Well, in fairness, I did have a RH chap tell me to my face several weeks ago that Linux needs to replicate the Windows registry model and stop using the /etc text file approach. So I have a certain sympathy for the idea of Red Hat conspiracy (what is a company anyway but a conspiracy to produce work & products for hire?).

ROFLMAO... more and more applications in Windows are moving AWAY from the registry.. other than install/uninstall notations created by the installer, very few recent apps use the registry. Most use the global ProgramData or user's AppData paths for configuration. It simply works.

I don't hate the registry... I'm just not in a hurry to see Linux adopt it. What's so bad about /etc/app/config or ~/.config/app/config? It works in pretty much every platform (though the paths may be slightly different). Windows does have both roaming and local data directories, which can be pretty nice (if you don't bloat them).

I was rather unhappy when Samba took this approach as well, ages ago (mimicking the registry as a configuration store, not just as a hack to talk to Windows systems).

Only "reason" i could think of for going registry is so that it could be wrapped in an ACL.

Yep, the Windows registry has its own ACL. Was bitten by that when trying (naively) to move an account's files between Windows installs. Logged in and found myself back at default settings, and changes not applying.

I wonder if this shift in mentality has something to do with the M-I contracts.

One thing that needs further investigation is the degree to which distros adopted systemd because they'd rather not maintain patches for udev, logind, KDE, GNOME, Wayland, etc. to keep them decoupled.

I have a hunch that for !RedHat, the motivation to switch comes just as much from not having to fight upstream (if not more so) than from systemd's relative merits. After all, there are plenty of different init systems, but only one of them is coupled to the rest of userspace to a significant degree.

Also, I wouldn't write off Solaris zones :) They're pretty powerful--in some ways, more so than LXC is today (syscall translation comes to mind).

Solaris does not use systemd. It uses systemctl. I'll leave it to others to debate their individual merits, but I personally like the Solaris system a lot.

systemctl is pretty obviously the inspiration for a lot of things in systemd though. The idea that one or the other is better is up for the debate, but they're both based on the same idea.

Conspiracy: a group of people working in secret to commit a crime.

In this case, we have red hat, lennart, Kay, and freedesktop.org working together to force a LGPL RPC loophole to circumvent the GPL. Sounds like an appropriate term.

> The fact that the article says that Solaris is the 'best of breed stack right now'

That well-known paragon of SysV systems 8)

I'm a bit confused, was that sarcasm? Doesn't Solaris use SMF and not SysV?

Yep, I was agreeing through the medium of sarcasm. The latest (11) version of Solaris is also XML-ifying all the things; it's starting (in terms of XML config manipulated from tools) to look a lot more like AIX than SunOS.

There's SysV Unix, and SysV init.

Solaris is based off of Unix System V, as are AIX and HPUX.

You can be based off SysV without utilizing the init system from it