As far as the init system goes, the vast majority of packages are not daemons. Only daemons require init support.

I agree. Most packages aren't a problem. But many packages depend directly on indirectly on daemons. Which is how chains of dependencies form.

But the task of maintaining a couple hundred init scripts wouldn't be hard for a small committee of volunteers.

That's easy. But that's not the task. systemd does process monitoring. Systemd has ties to PaaS. Systemd handles power management and alerting applications to be responsible regarding their power usage... All that code needs to be maintained. This is where it gets to be serious programming.

For the non-init stuff, the trick is to convince upstream developers to support diversity, which can be done by continuing to embrace open standards and APIs.

How? The fact that upstream developers liked the features of systemd and kept wanting to use them is what drove Debian to feel that they had to make the switch in the first place. Sure if the world were different Debian would have made other choices. But how do you convince developers to embrace "open standards". Especially since FreeDesktop has put out a systemd spec, there exists a systembsd which is implementing this spec so systemd is arguably an open standard.

First, the majority of the market is not PaaS vendors.

True. But the claim was, "Systemd may be fine for a desktop, but not fine for a server". Obviously the PaaS vendors are doing server.

I know of some that don't want it

Which PaaS vendor has come out against systemd?

So somebody else's problem with X11 means that my own use case gets trampled? That really sucks.

And it sucks for that your use case tramples their use case. These things are symmetrical. There are choices. Some are helped and some are harmed.

. I'm sure I'm not alone here in using network transparency.

You aren't. But you are of the 3 main cases (local, LAN, WAN) the least common.

If you want Windows Remote Desktop why not just use Windows?

They could say the same thing to you. If you want 1990 Unix why not use a 1990 Unix?

What I do really really care about in Ratpoison is the tiling I like... Can tiling be done with Wayland?

There are tiling compositors for Wayland since 2012. The algorithms for tiling are standard programming exercises there are easy to implement so they should be in the major compositors once larger issues get resolved.

Let's ignore the issue of whether the fork is a good idea. How are they going to accomplish this? Debian has thousands of packages. Upstream developers mostly like systemd. At least a few dozen packages are becoming hard dependent on systemd. Assume this number doubles every year (not unlikely). What is the Debian fork going to do? Assume that about 200 or so already have reduced functionality without systemd, again let that go up 50% per year for the next few years. How are they going to fix this?

This sounds like hundreds or not many thousands of man years of work per year every year trying to keep up. How is the Debian fork possibly going to make it? The best they can do is release a traditionalist subdistribution which uses init. OK that's easy, but that's not a fork. And frankly if they start patching a few things, why not just roll those patches either upstream or into Debian?

How is this fork going to work and what are they going to do?

The weird thing about this is that Ubuntu threw in the towel on systemd themselves. They realized they are behind and Upstart can't catch up.

Systemd may be fine for a desktop, but not fine for a server.

The PaaS vendors are all excited about systemd. So that's just simply false. It is better for server.

Linux works out of the box in the same way that MacOS or Windows does.

Not really. It is has gotten worse at this in the last decade. 10 years ago I'd say Linux is likely easer to install on random hardware. Today the relentless desire to hack up drivers has dried up (understandably a ton of work that never stops). The better desktop distributions went broke. Mandrake is gone. Caldera (pre SCO) is gone. RedHat makes a server but not an OS. YellowDog (PPC) gone.... Xandros gone. It is getting harder and harder to get Linux to install and work on the desktop.

I was using XTerms (the real thing not emulators) starting in 1988, and was using as my primary computer by late 1992. I know what XTerms are. The LTSP was just a way in the early 1990s to get Linux boxes, primarily cheap old PCs that couldn't run Windows 3.1 / 95 anymore to run XTerms. I've been familiar with that project for two decades. I'm not failing to understand you. But you were being a bit unclear about what you wanted before.

Check out the Linux Terminal Server Project ltsp.org. Can something like that be implemented in Wayland?

If by that you mean a dumb system giving you near real time performance, no it can't. That's what network transparency means, and that's what Wayland doesn't support.

X-terminal can be a truly cut down device with little more than a kernel and X. Boot time is super fast because all you are loading is a kernel plus X.

It doesn't even really need anything as complex as a Windows kernel. You can cut it way below that. X11 ran on DOS. You can easily create a dumb X-term which would be done booting before you could move your arm from the power switch to the keyboard. The NCR used an 88100 @ 20MHz and could boot in under 5 seconds.

By X11 having that do you mean PulseAudio?

There are lots of solutions. The X11 protocol is extendable one extensions that's been implemented multiple times is sound. Anyway to setup Pulse Audio: http://www.freedesktop.org/wik...

