this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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This was refuted long ago. Systemd isn’t a single binary file doing everything, it’s a project that has many different binaries doing many different things. The only difference is that they are developed under one project to ensure they integrate well with each other. What your doing is like complaining that glibc tries to do everything, I mean it does open, read, write, malloc, printf, getaddrinfo, dlopen, pthread_create, crypt, login, exit and more… Xorg would be another example of a project that does many things instead of one very well.
Splitting something into multiple executables doesn't make something not monolithic just like splitting a program into multiple source files doesn't make it not a monolith. It's not a monolith when the different component parts can be cleanly factored out, replaced, and used outside of the original context or with different versions of related components This is in fact very hard. Much harder than making a monolith.
For instance the X11 ecosystem isn't a good example of a monolith because its designed to make it trivial to swap in different loosely coupled components. You don't worry about needing your window manager and X11 to come from the same commit so they actually work. You can argue that the toolbox that systemd provides it is worth it but arguing that it's not a monolith just screams I'm not a developer.