[ale] Remove systemd network handling

[Leam Hall]

On 9/23/21 6:17 AM, Solomon Peachy via Ale wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 02:33:48AM -0400, Steve Litt via Ale wrote:
>> Handling things we don't need handled is what systemd is best known
>> for. Today it's networking. Tomorrow perhaps home directories. One day
>> it will grow its own package manager and systemd distros will drop
>> their own. In its five years, systemd has repeatedly solutioned things
>> that already had great solutions. As long as systemd is used at all,
>> one is constantly at risk of this kind of situation.
> 
> Oh, FFS.

"Fast Fritata Sauce"?
> 
> "Systemd" didn't sneak into Alex's RPi in the dead of night and take
> over networking.
...

>   - Solomon

I appreciate the humor in your post, and to some extent agree with it. Setting the technical details of systemd aside, the topic has a bad rap because the motivators behind it didn't really deal with the human issue of computing. Many people hate the concept of systemd because it is antithetical to one of the core Unix/Linux philosophies: "Do one thing and do it well". In many ways systemd seems more like Windows than Linux, and a lot of people prefer Linux.

There are use cases for systemd, but another human interface failure was major vendors switching to it for all varieties (Desktop, base server, cloud host, etc) of the OS. They took systemd out of its use case and forced a skilled support base to adjust to something they didn't necessarily feel the best. Making it mandatory, instead of optional, was a failure.

The original author of systemd has social credibility issues based on PulseAudio and his own attitudes.

Unfortunately, systemd seems to be killing Linux as a separate entity. While the kernel is still there, Linux is becoming little more than a buried layer of "hardware interface to virtualization layer". With containerization, the OS can largely go away for many projects. Whether that's a win or a loss depends on your perspective, but it is a transition.

Leam

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