Sunday, August 31st, 2014

       My last Debian installation
       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yesterday I installed Debian on my new Lenovo T400. To be precise,
it was Mint 17 KDE and not literally Debian, but anyways, this was
most probably my last installation of any Debian derivative. Why?

The answer is systemd.

I have been using Linux for fifteen years now and Debian (Ubuntu,
Mint) was always my favorite. Even now, when typing this text, my
Efika MX Smartbook is running ARM version of Debian Squeeze.
Unfortunately Debian is getting systemd as a primary init system,
Ubuntu and Mint will follow soon, so our ways must part.

I'm no fundamentalist. I use Linux, simply because it suits me best,
but I think it should follow at least the basic principles of Unix
philosophy, one of which is:
"Each tool should do one thing and do it the best way possible."
And from what I have read, systemd is not the case. If you want to
know more, visit boycottsystemd.org via WWW and see for yourself.

So now I have probably the last version of Mint without systemd and
as it is a LTS release, I have couple of years, before I will have
to make the choice on this particular machine. But Mint 14, which is
on my other machine is now obsolete and I have no plans to upgrade
it to more current version. Instead of this I will use the machine
to test the distros, which claim to stay systemd free: Crux and
Slackware. I know both, but never thought of any of them as of my
primary operating system. And now I will have to, even though I'm
not happy with getting used to a new computing environment.

Shame on you, Debian. Shame on you for breaking my otherwise perfect
Unix world.