John is a long-time Debian developer who opines on the complexity he
faces in Jessie:

http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9299-has-modern-linux-lost-its-way-some-thoughts-on-jessie

John clearly states that he believes the problems are distinct from
systemd. While many here may not necessarily agree, I do agree that
various aspects of the system have become, if not complex, at least more
opaque than in the past. I overlooked a lot of this as it gained me
some shiny desktop features (I do like easily mounting of removable
media and selecting a WiFi AP from my desktop GUI) but I see that left
unchecked we now have an ever growing level of complexity.

Like John, I don't wish to spark a systemd flame war as that has been
done to death. Instead, I think it would be wise for Devuan to lead the
way, after Jessie most likely, toward engineering a distribution that is
coherent and approachable by cherry-picking packages that maintain
current functionality along with reasonable configuration and
documentation. Jude et. al. seem to be working in such a direction for
device configuration. I'm also pleased with the decision to have Xfce
as the default DE. Kudos!

Perhaps, I'm not expressing myself as well as I would like. Perhaps
this is more an issue of poor documentation from upstreams. Yet I also
see what seems to be needless complexity in configuration. Plus there
is complexity in dependencies between packages and then complexity in
IPC (dbus?).

I think what has bothered me the most over the past few years is the
churn and what sometimes seems to be adoption and then replacement of a
technology without explanation (consolekit to polkit, for example, devfs
to udev for another). Some of this is explained away as needed support
for desktop environments which are moving quickly. Okay, but when did
the community abandon some level of desire for stability?

Yes, I'm rambling because, as I posted to John's blog post, I feel
helpless and lost with a lot of this. I realize that convenience comes
at a price. For example, Network Manager makes a lot of things quite
handy, but at the cost of being able to dig through a lot of what it
does when something doesn't go quite right. Yes, I know that Slackware
is out there (I started with Slackware in 1996), but I am so spoiled by
apt that I don't wish to abandon it just yet. I'm also loathe to throw
away my 18+ years of Linux and GNU experience for *BSD at this time.

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

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