I want a terminal that is basically a dedicated second head to the main machine.

That Wayland doesn't do. You have your choice: smart networking or application and video card on the same bus. Someone might figure out some way to get that to work by running virtual machines on either side and hacking together a virtual bus that is running over the network but what you want is what X11 is optimized for. Keep running X11 as long as you can and see where the world is in 2030 or so.

See, that's my point. Wayland is taking away something that was core to X11. Wayland is a regression.

No. Wayland is a different architecture and for some use cases that different architecture is worse. For most it is better. Given any two reasonable architectural choices A and B there must be definition of reasonable be cases X where A is better and cases Y where B is better. The set of cases where Wayland is better is much larger than the set of cases where X11 is better. Remote over a LAN (lots of bandwidth, around 1ms latency) is what X11 is designed for, X11 is much better in the case it was designed for.

Your specific case, of two machines in your home will be worse with Wayland. Your either going to have to boost the other machine up to being a full desktop or accept an experience which won't be much different from what you would have over a WAN.

I'm using Ratpoison. I like frames.

Ratpoison is an X11 Windows Manager. For a lightweight window manager changing this architecture is close to a rewrite from scratch. I'd assume Ratpoison will likely never be ported to Wayland. But if you like X11 Window managers Enlightenment has ported over to being a Wayland compositor.

No, don' t try to tell me that X is too bloated to run on an embedded device.

It's not. X11 works wonderfully on mode on X-terms which had 8mb of RAM and CPUs under 100mhz. The problem with X11 is latency due to round trips not resource usage. The CPU / memory resource usage is too low to compensate for network complications the problem is not that it is too high.

That means that sooner or later I and every other Linux user will have to switch! The only thing left for disagreement is when.

Yep. Exactly.

Also, X as a Wayland client might be useful for running an individual application remotely. I like to run the whole desktop remotely, from xdm to the window manager.

Well the RDP mode of Wayland will work for Wayland applications that aren't using X11, and of course X11 will still work for those that are using X11. The RDP stuff might work for the X11 applications making it seamless or it might not, I'd assume it won't and you'll have two networking sessions.

How will something like LTSP exist with Wayland?

You mentioned you liked VNC. VNC works. But excluding VNC something like LTSP won't work. Wayland demands a smart client it won't use a dumb client. And the reason for that is because you and everyone else who does X11 in 2014 are sitting at a smart client using it as if it were a dumb client. You aren't sitting at a dumb X-term, you are sitting at a computer with lots of CPU, RAM and HD. So Wayland takes advantage of that. your computer will have to do some of the rendering. This means your computer will need graphical objects that correspond to GUI you are running. So for example if you are running KDE5 (or 6 or whatever) remotely you will need a at least KDElibs on the local machine. Otherwise you can use something like VNC (which you said you liked).

Wife: "Honey, does this dress make me look fat?"

Husband: (curls up into fetal position and starts sobbing quietly to himself)

Why would the Fuqua School of Business and the Public Library Association want to infiltrate the FBI?

[Business] Leaders are [Federal] Readers?

Yes, we are! We have increased efficiency! Used to be that one had to actually invent something useful, but we've found a way to go around all that, going directly from "something already done often, and by many" to "magic computer pixie dust, nyeh!" in one step.

And the vast majority of these patents are paid for by your asshole corporations with the full knowledge they're lousy patents to begin with.

It is the nature of capitalism to do the least possible to get the most profit. Reduce effort to zero and profit goes to infinity!

Fuck America and your deluded view about how awesome you are.

And yet, "Canada's Pants" runs the whole show.

You're a country which started off ignoring everyone else's patents and copyrights. So why the hell should the rest of the world give a shit about the stuff you do? Especially since you often just patent things other people have already invented.

Because we convinced you that we're too legit to quit. NOW who's the sucker?

Americunts go fuck yourself.

We do, regularly, and dry, too. Ever hear of Ferguson?

Then you're not exactly a rational being; you're just a barbarian.

Right!

Hopefully you get thrown in jail/fined, and hopefully you learn your lesson.

And then it goes off the rails, calling for vengeance.

Statists are just one ladder rung up from barbarians, painting a thin veneer of excuses over group-backed violence. Take the next few steps and learn about peace-based alternatives! It's the means, not the ends, that determine whether an act is just - this can be easily proven with reason.

"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." - MK Gandhi

Where does the freedom to "say what I don't like" end and harassment begin?

Jefferson had a good rule of thumb: "it neither breaks my bone, nor picks my pocket".

That's more useful than most law libraries for determining standards of justice.