Mastodawn

Systemd has denied to revise their policy in regards to AI.

they've also marked evidence that people gave regarding its effectiveness as off-topic, then locked the conversation.

I believe the authors have not understood the weight of the issue. Later this day, I will begin drafting an open letter to Systemd's authors under the Starlight Network umbrella of projects. EDIT: or perhaps I will take a different approach. There's many more issues I want to talk about.

Disallow usage of generative AI to write code · Issue #41085 · systemd/systemd

Component No response Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe Generative AI is actively killing people, driving up costs, and plagiarizing work from many open source developer...

GitHub

@alexia completely fucking ridiculous. at this point, we’d all be better off just recreating everything that AI has infected instead of arguing with these people.

@mrmasterkeyboard easier said than done, even just getting a hard-fork off of the ground is quite difficult, letalone a drop-in replacement

@alexia if me and the others working on EVi could do it, i'm sure anyone with enough knowledge could!

@alexia @mrmasterkeyboard i mean there's already openrc and s6 and the rest of systemd can be replaced with extra independant components on the side

putting everything in one place is exactly how we got into this mess, why recreate it ?

@SRAZKVT @alexia Just because you can recreate it doesn't mean you need to make the same choices as them too. That's the fun part of recreating things.

@mrmasterkeyboard @alexia the problem is the very design of a lot of systemd components is that each depend on several others in an incomprehensible web, so unless you're willing to cut some features, you'll need to redo the whole thing in mostly the same way

if you're fine with just a subset though, you should be mostly fine, but again, it'd be a subset, not 100% compatible

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@SRAZKVT @mrmasterkeyboard @alexia ngl, I wonder if folks can do a port of SMF to Linux? that would make me a lot more likely to want to use Linux tbh

@freya @SRAZKVT @alexia i'm not sure what SMF is

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia oh! it's a very finely scoped init system that's kind of like "what if we did systemd, but actually done properly"? Doesn't use shell scripts, has its own awareness of service states, does a lot of the same things systemd does in terms of initing but it doesn't like do more than that

@freya @SRAZKVT @alexia oh, that seems cool

i looked it up and it's a Solaris thing, i think Solaris (during the Sun days) was pretty neat

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia yeah! I use Solaris on a daily basis and I think SMF is one of the best components

@freya @SRAZKVT @alexia i need to get back to Solaris honestly and see if i could make it a part of anything... the only one i used was Sun Solaris 9 on UTM...

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia omg niiiice

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia if you want an account on one of my Solaris boxen let me know, hey?

@freya @SRAZKVT @alexia hmm, sounds cool, i'll think about that and see if i do if i start trying to use Solaris more.

(might take a while, i've got a lot of stuff on mind at the moment and... honestly, i do too much nowadays, this will take a while to get through everything i want and i keep procrastinating. apologies for the involuntary vent.)

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia nah is totally ok!

@freya @SRAZKVT @alexia although i'm curious, is it a SPARC machine and what version of Solaris may i ask?

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia SPARC yes, UkltraSPARC-IIe running a heavily modified version of Solaris 10 1/13 with the 2021-10 security patch and the FractalKit Solaris upgrade kit

@freya @SRAZKVT @alexia ooh, niice!

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 Mar 13

@mrmasterkeyboard @SRAZKVT @alexia not a terribly high spec machine, Sun Blade 150, but holy shit if it's not the most stable thing in the history of ever

SIN001E/R-SINE | ΘΔ🦈 | 🏳‍⚧Mar 14

@SRAZKVT @mrmasterkeyboard @alexia i don't think you even really need to recreate systemd in the first place though

like, i've been running runit for a while now, and have had practically zero issues; turns out the vast majority of things that "depend on" systemd literally just need their service file rewritten, which in most cases takes 5 minutes

and on a distro built around runit like Void, that's of course already done in packaging

@sinewave @mrmasterkeyboard @alexia i don't think runit is perfect (even though i run it as well, and have for 4 years now), because runit doesn't handle service dependencies, but still, s6 and openrc exist and both support those

SIN001E/R-SINE | ΘΔ🦈 | 🏳‍⚧Mar 14

@SRAZKVT @mrmasterkeyboard @alexia true, although there's a very simple (and very runit-y) solution; you just run sv check dependency and exit with nonzero if it fails

the overhead isn't particularly high since it waits a few seconds between attempts; and as it turns out not that many services even need explicit dependency handling

@mrmasterkeyboard @alexia I actually didn't understand any of it. I know about systemd. could you explain in simple words what is actually happening there?

@Rose @alexia Basically, they've allowed AI contributions by providing AI agents instructions on how to contribute, plus I also think they did some AI sloppery in documentation? (Then again, I don't really use systemd other than on my Ubuntu laptop which I will now refuse to update, and will be switching to FreeBSD soon which I predict I'll work on in around another... month or more?)

@mrmasterkeyboard @alexia another one 🤦🏼‍♀️ Any other distro that doesn't use systemd? I don't do much on my laptop, a browser it's almost all I need.

@Rose @mrmasterkeyboard

There is many. Personally I like Alpine and Void Linux. Chimera Linux is also something to look at.

@alexia @mrmasterkeyboard I would look at them, though I'm not that techey. I hope I will find something user friendly and easy to install

@Rose @alexia though at this point, Linux allowed AI into it too, so you're better off moving to FreeBSD to escape AI... or even a hobby operating system.

@mrmasterkeyboard @alexia how will be the hardware hardware compatibility on BSDs? Again I'm afraid of 'hard' techey stuff

@Rose @alexia FreeBSD is the best for hardware compatibility, but it's also nowhere near Linux.

Some of my machines that ran perfectly on Linux don't even run correctly on FreeBSD. (Missing touchpad drivers, no Wi-Fi, etc)

Honestly no OS is perfect and it depends on your hardware. If you don't want to fix stuff constantly, don't go to FreeBSD (or a hobby OS, those will be way worse...)

My advice is to keep on a Linux version prior to 2025 or if you're paranoid enough then 2022.

@mrmasterkeyboard @alexia so I think the end of the story for dummies like me is we are stucked

neocat_floof_sad

@Rose @alexia yeah until someone can properly get something good up and running. for now I’d say resist updating Linux.

@Rose @alexia A few that I know allow you to select other init systems:
Gentoo (OpenRC or systemd)
Devuan (Debian but OpenRC, sysvinit or runit)
Void Linux (runit)
Alpine too (OpenRC)

Ian Jackson Mar 14

@mrmasterkeyboard @Rose @alexia I've been running Debian with trad sysvinit for years now. It seems fine.
The procedure for a fresh install is unfortunately shell runes including halfway through the installer but should be doable by your local Debian expert. IIRC the instructions are on the wiki.
My thanks to the Debian init diversity team! (Some of whose most important contributors are also working on Devuan.)