Here’s something that’s both surprising and, in a way, not surprising at all, especially after yesterday’s announcement from KaOS, a distribution long known for its deep commitment to the KDE Plasma desktop, that it plans to move away from it. The main reason cited was KDE’s reliance on systemd in a specific component.
As expected, the news quickly gained traction, prompting KDE to clarify its dependence on systemd and which parts of the desktop environment rely on it. In a post on KDE’s Reddit community titled “A quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk ‘the KDE is forcing systemd!’ hoax“, the contributor described the claims as misinformation and provided a short FAQ clarifying the project’s position.
There isn’t “an alternative” to systemd because nobody who hasn’t drunk the kool-aid believes that anything like it should exist. The syslog, the cron daemon, the dns config, the log rotation, the ntp server, and even the init system should not all be part of one giant tangled mess of a project.
Then make a better alternative. You obviously “haven’t drunk the koolaid”.
Not every Linux user casually writes init systems. Not every Linux user is a programmer, even. Even less have competence at promoting their project so that it would be meaningfully adopted.
“Be the change you want to see” is cool and all, but Linux userbase can have opinions.
“Write the code I want, free of charge, in your own time. I demand it. Recognition for your efforts? Nah, I won’t even know of you, but if anything ever goes wrong, I will find your repo and complain about how Microslop did it better with hundreds of engineers!”
That’s what you sound like. If you don’t contribute code, money, documentation, detailed bug reports, community guidance, moderating, etc., then IMO, that opinion is worthless.
Devs aren’t your code monkeys, shackled to computers to do your bidding. A lot of thankless, unpaid time went into writing most of opensource code out there. To sit there and demand options is, to me, appallingly ignorant behaviour.
I contributed money, translations and properly filed bug reports to various open-source projects. But I don’t think people who don’t shouldn’t speak out. Being unhappy with a certain change signals the direction for the devs to make their code better.
Besides, KDE is no hobby project; it’s a nonprofit with full-time workers on a wage. Nonprofits are always kept to a high standard of accountability, and are resilient enough to turn negative feedback into directions for growth. It is in part this feedback that led it to develop the best DE out there.
The Linux kernel is a tangled mess and not an alternative to the well designed HURD micro kernel.
Both compile much slower than the entirety of Plan 9.
When you compare the number of drivers in the linux and plan9 systems, it’s not surprising.
Like many, back when it was fashionable I was open to the possibility of that idea being correct and I guess it’s still best to keep an open mind, but the results thus far suggest otherwise. Using Hurd is somewhat difficult for most purposes. Using cron rather than systemd timers on the other hand is much more pleasant and easy.
macOS runs on the Mach/xnu micro kernel and is pretty successful with it.
Apparently there have been attempts to make a free OS based on Apple’s kernel, but wikipedia mostly talks about them in the past tense. Too bad, it would’ve been good to have such an option.
Pure Darwin ist still around.
I tried out a Darwin distribution a few years ago. It was a BSD with some apple flavor. None of the GUI was included, not all drivers, firmware, etc.
The community is tiny. There was also little incentive to try and fix things or add features, because upstream Apple ignored it pretty much. Grabbing the sources and compiling them into an operating system has little documentation from Apple.
Mac OS X used to install XQuartz, a hardware accelerated Xorg/X11 server by default in the 2000s, but dropped it at some point.
Even back when OpenDarwin and such were around, people would rather install YellowDog Linux that supported PowerPC Macs.
I think at some point the old NeXtStep/OpenStep folks left Apple and the new engineers didn’t understand Unix or think it’s important.
Didn’t read to me like OP was arguing for a single alternative.
In that case there are alternatives for each component, most often more than one, though they may lack here and there some feature you believe to be indispensable.