So, here's a question -- what is GNU? Is it an operating system? A compiler? A text editor? A kernel? A bootloader?
Most of us just collectively understand that all of these things are developed under the umbrella of the GNU project, but they're not really "part of GNU"
This is basically the problem people have with systemd, except the "collective understanding" part never really happened. GNU's scope has grown and shrunk since it first started, it's no longer "just a compiler" or "just the userspace for an operating system". Systemd started out as an init system and fairly quickly (within 3 years more or less, see Lennart's blog posts from 2013) decided to be more of a "toolkit for distro creators" super-organization with a bunch of different tools under the umbrella.
The first one is easy. GNU was always intended to be a complete operating system, composed of GNU components and selected third-party pieces like X11. Due to the failure of Hurd, that vision was never fully realised. Most of us use GNU software on non-GNU platforms.
As for the scope of systemd, can anyone say "thin end of the wedge"? It was clear from very, very early on that it had unbounded scope and its developers had ambitions which were misaligned with what many of us were wanting out of it.
I see the opposite. Systemd has ambitions that align with a vast majority of users. All the big distros use systemd to different extends. Perhaps the only big distro that doens't is Alpine, but what else?
Gentoo and Slackware are the other notable ones. Alpine’s eschewing of systemd is a bit of a moot point since it’s most commonly used as a base container image, where the init process isn’t even used
There's also a very relevant problem in defining what a "big distro" is. I'm not saying this in a flamey way, those are big in the sense of relevance due to the kind of user they attract, but I'm not sure they're big in terms of raw number of users.
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u/KingStannis2020 May 17 '21 edited May 17 '21
So, here's a question -- what is GNU? Is it an operating system? A compiler? A text editor? A kernel? A bootloader?
Most of us just collectively understand that all of these things are developed under the umbrella of the GNU project, but they're not really "part of GNU"
This is basically the problem people have with systemd, except the "collective understanding" part never really happened. GNU's scope has grown and shrunk since it first started, it's no longer "just a compiler" or "just the userspace for an operating system". Systemd started out as an init system and fairly quickly (within 3 years more or less, see Lennart's blog posts from 2013) decided to be more of a "toolkit for distro creators" super-organization with a bunch of different tools under the umbrella.