He's not casting all opponents of systemd as trolls; he's saying that trolls have spread a lot of misinformation about systemd, which is true.
Opponents of systemd have spread a LOT of FUD and misinformation about systemd. I know, because I was initially very skeptical of (or even opposed to) systemd based on what they had said. Fortunately, I discovered that much of it was misleading or inaccurate after my main distro switched to systemd.
Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt and say that it wasn't an intentional attempt to spread misinformation, and that they were simply speaking very vocally about a topic that they themselves had not taken the time to read up on, it is not much of a stretch to call that behavior "trolling".
While it may not be much of a stretch, it still hampers his point. If the goal is to convince an audience of people who are evaluating the technical aspects of systemd that there is a viable alternative to using it, the continued reference to the less-than-polite demeanor of many detractors isn't helping to further his point.
As well, many (most?) people associate "trolling" with "intentional griefing" and not "willful ignorance". I believe that many of the people arguing against systemd are either ill-informed or only considering their own use-cases, but I don't think it is appropriate to generalize them as trolls if their goal is something other than "to make people angry".
> Opponents of systemd have spread a LOT of FUD and misinformation about systemd
Well, obviously there's another, more charitable interpretation.
> I discovered that much of it was misleading or inaccurate after my main distro switched to systemd.
Systemd is a continuously-varying project, and just because your distro smoothly switched, doesn't mean there were no problems for early adopters. Or that just because your configuration works, no difficulty with the multiple systemd components have, do or will arise.
> systemd is a continuously-varying project, and just because your distro smoothly switched, doesn't mean there were no problems for early adopters, or that just because your configuration works, no difficulty with the multiple systemd components have, do or will arise.
Actually, I never claimed that my distro switched smoothly. Ironically, I literally commented just yesterday complaining that my distro (Arch) did not switch smoothly (and IMHO switched too early)[0]. I had a lot of issues when I first switched - I couldn't even boot my system, as a lot of stuff did not migrate cleanly.
Switching is always going to cause upheaval and breakage to at least some extent, and that's not what OP and I are referring to when talking about FUD.
What I'm talking about are people making factually incorrect (and worse, trivially verifiably incorrect) statements about systemd and what it does. Some of them are just blatantly wrong ("systemd forces you to use binary log files"[1], "systemd means you can't use init scripts"[2]), "systemd means you can't use crontab"[3], or my favorite "systemd gives QR code output"[4]). Others are technically true, but highly misleading ("I don't want everything to run in PID 1"[5], "systemd is the only way to run cgroups"[6])
There's a difference between disliking systemd on technical merit and disliking it based on false information that one hasn't even bothered to verify, and then vocally spreading that misinformation.
[1] systemd by default does not use any log files (IIRC), and provides text logs as an alternative to the recommended binary default. You can keep using syslog just as always.
[2] systemd allows for init script compatibility. I won't claim that all init scripts will work without any modification, but it's not like you can't keep using init scripts instead of systemd configs if you don't want to
[3] systemd.timer is something you can use instead of crontab, but it will also run regular CRON jobs as well.
[4] systemd does have an option to display kernel dumps as QR codes. This feature is generally not compiled or available by default
[5] systemd includes some functionality that runs in PID 1, but most of what people actually are talking about does not run in PID 1
[6] systemd is the only way to run cgroups, because the Linux kernel requires that a single arbiter handle all cgroups, and systemd is (was?) the only program that has actually implemented the entire necessary ABI to do so. Anyone is free to write another program to handle cgroups instead of systemd.
Okay, I was saying, just because some people doesn't know, it doesn't have to be FUD, that'd be just an ad hominen attack. I've been a user of Arch back before systemd and I know your points are mostly right, but as you admit, in some cases you're true only technically, so don't attribute all errors to malice.
I think most people don't care how much of systemd is pid 1, there are components like udev that systemd is assimilating, we just want choice, I happen to like modern daemontools-like init systems a lot, but I use various init systems depending on what I want, and that's great IMO. However, read this:
Unless the systemd-haters prepare another
kdbus userspace until then this will effectively also mean that we will
not support non-systemd systems with udev anymore starting at that
point. Gentoo folks, this is your wakeup call.
The factually incorrect statements stem from such messages from lead developers, they've stated that in the future systemd will be sort of "merged" with linux, and that's no good. We know because we've been using great OSs and this is clearly a regression.
I really think he is thinking FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) equals trolls. Which is wrong.
"Don't listen to the FUD" # Fixes the first sentence
I can understand that feeling when ideas and chooses are not based on the same as your own. The whole Mono is evil was the definition of FUD to me and not based on the presented facts. To me the issue was mono and C# was a language that was already was a standard and that we had public confirmation that M$ would not do anything to anyone using mono. BUT I would be hard to call people who don't believe like me that SystemD is easier as a user or that Mono was a great choice of a language. I think society is based on what do we do to those who believe differently then ourselves.
