On Sun, January 24, 2016 11:45, Peter Duffy wrote:

Trouble is that when you go from 6 to 7, you also have the delights of systemd and grub 2 to contend with. . . . Similarly with others who have commented, I simply cannot understand why the maintainers of crucial components in linux have this thing about making vast changes which impact (usually adversely) on users and admins, without (apparently) any general discussion or review of the proposed changes. What happened to RFCs? Maybe it's a power thing - we can do it, so we're gonna do it, and if ya don't like it, tough!

Part of it is marketing. Most of it is ego.

It would be very interesting to know how many other users are still on CentOS/Red Hat 6 as a result of reluctance to enjoy all the - erm - improvements in 7. Maybe it's time to fork CentOS 6 and make it look and behave like 7 without systemd (or even better, with some way of selecting the init methodology at install-time and afterwards), and with gnome2 (or a clear choice between 2 and 3). Call it DeCentOS.

Depending on how the systemd drama plays out CentOS-6 may well be our last RH derivative, and perhaps our last Linux. At the moment we are withholding any judgement on the matter for want of clear empirical evidence respecting systemd's benefits and risks.

On our test CentOS-7 systems we eventually switched to Mate. That in itself sorted out most of the most visceral negativity to RHEL7. But systemd, rightly or wrongly, remains a controversial issue here. And, being more interested in stability than features we will await further developments on that front.

Maybe someone could convince Linus to embed an init processor into the kernel in a manner similar to how KVM made its way.