I cannot even begin to describe how silly your comment is. Since when were politicians even comparable to programs? Do we "elect" a init system, as one nation united under Torvalds?
I'm hoping I was just trolled by an HN-flavored Markov Chain.
> Since when were politicians even comparable to programs?
Since people learned the power of the metaphor.
> Do we "elect" a init system
For some distros? Sure. By its nature, Linux, GNU and the open source software that goes into the ecosystem allows people to create new distributions, or choose one of the many that exist. This choice is, in some small way, like a vote. If systemd was really that bad, enough people would work around it to make it's adoption much more problematic.
If you want more than that, some distributions literally vote on features like this, and have voted specifically on systemd[1].
> I cannot even begin to describe how silly your comment is. ... I'm hoping I was just trolled by an HN-flavored Markov Chain.
I do retract my complaint about comparing politicians to programs. In its place, I complain about the process of electing a President being different from voting on an init system.
The most important point here is that distributions vote on which init system they elect. We are not all electing one init system to rule them all, across Linux. Distributions are nation-states of varying size that follow similar but sometimes incompatible rules, all derived from the same core tenets and program. So we're electing governors from the same political parties, more or less.
I think telling people to suck it up and just accept systemd as their one true init system is just silly. Regardless about how you feel about Clinton, there are always reasons to use something else.
If you need a barebones system, or something for experimentation, or something that is hardened at the price of flexibility, that is an applicable choice, and one you can make from the comfort of your own home. You can't fork the US or an individual state in the same way you can download a different distro to your Raspberry Pi.
And I could go on and on. But you're right; I suppose I could, in the end, begin to describe how silly that comment was. Even if the explanation ended up being really unwieldy and not my best writing. It might not have been wholly constructive either, but we're generally all here to have a good time.
My point is, it's a silly, leaky metaphor. And telling people to suck it up and use an actually useful tool in the comments for a distribution that's written as an elitist hobby project is similarly silly. These people aren't picketing your Debian or Arch systemd parties. They're just doing their own dang thing.
All metaphors and similes are leaky. The point is to focus on the ways it works and doesn't work, because each has the possibility to expand your thinking on a topic. The original comparison could have only worked in a singular facet, yet that would still make it a valid, correct and possibly useful simile. Here you've expanded on some ways the two things are different, which is also generally the point of using an analogy, in that it promotes that thinking as well.
> You can't fork the US or an individual state in the same way you can download a different distro to your Raspberry Pi.
Well, you can (in that you can fork the rules and structures), it's just finding the resources (people and location) to make use of this new government is hard, because we are currently resource constrained. In the past, when land was plentiful, this happened. It happened to some extent with the Pilgrims (although it mostly a separation from the prior church, not the government, although I don't doubt it was also viewed as a partial separation from the government due to the distances involved). If we start colonizing Mars at some point, I'm pretty sure there will be some more separatist movements and forking of governments.
Another way to look at this is that you can fork the government right now, you just can't supercede the rights of the current government you are part of. To follow the resource and forking metaphor, you can virtualize governments to your heart's content, but in cases where your rules conflict with the host government, you can emulate the result but you can't enforce it. That is, Ring 0 doesn't care what you think you can do, the rules are the rules.
Yeah, I'm aware, and actually thought of that while writing the comment, and specifically chose metaphor. I think it still worked better to use metaphor because I think that's the more common way to relate the items in question, and being the more abstract of the two, metaphors obviously allow for similes.
In the Linux ecosystem, generally you use whatever the majority supports, or if you use an alternative you assume responsibility for supporting it yourself. Since the majority of distros, and soon the majority of upstream, are supporting systemd, what do you think is going to be used by most commercial Linux deployments?
I'm hoping I was just trolled by an HN-flavored Markov Chain.