I dislike this article for the ad-hominem attack alone. It would have been just as easy to get the point across by dubbing it “the systemd-ization of GNU/Linux”.
If the author really wished for more competent developers to spend their time on GNU/Linux, I recommend they don’t attack individual developers, regardless of their opinion :).
It's not just SystemD though. PulseAudio displays exactly the same properties. I think if anything OSS participants are too conflict-averse, too unwilling to identify specific individuals as being the problem (I'm thinking of the sorry scalaz CoC saga, where the whole thing could've been avoided if anyone (and I'm as much to blame as anyone else) had been willing to stand up and say that Tony Morris in particular was causing a problem).
But these days, PulseAudio just works. No one has come up with a good alternative. Especially not one with the same features and level of integration. Couldn't it be that audio is just not that easy to get right, and Pulse is taking the flak because it's working on an impossible problem no one else works on? Like there hasn't really been any improvement in sysvinit in the last two decades?
I'm also not happy with the "those who actually use the software" in the article. I use systemd. I love systemd. It's been rock solid for my servers and desktops, its easier to use than sysvinit and it has features that I love that other systems don't have.
Also I disagree with the "unaccountable cliques of developers" thing. All important distros have independently decided to go with systemd. The people creating the distros and making that decision are the people that have to work with systemd most, and most directly. They are the experts. Compared to them, the author of the article is not.
TL;DR: My audio works out of the box now thanks in part to Lennart Poettering, so what are you talking about.
> But these days, PulseAudio just works. No one has come up with a good alternative. Especially not one with the same features and level of integration.
Jack was fine. OSS was fine once it got software mixing support. I can see that hotplugging a different device might be useful for some people but IME it causes more problems than it solves (particularly when you get surprisingly loud playback on something you've just plugged in, or conversely if plugging in your headset turns off your speakers).
> Like there hasn't really been any improvement in sysvinit in the last two decades?
There were plenty of innovative experiments (runit, nosh, ...), it's just because they played nice and didn't get software to become that-init-system-only no-one was forced to adopt them. It's (maybe) a failure of distribution politics that no distribution was willing to go beyond sysvinit (just as many distributions still ship basic cron or syslog implementations, or default to sendmail rather than much better modern alternatives). But forcing it in the underhanded way systemd did can't be the answer.
> Also I disagree with the "unaccountable cliques of developers" thing. All important distros have independently decided to go with systemd.
It's not exactly independent. The distros were strong-armed into doing so by gnome (which made systemd a hard dependency), which in turn is controlled by redhat.
> TL;DR: My audio works out of the box now thanks in part to Lennart Poettering, so what are you talking about.
Pottering broke my audio and my boot (twice). I want him to stop breaking my computer.
On a larger scale I fear he may have permanently sabotaged GNU/kFreeBSD and operating system innovation in general. If Pottering had been around in the days of GNU it would have been impossible to swap in Linux, so we'd've been stuck waiting for the HURD.
If the author really wished for more competent developers to spend their time on GNU/Linux, I recommend they don’t attack individual developers, regardless of their opinion :).