[arch-general] Lennart Poettering on udev-systemd

[Norbert Zeh]

David Benfell [2012.08.14 1535 -0700]:
> What I think is unfortunate about the discussion of systemd here has
> been that it has been conflated with the discussion of pulseaudio. I
> think it is possible to like one and not the other.

Indeed.  The heated discussion about systemd actually had the effect that I gave
it a whirl to find out for myself what the fuss is all about, and I must say
that I quite like it so far, while I find pulseaudio is an abysmal piece of
software.  So I think your point is a good one.

On the other hand, in my mind, pulseaudio has quite some bearing on the
discussion about systemd.  There have been endless complaints about this and
that piece of hardware not working well with pulseaudio, and I myself never got
my mic to work properly with pulseaudio and recently started to experience
serious audio delays when playing sound through pulseaudio.  Yet, Poettering's
response to these kinds of complaints are usually completely dismissive: it's
ALSA's fault, your hardware isn't working properly, etc, in spite of everything
working flawlessly when pulseaudio doesn't get in the way.  So, to me the
problem with systemd is not so much that I am afraid of changing to a new init
system - I am not - it's the author.  What if somewhere down the road things
start to go wrong with systemd?  Is Poettering's response going to be again that
systemd is perfect and it's some other part of my system that's causing systemd
to misbehave?  I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Cheers,
Norbert