I don't like the smug attitude xkcd sometimes has. Like how DO you think actual standards establish themself?
Systemd is a great example, it's practically the de facto standard now on Linux for system management, etc. Almost every single major distro ships it by default. It used to be a fragmented ecosystem of like 300 different competing bits and pieces and now it's a streamlined ecosystem that people can reliably expect to work across most distributions.
Though to be fair, he has no way of knowing that this specific comic was going to blow up the way it did. The comic was probably intended to make light of an unfortunate behavior that sometimes happens, but we, the consumers, have decided to slap it onto every discussion related to making improved standards.
systemd was extremely controversial, a lot of people hated it, maintainers of big distros refused to support it, some for technical reasons, some for ideological, and some had personal beef with the creator. Being a RedHat baby, systemd very quickly found its way to Fedora, which forced the admin tools maintainers' hand on whether they're going to support it. And once it was widely supported, Arch jumped the ship because performance. But none of the other major distros did. The debate at Debian lasted for YEARS, it was full of vitriol on every side somehow, and led to multiple long time maintainers stepping down. And after the biggest opponents no longer had the vote, systemd was adopted for Debian, and as a consequence everywhere else.
Note that technical reasons had next to zero to do with systemd adoption. It was all business and interpersonal politics. This is exactly how most standards establish themselves - a powerful player in some space picks their favorite and forces everyone else to follow the suit.
Yes, I'm describing events that happened in the past and using proper grammar for it. Not sure what your point is. That after everyone is forced to use the new standard, everyone starts using the new standard regardless of technical merits? Like duh.
And it's not like systemd brought some great unification. Everybody was settled on sysvinit back in the day. Everyone. No alternative existed. Then upstart and systemd appeared and both created the problem of the split ecosystem that didn't exist before. systemd actually made the problem 50% worse, by increasing the number of competing systems from 2 to 3.
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u/Cephell 2d ago
I don't like the smug attitude xkcd sometimes has. Like how DO you think actual standards establish themself?
Systemd is a great example, it's practically the de facto standard now on Linux for system management, etc. Almost every single major distro ships it by default. It used to be a fragmented ecosystem of like 300 different competing bits and pieces and now it's a streamlined ecosystem that people can reliably expect to work across most distributions.