interested in what he thinks. But lets not get into detail about this one.

You don't need a person like that to stand up for your principles, if you must find somebody to stand up for them I'd say go for Linus. He might be a jerk, but he's not an obnoxious paranoid unreasonable person.

I'm fairly confident that your community runs more on folks like me (engineers who use this sort of software during their working hours and patch stuff up the moment they run into a major issue) than you realise. Though I've realised long ago Linux is pointless to invest time in, hence my preference for FreeBSD. The key difference is that in the FreeBSD community people don't complain constantly. If they run into an issue they fix it instead of whining about it on Slashdot for half a year.

I have yet to see evidence of this statement. Every computer I install linux on, I must point out this is on recent hardware and often laptops, I usually end up having to fiddle with the driver settings because some person somewhere decided that having the default settings automatically loaded into configuration files was a bad idea. Keep in mind the Windows driver figures out these things by itself, mostly because it doesn't have to take into account 50000 different possible locations for said configuration file. Also: Register! But that's a whole other debate. On the other hand, Windows 7 pretty much automatically installed everything by itself the moment it had network connectivity. And I haven't run into a codec issue in years, because quite frankly nobody still uses Windows Mediaplayer.

And even that is false.

Pretty sure they aren't.

I actually use Linux at work occasionally (Cadence software, yuck), and manage a few FreeBSD servers for hobby purposes. So I am very much familiar with the subject. But I disagree with your assessment. Based on my personal experience many of the scientific applications you speak of do actually run on clusters these days. And pretty much all the clusters I've encountered so far have very different needs from mainstream Linux distributions anyway.

The other software tends to run locally on Windows machines, because lets face it: you're a company and you want market share, you are going to target Windows. With the exception of a few tools I can't state much reasons to run Linux on desktop these days, and even when its necessary the software is usually unpolished, difficult to use, badly documented, and targeted at a very niche market. Half the problems are due to the very fractured system currently used by many linux distros. If you can simply tie down the sort of software you can expect you greatly reduce the difficulties in making things work. Like in the electronics industry we often run into crapware from Cadence and Mentor Graphics which is down right torture to use if you don't use the exact same software setup as the developers used.

And if it takes you days to figure out how to do something on windows you're either doing parallellisation over network, which Windows is indeed terrible at. Or you've never written software for Windows before, which does take some getting used to. But at least you don't have to recompile the executable 20 times for every different flavour and you don't have to mess with GNU Make or GCC, which I consider bonus points

Flexibility is all nice, until you actually want to get something done. You either standardize a series of interfaces, which has NOT been done, or you force something on everyone. But unless you do either of those you're always going to have a system that's half way in limbo for practical applications. I can't say I particularly love linux for any specific thing: for desktops Windows works best, for servers FreeBSD seems to do the job nicely, and for embedded systems we either write something up ourselves or go for NetBSD. The only place where Linux seems to be loved is clusters and super computers, and there you usually have a bunch of admins doing their best to hide the nasty things behind a whole series of customized scripts and tools.

So to summarize it, while I certainly don't mind you using a system for hobby purposes. The rest of us sort of need to get our job done and don't have the time to spend 2 days looking for a solution to something that just works on another operating system. If I have 2 days of spare time there are a million other things I'd love to get finished, forcing a linux distro to work isn't one of them. So please fork a distro for your own purposes or stop whining about systemd.

I heavily disagree with you on that. But I'll leave it to yourself to figure out why having a centralized system isn't a bad idea.

First of all 1.5 billion, not billions. They also sell a lot more than just their flavour of Linux, which many people seem to forget. (Its all explained pretty well on their website.)

Granted the Stallman comment is a bit old fashioned, but still applies considering his recent whining. But I heavily disagree on the driver remark. If you mean old hardware, sure it has better support. On the other hand if you're running a recent system, lets say a laptop. Forget about having a smooth install unless you buy very specific models of specific brands. Even my ThinkPad, which was rated as having "good" linux support has shoddy WiFi drivers at best, the soundcard fails to operate without me performing quite a lot of manual configuration, and things like free-fall protection for the harddrive you can just sort of forget about. To give you an idea, I installed Debian on my laptop and it took two days to get it up and running. Keep in mind I am very familiar with FreeBSD so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with configuring this type of system. I then proceeded to install Windows 7, other than spending half an hour fixing the bootloader I pretty much only had to install the network driver and Windows did most of the work. On Linux I had to actively invest time in it, time that I could have spent doing other things. And the whining about Windows 8 is also rather old. While I must admit I still run 7 on my home systems, at work I use 8 on a daily basis. Just disable the charms bar, and have it jump to desktop at boot: annoying features disabled.

And so much became clear, but they should just shut up their clapper already or get to work.

Ever realised that it might actually be desired? Its simply that people who disagree are generally a lot more vocal. I have yet to see any unbiased statistics on the well-informed people's opinion of systemd.

That sounds like a steep request, it would require a skill other than whining about systemd and the position of female employees in technology companies though.

While it all sounds nice, you do realize 99.99% of the population just sort of wants their computer to work. We don't strictly care too much about your love/despise of some piece of software you didn't pay a dime for, didn't invest any time in writing, and then whine about being used/write love stories to. This sort of behaviour is exactly why projects like a Linux distro, or god forbid GNU/Hurd, never make it to mainstream software. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. If you want the Linux eco-system to be accepted start by getting rid of Stallman, write some damned drivers, make an easy to use system that doesn't require 5 hours of Googling on how to get a laptop soundcard to work. If you invested half the energy you folks use for whining about systemd into actually making an alternative available you might actually get something done.

Both from a technical academic nature, and a pure R&D perspective this is very weak argumentation. I'll put it this way: "weak confidence" as you call it never passes the cut. Applying silly non-concrete statistics is more expensive than actually doing the real complete test runs with all possible parameters in many cases. Additionally small sample sizes like this are horribly biased in many cases. Since the technical ones are more iffy (the reasons are often obscure measurement errors), so let me give you a psychology example: We all know the psychology major handing out flyers on campus for a survey, he promises a particular gift (e.g. a can of redbull) and hands out these flyers in a few very specific locations (e.g. faculty of electrical engineering) Then your entire sample group will be highly educated early 20 year olds, and maybe some university faculty. So if you combine that with a small sample size of about 50 you get the most biased world view possible. The same with technical datasets, your small samples will usually be from a single manual production run which means environmental conditions and operator skill and error have a huge impact on the end result.

Considering this is really really basic statistics I'd say anybody we want on Slashdot is already very familiar with these things. If we wish to introduce post quality standards I suggest we give it an IEEE Spectrum approach: low quantity of quality articles with decent journalism about technical subjects. Not to say they never publish bullshit, but in general they seem to get it right. Then again, I think I'll just move over there.

What we should really do is shut down the psychology and sociology departments and insert a symlink to McDonalds, Burger King, and Starbucks application forms. I should put it this way: Having a bunch of pissed off folks, who would normally study psychology and then kept whining about how they couldn't find a job, serving your coffee or heart attack inducing burger is better than having them publish crap like this.