this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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Linux has been having issues for a few years now. They’ve been going an obfuscation route with GNOME3 and systemd. Red hat basically decided to contractually kick people out for doing the traditional CentOS thing ever since they decided to change what the official CentOS does.
The worst thing is, Debian also started using systemd.
No, systemd and GNOME are not part of mainline, and also GNOME and systemd arent obfuscated
While its possible to find or build a distro without systemd, most of the big names that you would introduce people to use it:
Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, OpenSUSE
Hell, Arch uses it
I do get your point about GNOME, and I don’t use a DE anymore so I might be outdated, but Gnome and KDE were the big two back when I used it.
I say obfuscates because gnome configuration is now largely binary, whereas gnome2 used to be text files. The same goes for systemd- the logs are now binary files with journalctl instead of text files
I think you are either trolling or you fundamentally don't understand, what you're talking about.
Nothing is obfuscated. You can download each and every code file, audit it, and build the binaries from exactly that code. You can even compare the binaries to the ones provided by major distros thanks to reproducible builds.
Just because you don't understand code, doesn't mean it's obfuscated. Following that logic, even a loaf of bread is "obfuscated" because you don't understand sour dough.
That’s not what I’m saying. Yes, it’s open source and you can build the binaries itself. I’m saying that the process is obfuscated or complicated because instead of text log files, you have to use journtalctl to view them.
Then again, someone said it may be text files with markers so I have to look into that
Are you really sure, you're using "obfuscation" right? Because that implies that someone intentionally makes something harder to read to hide something. That's not the case here. Nothing is hidden, it's all there, the formats are well defined and easy to read.
Yeah, of course, it's all there in binary. For programs of course that's not a problem, but for data that you may need to look at any time, it is. It's harder to interpret both for humans (significantly) and both for any program that want to make use of it (unless they use the specific library that came up with the format, and by that also pulling in all its libs transitively)
Binary data is not much less obfuscated than the system files of windows. It's all there, you can read it
So literally every program on your machine is obfuscated. Linux kernel? Obfuscated. Wayland? Obfuscated. And even VIM: obfuscated.
You're creating problems where there are none.
Did you read my comment in it's entirety?
For programs, that is not a problem.
This is a problem for data.
Why? Because you very rarely need to read the program's "content", and when you do, you'll instead go look at the source code anyways. But for binary data files there is no source code that is the equivalent of the contents in readable form.
If you want to read it as a human in your text editor, good luck with making sense of it. If you want to read it with your program it'll have to pull in a tree of dependencies out of questionable necessity, and any of that dependencies could have a severe bug or a security vulnerability that affects your program and it's users. And the only reason you needed to import that lib is to be able to parse this binary format. It's not even a common one like an archive format, but a totally custom made format of systemd.
And then there's another problem. You may be able to make sense of the binary data with your bare hands and a text editor, but you better not edit it that way, because you may mess up the delicate offsets, or you may wanted to replace a value (e.g. a string, out some kind of list) with a longer one but you can't because of the former problem.
Binary is ok for programs, and you know what, it's also fine for data in transit (network) and of course archives.
But for data, whether it's a log file or configuration, or some other that would be totally fine in text format, it's just annoying, limiting, and overcomplicated.
Again, that's not what obfuscation means.
Also, what exactly is the difference between cat and journalctl? You can't read a text file without a program either.
Of course, raw text files are more common, but what you're drawing up here is a mixture of old man yells at cloud and tin foil hat territory.
I'm not sure I totally agree with him, what I'm sure is that I don't agree with you, because you clearly haven't read his comment.
Oh no, not binary files that are well-documented and you can know exactly what they're doing!
Also, the journalctl files are just text with useful markers embedded in them to be easier to filter and search. Run strings on the journal files and see they're just text with metadata in them.
You must compile every single software package from source, but only after you've examined every single line of the code yourself!
1995 called, they said you're doing it wrong, and RMS is going to be very mad at you.
I didn’t know that the are text files with markers…
If that’s true, I may hate it less. I’ll have to try that
There are plenty of distributions without systemd
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_distributions_without_systemd
Yes, I am aware. But none of these distros are distros I would introduce to someone new to Linux.
If any of the people you introduce to linux would care about systemd
Or have any clue what systemd does out of the gate, especially on a more user-friendly distro having never used linux
That's a bad point. What that logic introducing someone to windows is not bad because they don't know about it's data mining components anyway.
I'm not saying systemd does that. I'm saying that you basically said: "they wouldn't know even if that was true, so it's fine!"
Huh? All I was saying was that someone who's brand new to Linux is going to be up to their eyeballs in their new system to barely comprehend the very concept of an init system, especially on the more polished, user friendly distro that do a good job of keeping those mechanisms under the hood.
The way I understood was that it's not a problem if the system does something bad because the newcomer I directed there won't know anyway.
Sorry if that is not what you meant, but the comment has read like that.
systemd doesn't obfuscate shit. It's Free software and you know exactly what it's doing. Stop spreading misinformation.
I see what people thought I was saying. Yes, it’s open source and doesn’t taint the kernel. I’m saying the way it works is obfuscated or complicated for the user. You shouldn’t have to run binaries to figure what the logs say. The logs should be in text.
As a selfhoster, the way systemd does logs is great, I love it. Oh, and also if you want you can tell systemd to save the logs to files, it's an option
Please advise on the second portion.
See this