esa

Yes, always has been.

There’s also no uppercase d in systemd, the word is entirely lowercase (but I’ll still write it with an uppercase s at the start of sentences).

Yeah, the manpages for systemd are large but also informative. Most of us only use a small subset of the features—much like we never explored everything possible with separate init programs.

Having used Linux on the desktop for some two decades and worked as a Linux sysadmin for a good while I don’t miss the init scripts. My impression is more that a certain cohort wants to pretend that service management is easy by ignoring large amounts of it. It’s easy to write a bad init script that breaks when you really need it, or be out of your depth with more complex cases.

Not to mention the whole conformity by convention thing. Systemd unit files are descriptive and predictable by their nature. So-called init scripts didn’t really have to be scripts, they just usually were, and their arguments and output and behaviour was also unenforced—there’s nothing really stopping you from writing a compiled program that self-daemonizes and place the binary with the init scripts rather than in /bin. Ultimately people who make programs also have to be good at writing init programs with that setup.

So we’d have people doing dumb shit themselves and getting angry at others doing dumb shit. PHP was also pretty popular and full of dumb shit. Lots of “worse is better” to go around.

Ultimately it’s more of the stuff covered in Bryan Cantrill’s Platform as a reflection of values. Some of us value predictability and correctness, others feel it’s a straitjacket. There’s no way of pleasing everyone with the same platform.

And currently the people who want to distribute their own riced-out init programs in bash, perl, php, node.js and so on are SOL. (They can still use them on their own machines.)

Too recent. Let Gore win back in 2000.

Or at the very least avoid car ownership and overuse:

When you use a 3500-pound car to transport your 150-pound self around, 96 percent of the weight of that clump of matter is the car. You’re moving 25 times more junk around than you need to, and thus using 25 times more energy to do it.

Imagine that you’re hungry for lunch, so you go to a restaurant. But you don’t just order yourself a blackened salmon salad for $15.00. You order twenty five salads for $375.00! Then, you eat one of them, and leave the other 24 blackened salmon salads, $360.00 worth of food, to get collected by the waiter and slopped unceremoniously into a big black garbage bag. All that fine wild-caught Alaskan Salmon, lovingly seasoned and grilled. All the fine crumbles of feta cheese, the mango salsa, diced green onion, shaved peppers, rich zingy dressing, and everything else the chef worked on for hours – plopped into the slimy garbage bag. This is exactly what you are doing, every time you drive!

Of course, a lot of people, especially in North America, don’t really have an alternative, and they’ll be financially and bodily worse off for it.

Or at the very least lift the seat.

Guessing they also don’t close the lid so they get to spray themselves with whatever’s in the bowl when they flush. And then don’t wash their hands before leaving.