Systemd is a good init system. Better than any of the alternatives, although they’ve also come a long way since systemd first came around. It’s also a weird interconnected mess of a thousand other things that probably shouldn’t all be lumped together into a single project. Half of them are absolutely vital to the vast majority of Linux systems, and half of them are unused and neglected and no one has touched them in years, but they’re all stuck together in one weird project for some reason.

That’s kind of the exact same sort of situation xorg was in 20 years ago. I am concerned that systemd is going to turn into the next xorg, but really those concerns are the only reason most people should consider an alternative. If you don’t care about that, you probably don’t need to worry about systemd.

i like systemd

I’ve never used another init system, but i see no problem with systemd. The declaritive approach makes things very robust. Surely some things can be improved, but it’s a good tool.

Edit: Also managing user services the same way is nice.

Lennart Poettering intends to replace “sudo” with #systemd’s run0. Here’s a quick PoC to demonstrate root permission hijacking by exploiting the fact “systemd-run” (the basis of uid0/run0, the sudo replacer) creates a user owned pty for communication with the new “root” process.

To my understanding that actually solves issues. A lot of ppl already prefer other tools like doas since sudo is basically “too big” for what it does.

More code means more potential bugs. run0 has to my knowledge significantly less code. And the benefit of not relying on SUID.

In the end, you do you. The big distros will adopt what is good for them and good to maintain. You do not have to use it.

I personally don’t really care much about the init system. For most of my linux journey i was using arch, then void, then nixos, and now i’m back on void, so i jumped between systemd and runit for a bit. I never chose to use void because of its init system though, i just prefer its package manager. I found both systemd and runit to be fairly simple to use and it just gets out of my way. Poettering working for microsoft has concerned me a little bit, but if i’m being honest that’s just me wearing the tin foil hat. I will say though that at this point, if something were to happen to void and i had to move back to arch, i might try using artix just for the style points, and because of me already being familiar with runit anyway.

A lot of man-hours went into engineering it. Very smart people from many distros went over it, kicked its tires and deemed it good enough to replace old SysV. We’ve been through this, if you don’t like it for some reason, use something else.

It’s just software, people, it’s not a frelling religion.

I really love all the 5+ years old articles about why systemd sucks.
It’s not perfect but it’s so much better than the plethora of different init methods Linux used to have. Also managing sysv init scripts sucked really bad.
It’s lightweight, most of it is optional, it’s declarative, it makes managing your systems much easier and it just works.

How do you know a post was written by a systemd hater? Easy, they’ll spell it with a big D for some reason. It reminds me of how Norwegian rabid anti-cyclists are unable to spell “cyclist” for some reason.

Claiming you don’t want to restart an old debate and then trying to restart it anyway is pretty funny.

You might also want to keep in mind that you can’t really force an init system on Linux distros. Systemd became the norm through being preferred, as in, the people using and maintaining it think it’s good. At this point you might as well be ranting about how “LinuX is evil somehow” and we should all be using GNU HURD or Minix or something.

Also: Haven’t thought about suckless in well over a decade, maybe closer to two? I guess way back in the day I was kinda intrigued by their ideas and used some of their products; these days I’d rather see them as something between an art shop and people who are playing a somewhat unusual game with themselves, but not particularly relevant to mainstream software engineering.

Where did you get this idea?

I didn’t knew about Microsoft taking over the fsf either, and I am getting concerned about the real freedom behind my beloved Linux.

I think you are confusing FSF with the Linux Foundation, and you can see MS as part of the platinum LF members. Was that it, or you really meant FSF?

I don’t understand what you are talking about.

I like reading a post with a clear topic and reasoning, unfortunately it’s not obivous to me.

Something like “I dislike systemd because XY. What do you think?” Would help me.

Systemd has more features than old SysV init scripts. Particularly around detecting events and taking actions such as starting firewalls when joining networks, turning on battery tools when unplugged from a charger, starting new services when connected to a dock etc.

The other things it does, it does more reliably than sysV init scripts. It starts services concurrently, provides a profiler to improve start up time, contains much less code, provides better security to tapping into the container features of Linux.

Gentoo user here too. I once switched to systemd, but didn’t stay using it for too long. Back then some things didn’t work with systemd. Nowdays my systems use seatd instead of logind or elogind. Some have musl toolchain. It’s just simpler, currently, for me to use OpenRC on all of my setups. But the thing I most disliked with systemd was that it cannot work without journald.

I don’t know what systemd does and now I’m too afraid to ask.jpg

Also obligatory fuck microsoft, go crawl and Embrace other stuff.