Here's a list of 62 volunteer-management packages. Some are web based. Some are free. Somewhere in there should be something that solves your problem.

Google, IBM, Facebook, Netflix, Random House, GE... Those are complex server installations. Your side hasn't said much of anything. Mainframes, minis, bigbox Unix have had monolithic systems for decades. I'm presenting evidence you aren't presenting any well known vendor who disagrees.

Nope. It's identity eminent domain

haha, only they might actually argue along those lines (no shame). They're also appropriating Facebook's computer resources to make these profiles operate - it's no different than seizing property or money on a small scale, and the 5th Amendment has something to say about that (n.b. I'm playing the game that the Constitution is still in effect, rather than used to paper over "trouble").

Federated systems like Tonika can provide authentication of friends - Facebook makes authentication nearly impossible.

If the nucleus really had been 50km in diameter (original estimated maximum), and if it had hit Mars, it would've significantly increased Mars' atmosphere with one blow.

Some folks have recommended nabbing some passing asteroids and detonating them in the Martian atmosphere, just to create more atmosphere as they burn up. I still don't know how they deal with the lack of gravity, though.

>>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.

Bull!

You can't run around claiming you don't want to talk about internals and then just make statements like that. You don't know what you are talking about. The fact that you don't like reality doesn't mean it isn't reality. Yes there are choices in life. Not everyone gets to have everything. Do you really think that the debates regarding network transparency for the last four decades were because of spite and that: Microsoft, Apple, Commodore, Digital, NVidia, Intel, IBM, Sun, SGI, the current X-Windows team... are just wrong while your "I don't like it, so it isn't true" is right. Grow up!

This is /. Stop cursing. Start thinking about these problems from the developer's end. Either the application and graphical buffer is shared or it is separate. Either the network protocol is intelligently decomposing graphical objects or it is oblivious to them and just passes buffers around. No you cannot have both.

If supporting the X protocol means someone else's video doesn't play right then fine, don't support the X protocol. (makes no sense to me, I can play videos all day long with seeing tearing, what ever the hell that is). Just make sure it still has the possibllity to do somethign that works like an X terminal but uses RDP or VNC or whatever protocol makes you happy.

That's what it does. There is no reason you can't build a VNC client that boots instantly on bad hardware. The VNC use case is covered by Wayland today. But that is not network transparency.

So? The least common automatically gets no support?

No. But it a well designed system when there are tradeoffs that's the group that is disadvantaged.

Somebody always must be descriminated against? Where is the logic in that?

The logic of that is we live in the real world.

I'm sure there are many others using LAN support. So what if it's the least common. It's still common enough to be important!

No it isn't. And we know that because we have data. NEC didn't leave the XTerm industry 15 years ago because sales were too strong to keep up. SunRay are selling for less than the case it worth on ebay, that's not a sign of strong demand. It is time to deal with reality. Your use case is a tiny niche. A well supported niche and one likely to continue to be supported in a limited fashion for decades. But you aren't under 2%, not 90% anymore.

Even if systemd is a clear upgrade over every single component it has its tentacles in (for the sake of argument), it isn't enough to justify refactoring a working infrastructure on a DevOps team that's already understaffed as it is.

So don't use it. But that's very different than claiming it is only for desktop and not for server. Which both of you tried and which is provably false given that the most complex server installations are pushing systemd. Devops BTW being one of the its best use cases.

Well yes. The claim these guys keep throwing around is it is "desktop only". When in reality the most complex server installation are finding it solving their problems. They are just peddling a myth because the earliest success were for desktop.

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.