Person: Systemd bad
Me: why
Them: IDK
The argument is basically that it does too much and as the motto of Unix was basically “make it do 1 thing and that very well”, systemd goes against that idea.
You might think it is silly because what is the issue with it doing many things. Arguably, it harms customization and adaptability, as you can’t run only 2/3 of systemd with 1/3 being replaced with that super specific optimisation for your specific use case. Additional, again arguably, it apparently makes it harder to make it secure as it has a bigger attack surface.
Sustemd is modular though, you don’t have to use every subsystem. The base init system and service manager is very comprehensive for sure.
I know it’s a typo, but Sustemd would be great for AmogOS! 😂
I tried to express my understanding of the arguments. I don’t know and I couldn’t argue either case to a point that it is worth adding to the conversation
Then again, it doing all those things can lead to those parts working together better because it’s the one project instead of a dozen different projects with every distro having a different mix.
I understand your point and I want to make clear that my own opinion is not in favor of systemd or against systemd. I am very much neutral. I just expressed my understanding of the arguments. But I welcome the discussion.
And funnily enough, the kernel doesn’t follow the unix philosophy either as far as I know.
I have heard that before in a joke setting, I would love to hear genuine arguments for and against it.
The debate is as old as Linux itself, and well documented.
It doesn’t seem to be a debate. “Microkernels are better” “yes but I don’t have the time for it” but thanks
At a high level, microkernels push as much as possible into userspace, and monolithic kernels keep drivers in kernel space
There are arguments for each e.g. a buggy driver can’t write into the memory space of another driver as easily in a micro kernel, however it’s running in the same security level as userspace code. People will make arguments for both sides of which is more secure
Monolithic kernels also tended to be more performant at the time, as you didn’t have to context switch between ring 0 and ring 1 in the CPU to perform driver calls - we also regularly share memory directly between drivers
These days pretty much all kernels have moved to a hybrid kernel, as neither a truly monolithic kernel nor a truly micro kernel works outside of theoretical debates
Thanks! I will look into
Problem is, nobody’s alternative solves all of the problems people wanted their init system to solve. sysvinit didn’t solve booting/service supervision well, so it’s hard to say it was really a UNIX philosophy solution, and it wasn’t even part of the OG Unix system but came over a decade later in 1981 with AT&T’s system iii (later included in system v, hence the name sysvinit). There’s nothing sysvinit does well. The most popular services and distributions had simply thrown away so many hours of time and effort bashing their heads against sysvinit’s limitations that they had managed to make them work, but that’s different from the system overall working well.
Anyways, people don’t like Poettering, but he made inroads with systemd in large part because he actively took notes on what people wanted, and then delivered. He’s an unlikable prick, but he delivered a product it was hard for many projects to say no to. That’s why project after project adopted it. It solved problems that needed solving. This counts for more than adherence to an archaic design philosophy from the 70’s most people don’t follow anyways and which the predecessor wasn’t even a good exemplar of anyways.
Following an ideal while being based on free labor is difficult
Yeah, and as “ideals” go, an OS design philosophy is a bad hill to die on. Just take the process supervision and go.
You can in fact run 2/3 Systemd whatever that means. Systemd components are modular so you can run the base system by itself if you want to.
Additionally systemd just works. You really don’t need to care about the details as running something like a web server or service is as simple as starting it. Dependencies are handled automatically.
Just In case, I wasn’t clear, I am just relaying the argument as I understood it
More like it’s bad because of architecturial decisions (integrated init system; system state managemt in the same package as init and supervision), creating lots of unneeded complexity, number of CVE’s, how the developers behave (or don’t), and that you can’t have other init systems in the same repo without a fuckton of shims and wrappers.
Sounds like valid concerns to me.
That’s the problem with how most things Lennart designs are. They are typically 70-80 percent excellent ideas brilliantly architected, 10-20 percent decisions that we can agree to disagree on but well designed still, and ~10 percent horrifically bad ideas that he is unable to receive criticism on because of his standing, terrible attitude and ~90 percent good and acceptable ideas.
Another problem is that they all seem to be designed in a way that they are the One True Way to do something and are designed to choke out any alternatives because Lennart Knows Best.
I’m still ambivalent about having this much extra logic and complexity attached to my init system but the ship sailed long ago and I’m well into making lemonade at this point.
Unix was also made in 1969, Computers are a tiny bit more complicated now and expected to do slightly more than they did back then.
I been told it was to big, but if you look at the Linux Kernel, it is huge.
People also love to say Unix, but Linux is not Unix.
But that only spells “LINU”.
Fine then: “Linux is not Unix, Xerxes!”
Imagine a very irate spartan shouting it as he hurls his spear across the room where the lawyers are having their discussion about the lawsuit pending between the linux loving spartans and the tyrannical unix using persians.
