Yikes! Yup.

I've used gentoo for a long damn time, so my ability to objectively gauge it's difficulty is probably long gone.

That said, I for one think gentoo has gotten far easier to install and especially maintain. The default profiles are no longer the joke they once were, and most packages are using more generic high-level use flags so you have one --with-feature-x instead of the old --with-compat-mode-z --with-doublefork --with-some-other-unrelated-but-required-flag type stuff you had years ago, which translates into much simpler USE flags. You can actually leave make.conf relatively untouched and still end up with a decently functional system, especially if you want a desktop and go for one of the desktop profiles.

Portage is also a lot smarter these days, being able to resolve many issues that it previously would have died on. When it does run into problems, the descriptions these days are much nicer than before!

I'm being completely honest when I say that systemd has been the first major gentoo headache I've had in a while. Everything was just dandy then suddenly I'm having to switch packages around (udev being the big one), and having to blacklist udev and systemd because so much random shit pulls them in (and a -systemd use flag isn't enough), and then uninstalling a bunch of random packages (like some power management widget that got pulled in by god knows what for some reason).

I know you've probably written off gentoo at this point, here's a completely random bit of usage advice:

- Set use flags as you need them, even if this means re-installing the same thing multiple times. This avoids big important packages being pulled in as mere dependencies (though you can add them to the world list afterwards) and more importantly lets you set up and configure everything one at a time and makes it more likely that you'll notice error messages.
- Don't be afraid of package.keywords, especially for very specific use flags.
- Avoid gnome if possible. I don't know wtf it is with gnome, but it seems to be the poster child for weird and hard to diagnose issues as well as crazy dependency trees.
- Pay attention to what virtual packages are doing. Usually they are in your best interest, but not always.
- Don't bother using ebuilds for web apps

A very well written proposal that outlines many of the concerns I (as a non-Debian user) and I suspect most have about systemd. It’s worming it’s way into everything for the sake of better integration, which it may deliver on, but this goes against much of the traditional Linux spirit of small self-contained bits that can be swapped out at will.

In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place. Personally I want a hackers OS that I can play with and tweak as I feel like, but I accept that many people basically want open source windows or even just zero cost windows (i.e. free as in my wallet).

I hope Debian rolls back on their decision. I doubt this will happen, but at least we’ll get some more discussion in a somewhat visible forum. I may not agree with a lot of the Debian mentality, but they are very good at thinking about and discussing things, so I think this will be good overall.

And before someone says "just use gentoo", I do, and have for almost a decade (I started using it fairly soon after it came out). The problem is that systemd, being basically a virus at this point, is causing exactly the kind of problems mentioned in the proposal. I've had to use the blacklist for the first time in a while because *McBane voice* the use flags, they do nothing!

Thus the invention of the "mobile version", which I think generally works out a lot better than a page designed to serve both (and _way_ better than a mobile version designed to look ok on a desktop).

But that said, I don't do much web dev. I'd certainly never do it professionally. Not just because I think it's an absolute mess of an industry, but because my skillset in that area is about 10 years out of date (as you probably guessed) and was never that solid to begin with.

It _kinda_ does if you do as was said and define all the common properties for both and then the specific properties for each individually.

It's not really inheritance as you would find in c++ or java, and not nearly as flexible, but it is kinda there.

I still just use tables when I delve into the wonderful world of web dev. CSS has replaced coloring and styling of text, but positioning.. screw that. Proper or not, tables worked fine then, and they still work fine.

That's actually no longer totally the case. There is even a comment in the code:

That said, I totally agree with everything else you said. CSS is an example of fixing a barely existent problem by introducing a bunch of major ones. Tables worked fine, and could have been cleaned up or replaced/augmented by something made for layout.

I'm not a web developer, so maybe you grow to like it, but I always found div based layout unintuitive as hell ("oh, I need to float left this div to make it centered and set the block to inline"). I still just use tables any time I dabble with that stuff. They still work!

Bah!

To make things worse, I think I originally typed it as "myself", which I felt was wrong so I changed it to I. :(

Interestingly enough I don't think I'd use the word at all, but if I did, maybe.

I'd be more likely to say "The steam shovel belonged to her" vice "The steam shovel was hers" or "It's her steam shovel".

The problem is likely the same as on gentoo. Sure you don't have to install systemd, but a shit tonne of stuff will depend on it, or have dependencies that depend on it. I imagine the situation will be far worse on binary based distros as they tend to pull in a shit tonne of libraries and sometimes actual programs because of some minor but tightly coupled feature that didn't warrant a patch or a -non-<whatever> version. As I said in a prior post, on gentoo I had to straight up blacklist the systemd package and rely on portage failing because telling everything not to compile with systemd support isn't enough!

Slackware ditched gnome because it became too big of a pain to include it without including systemd.

The whole thing is just very anti-linux imo.

It's a trade-off. Mac, and to some degree Windows, benefit greatly from tight integration, but it comes at the cost of flexibility. The preference of flexibility over user friendliness and even functionality was what drew me to Linux and specifically Gentoo in the first place.

Systemd is probably not a terrible idea by itself, it just goes against the traditional linux mindset, which is probably why it's hitting so much resistance from people like me who bought into that mindset more so than the functioning system.

See the thing is I have no problem being either, especially not online.

And with any luck, someday you'll have a bootloader and a single binary named linux?

I'm sure they'll add a text editor sooner or later. The systemd operating system will rise if we don't slay it now!

I accept that we have rules, and when dealing with people I work with, or in situations where someone else is going to be harmed if I don’t represent myself well I definitely make the effort. Here though, the only person who looks stupid if I use poor grammar is I, so I don’t feel particularly bad about it.

And as said, if you and your like minded peers want to think of me as an idiot, I'm totally cool with that.

It's not about learning grammar. I know the difference between possessive it's and contraction it's. It's not even about the effort associated with choosing the right one. Using a possessive without an apostrophe feels weird and unnatural, and as grammatical correctness in a casual context isn't a priority for me, I chose not to. It's just one of many completely random and arbitrary things I decided to do, and then stuck with because I'm like that.