[sf-lug] ... bring down systemd, Devuan?, choices, Usenet, ...

[Michael Paoli]

Those that are obsessed with reinventing the wheel,
will generally do so ... and poorly, at that.  Repeating
many mistakes that were made before, and occasionally
coming up with new mistakes ... though generally not
totally and fundamentally new - mostly just the same
old bad goop all over again, but in slightly different
form, and failing to learn from the history, and pick
up problems and errors, from various problems that weren't
present had they not "reinvented" whatever.

That's not that systemd doesn't have it's useful/positive
points.  And I think Debian has also done a fine job
of pulling much of the worst of it out of Debian.

And Debian is also about freedom and choice.  Sure, systemd is
currently the default on Debian, but it's definitely not the only
init system available on Debian.  I manage a fair number of Debian
systems.  All of which are Debian GNU/Linux 8.x (jessie)
or newer - so they all would have systemd by default at install
or when upgraded to 8.x jessie.  And, on all but one of 'em,
I'm thus far running systemd ... because, at least thus far,
all but one of 'em has given me zero problems with systemd.
And the one that's not running systemd?  Yeah, systemd was
annoyingly problematic and non-cooperative when I did the
upgrade to jessie - so after about half an hour to an hour
of trying to get it to play nice and basically work, I booted
the earlier init system - which worked fine - and then later
took the well documented steps to effectively disable use of
systemd in Debian - and thus far that's been perfectly fine and
haven't looked back.  I'll probably revisit the issue when I
upgrade to whatever's after jessie and when that has become
the new stable.  In the meantime, no rush at all - the old
init system works fine, no need to abandon Debian just 'cause one
doesn't like a package or default package or some set of default
packages in it.  I mean really, surely we don't all run Linux
because we like defaults and the default operating systems generally
sold and loaded on computers now, do we?  Yeah, make some actually
choices, and when and where one doesn't want the default, well, pick
or configure as one wishes to relevant non-default configuration.
Y'all don't use default passwords, do you?  Default login names?
Go to nothin' but default web sites?  Yup, make some decisions,
take some actions, don't have to stick with defaults.

And the systems I am running systemd on?  Thus far I've not yet seen
a compelling reason to switch them off of systemd.
"If it aint broke, don't fix it." ... well, kind of, at least.
Reasonable prevention and maintenance is good too.

Reminds me too - as others have often well made the point ...
person installs a Linux distribution, doesn't like it (or most
notably and more specifically, its default desktop environment
and its default configuration thereof), and ... abandon's the entire
distribution, and goes on to yet some other distribution.  Yet many,
if not most distributions, support various desktop environments.
Two, three, four or more - not at all atypical.  Not to mention all
the configuration and customization one could potentially do for any
given desktop environment.  Do I run the (more-or-less) default
desktop environment on my favorite distribution?  No, not at all
really.  I think I may still have it installed so I can fire it up if
I want to (e.g. to test something out under it) ... but the vast
majority of the time, not using that default desktop environment.
And it's not too hard to, e.g. check what desktop environments are
available, do a bit of research to see how the different desktop
environments look and behave, key differences among them, etc.,
then pick one or two or three that sound like good fits, and try
them - for the most part, selection of distribution - at least for
most major distributions - can be quite to highly independent of
which desktop environment one runs on the distribution.

Ah, Usenet.  Once in a while, I still go on Usenet ... sometimes just  
to try and
find an at least moderately interesting question to answer ... hopefully
a more interesting and challenging one.

Here, some fun challenges I've run across before (from Usenet and other
sources):

Find all the five letter palindromes in /usr/share/dict/words (or wherever
the word list is on your system, or install it, or likewise solve for
comparable file of words (one word per line).

For a given directory, list it and any subdirectories recursively
thereof, which are "leaf" directories - all directories which contain
no (sub-)directories (we're not counting . and ..).


> From: maestro <maestro415 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [sf-lug] A command short enough to be tweeted can bring  
> down systemd
> Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2016 17:50:01 -0700

> usenet eh?...
> you ARE an edgy girl ;-))>
>
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 4:58 PM, Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com
>> wrote:
>
>> Hi LUGers,
>>
>>     Found this tidbit floating around Usenet today
>>
>> <http://betanews.com/2016/10/07/systemd-vulnerability-linux-
>> crash/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=
>> Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN>
>>
>>     So now the simplicity of PCLinux OS and Devuan are rewarded.
>>     Many other systems will have a problem though.
>>     Maybe they will reverse course on systemd use...