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Comment Just like Gnome and Canonical? (Score 1) 681

I hope this episode would convince the Gnome folks and Canonical to revert this whole "convergence" thingy (I think that's Shuttleworth's word). Touch is nice for portable screens but not for large, fixed screens. Maybe the next generation will grow up with their hands glued to a video display even for tasks like driving and typing book reports, but until that time let the mouse and touch pad die a natural death.

Comment A popular laptop OS? (Score 5, Informative) 133

by systemDead (#47354897) Attached to: FreeDOS Is 20 Years Old
To add to the summary, FreeDOS is probably the 3rd or 4th most popular preinstalled OS for laptops, behind Windows and Mac OSX and maybe Chrome OS, but certainly higher than Ubuntu or any other desktop Linux. My HP laptop came with some version of FreeDOS that I since wiped off the disk. Installing FreeDOS gives OEMs the chance to have a nominally functional unit that can be tested for obvious hardware defects while not restricting the eventual user to their choice of a non-Windows OS.

Comment Re:icewm (Score 1) 611

by systemDead (#47140067) Attached to: Which desktop environment do you like the best?

This may have a lot to do with proprietary display drivers, sometimes not available at all for Linux (what's the status of Linux PowerVR drivers anyway?), forcing them to do everything with CPU, and Atom isn't sold for it's processing power.

Also, if you don't mind, I'll take that "all effects turned on" + "very smoothly" with a grain of salt...

Something other than proprietary drivers is at work. I've run the Windows 7 beta under QEMU-KVM, which has no 3D acceleration, and the basic (not Aero) desktop effects run smoothly. Windows appears to be using 2D rendering to produce a false 3D look. Among window managers in Linux, Enlightenment is capable of something similar. A shame that all of the so-called modern desktop environments assume the presence of 3D hardware acceleration.

Comment Re:launchd (Score 2) 533

by systemDead (#46956367) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Practical Alternatives To Systemd?

I suspect that the people responsible for systemd never even thought to look at already-existing alternatives

Poettering was most definitely aware of launchd.

Is this really Lennart Poettering's blog? I find the part where he describes the Solaris init quite ironic.

There are other init systems besides sysvinit, Upstart and launchd. Most of them offer little substantial more than Upstart or sysvinit. The most interesting other contender is Solaris SMF, which supports proper dependencies between services. However, in many ways it is overly complex and, let's say, a bit academic with its excessive use of XML and new terminology for known things. It is also closely bound to Solaris specific features such as the contract system.

Just change Solaris to Linux and "in many ways it is overly complex" and "closely bound to Solaris specific features" sounds like an apt description of systemd.

Comment Re: We'll keep on trucking without systemd garbage (Score 1) 533

by systemDead (#46956317) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Practical Alternatives To Systemd?

Keep in mind that *BSD is not alone. There are other GNU/Linux distributions that avoid it. Gentoo are among the distributions working on things like eudev (so you can keep on using udev without systemd).

But besides Gentoo, are there any other major GNU/Linux distros not planning to adopt systemd? From what I've read, Slackware is just holding out until the last minute. Among the BSDs, FreeBSD has the greatest number of packages. The only thing I don't like is the fiendish mascot.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Practical alternatives to systemd?

Submitted by systemDead
systemDead writes: I looked mostly with disinterest at Debian's decision last February to switch to systemd as the default init system for their future operating system releases. The Debian GNU/Linux distribution is, after all, famous for allowing users greater freedom to choose what system components they want to install. This appeared to be the case with the init system, given the presence of packages such as sysvinit-core, upstart, and even openrc as alternatives to systemd.

Unfortunately, while still theoretically possible, installing an alternative init system means doing without a number of useful, even essential system programs. By design, systemd appears to be a full-blown everything-including-the-kitchen-sink solution to the relatively simple problem of starting up a Unix-like system. Systemd, for example, is a hard-coded dependency for installing Network Manager, probably the most user-friendly way for a desktop Linux system to connect to a wireless or wired network. Just this week, I woke up to find out that systemd had become a dependency for running PolicyKit, the suite of programs responsible for user privileges and permissions in a typical Linux desktop.

I was able to replace Network Manager with connman, a lightweight program originally developed for mobile devices. But with systemd infecting even the PolicyKit framework, I find myself faced with a dilemma. Should I just let systemd take over my entire system, or should I retreat to my old terminal-based computing in the hope that the horde of the systemDead don't take over the Linux kernel itself?

What are your plans for working with or working around systemd? Are there any mainstream GNU/Linux distros that haven't adopted and have no plans of migrating to systemd? Or is migrating to one of the bigger BSD systems the better and more future-proof solution?

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