Ask Me Why

The subsystem in Linux called systemd is okay… until it’s not.

From what I read in the commentary online, the kernel itself is less complicated and Byzantine than systemd. Yet, systemd is controlled by a tiny few people who are openly hostile to comments from the outside. And when it’s broken, you cannot tell them unless you become a part of their little club.

I tested an aging Dell laptop with Mint, SUSE, and Rocky Linux. All of them kept throwing up the same error that arises out of systemd. It’s that crazy complaint coming out of hibernation, that the system is dazed and confused because it does not understand the ACPI implementation. It’s because systemd has changed recently, and as so often is the case, it’s stupid again.

Picking through forums and mailing list archives, near as I can tell, that error traces back to the way systemd handles ACPI events. And having no way to fix it or give feedback is part of the heedless domination that comes for systemd development. Those three distros have worked on this laptop in the past, but not now. And unless you are a developer and master with hardware internals, the systemd folks don’t want to hear from you. If you don’t have a useful patch, don’t contact them.

After running diagnostics on my laptop and finding no problems, I installed PCLinuxOS, which doesn’t use systemd. It works fine and the system doesn’t complain at all. There may be other minor glitches, but hibernation is not a problem.

That’s what it boils down to for most users. If I can’t use the hardware as designed, then don’t offer me something that satisfies philosophical goals or some kind of doctrinal zeal. For example, I still had to learn how to get XTerm to use misc-fixed fonts, but that’s easy to figure out.

!/home/ed/.Xresources
XTerm*renderFont: false
XTerm*font: 9x15

I’m not a coder, just a power user — if that. Which means I know a whale of a lot more than the vast majority of those who finger computers all day long. One of my missions in life is to help those other computer users with all the crazy stuff computers do. Developers typically despise ordinary users, so I do what I can to mitigate user sorrows.

I’ve done a lot of volunteer tech support. I’ve got a big pile of CDs and DVDs with various software on them, collected over the years to help others. I’ve done it for a lot of individuals and a few institutions. Some of them have Linux machines on site. I’m told over and over again that mercy is a quality that they find rare in the tech support business.

As bad as Windows is, ask me why Linux hasn’t replaced it already. I’ve encountered plenty of people willing to switch to Linux, until they learned for themselves that Linux people are typically anything but merciful. I can assure you that systemd is quite typical of Linux development.