Yay. I'm glad to hear more and more folks are moving back to Firefox. It really is the best browser IMO. Like you said, it's fast, stable, has all my extensions and gets out of my way. Love it.
OK I have to say this: reading some of the comments here makes me think I was actually friends with you back in 1998/1999 because that's about when I was doing this same shit in my high school computer lab. Small world.
I definitely use IRC to communicate with users of open-source projects like Spacewalk or Fedora. Anytime I can't get decent help using forums or Google searches, I go to IRC and work with the community there. Works very well!
This is a really cool story. Science FTW! We have new evidence and people are starting to adjust their frame of mind and thinking in regards to the new evidence. Hopefully they can prove their hypothesis and we'll have a better idea of the actual age of the universe.
It's comical how people get so "jazzed" about something like not liking systemd and make a whole movement about it (with their t-shirts and everything). I get people may not love everything about systemd (or maybe they hate it), but I'm not convinced it's so bad. I've been using it since RHEL 7 and I've really gotten used to all of the benefits of systemd. It also doesn't hurt that I went to the session on pid 1 by Lennart Poettering at Red Hat Summit 2014 and he convinced me of the at least not-horribleness of systemd.
The simple reason is that everybody is forced to deal with it. So you either like the way it works, or you dislike it, but there's no real option to just ignore it in Linux land anymore. For a lot of people, that means that their favorite distro suddenly works in a different way.
This happens every time you significantly change something that people use and have existing workflows for, regardless of whether your change is beneficial on the whole.
I didn't care much about the problem systemd was solving, I was content to let the init process go through without touching it.
Then one day several years ago I did an apt-get dist-upgrade and my system didn't boot after that. I have personally hit way more issues with unbootable systems or having to drop into single user mode to fix some BS with systemd. That was enough to make me dislike it, or convert into a hater, and switch most of my personal usage away from Linux.
I think it's gotten better since then. I still dread updating Linux boxes, because I know that some percentage of those updates will have a systemd bug introduced resulting in a non-bootable system or one where I have to manually fix it up.
Counter-anecdote, I switched to systemd all the way back in 2012 on Arch, even before it was mandatory and way before it was in a state where other distros felt comfortable switching and I remember to this day that after I did the conversion and hit reboot, an absolute panic hit me, I was 110% sure the system won't boot afterward, just because of how drastic the change was to perform on a live system, (because simpler upgres than that broke my system before). Since Arch is rolling is not like a new release came with systemd, no, you just switched your live system over.
I remember being absolutely floored when after that relatively complex procedure, not only did the system boot, but it booted faster. I think I became a fan that day.
...and when you care quite deeply about the problems being solved, think they're being solved in a pretty good way, and are unsettled by the anti-systemd frothers literally sending Lennart death threats? (Like...this is bad, yo. There are arguments--bad ones, IMO, but arguments--against systemd. But the people who like systemd aren't sending death threats to Devuan people or whatever.)
To be fair, the ones sending death threats are contributing negatively, while the fork effort is a positive contribution to the situation. We'd appreciate not being lumped in with the worst offenders, if you'd be so kind.
A lot of the western world has devolved into tribalism and identitarianism. People of similar views on anything are lumped in en-masse and presumed to hold all of the same values, opinions and support all actions of the collective whole.
It's a shame that a lot of core values are lost in favor of these viewpoints.
Yeah. It is really sad. We're getting hyper-polarized options and information everywhere we look, and it's affected people's ability to argue a specific point if they detect any misalignment of interests. I've been calling it "casually dismissing someone's opinion by lumping it in with an ideology", but looking for something more concise.