I was going more for a “Linu Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Let’s Find Out!”
maybe systemd is a verb
e.g.
“damn homie got systemd by the opps”
In fairness reading this thread all I see is systemd good
Why: i find sysvinit start up scripts too complicated to read/modify so let’s drop this gigantic mammoth that does a million other things on my lunux system so I don’t gave to learn how to write a shell script.
I don’t have much skin in the game and have been out of the loop for many years but don’t find many of the arguments in favour of systemd very convincing
It is very fast and easy
Poettering and Systemd are amazing and Linux would not be as good as it is today without them. Whether you like it or not, we can’t have a fragmented ecosystem and expect people and companies to adopt it (see the 14 competing standards XKCD). Having one solid base that works the same on every client is like literally the base requirement for making a product for the said client. Systemd, flatpak, xdg-portals, pipewire and immutable distros all solve this.
Here’s my hot take: I don’t care what operating system most people use. If people are happy on Windows, let them stay on Windows. That’s not my problem. When you say we need to make Linux less diverse and interesting to make number go up because more biggerer number more gooderer then suddenly that is my problem. You are trying to make my experience worse for the sake of something I do not care about.
There is nothing wrong with systemd. Most people on Linux are using it, and that’s fine. Options are good too though. I specifically like Linux because it’s NOT a bunch of homogeneous lowest common denominator sameyness. That’s the very thing I don’t want.
The thing with Linux is you can use it however you want
Ironically, pipewire is built to replace pulseaudio.
Which was built because of the limitations of ALSA.
Immutable distros are never going to catch on as they are to complex.
Abstraction seems like the next step for them after the underlying systems mature out.
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I’d like to propose a new rule for this community:
People criticizing systemd to the extent where they promote alternatives (regressions), have to provide proof that they have or are maintaining init scripts for at least ten services with satisfying the following conditions: said init scripts must 1.) be shown to reliably start up the services and 2.) not signal their dependencies to early and 3.) gracefully stop the services 99.9% of the time. People failing to satisfy these conditions are not allowed to voice their opinions on how arbitrary init systems are better than systemd. Violations of this rule will be punished by temporary bans and forcing the violators to fill the entire canvas of a blackboard with “‘do one thing and do it well’ is a unix principle, not a linux principle” in fine print.
More lines of semi-reliable init scripts have been written by package maintainers, than lines of systemd code by Poettering & Co, and that while achieving far less. The old init systems might have been simple, the hell of init scripts wasn’t.
That might have been true a decade ago. I don’t actually know. I do know that modern init scripts for modern alternatives to systemd are barely longer than systemd service scripts though. So that’s kind of an insane take.
can you give examples of some? Not trying to bd sarcastic, i do just want to see what alternatives are doing.
Sure, that seems pretty reasonable. Here’s the init script for sddm:
#!/usr/bin/openrc-run supervisor=supervise-daemon command="/usr/bin/sddm" depend() { need localmount after bootmisc consolefont modules netmount after ypbind autofs openvpn gpm lircmd after quota keymaps before alsasound want logind use xfs provide xdm display-manager }That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
That’s a pretty simple one though, so here’s Alsa. It’s a more complex one:
code
#!/usr/bin/openrc-run # Copyright 1999-2019 Gentoo Authors # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 alsastatedir=/var/lib/alsa alsascrdir=/etc/alsa.d alsahomedir=/run/alsasound extra_commands="save restore" depend() { need localmount after bootmisc modules isapnp coldplug hotplug } restore() { ebegin "Restoring Mixer Levels" checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1 if [ ! -r "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" ] ; then ewarn "No mixer config in ${alsastatedir}/asound.state, you have to unmute your card!" eend 0 return 0 fi local cards="$(sed -n -e 's/^ *\([[:digit:]]*\) .*/\1/p' /proc/asound/cards)" local CARDNUM for cardnum in ${cards}; do [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 [ -e /dev/snd/controlC${cardnum} ] || sleep 2 alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -I -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" restore ${cardnum} \ || ewarn "Errors while restoring defaults, ignoring" done for ossfile in "${alsastatedir}"/oss/card*_pcm* ; do [ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue # We use cat because I'm not sure if cp works properly on /proc local procfile=${ossfile##${alsastatedir}/oss} procfile="$(echo "${procfile}" | sed -e 's,_,/,g')" if [ -e /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss ] ; then cat "${ossfile}" > /proc/asound/"${procfile}"/oss fi done eend 0 } save() { ebegin "Storing ALSA Mixer Levels" checkpath -q -d -m 0700 -o root:root ${alsahomedir} || return 1 mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}" if ! alsactl -E HOME="${alsahomedir}" -f "${alsastatedir}/asound.state" store; then eerror "Error saving levels." eend 1 return 1 fi for ossfile in /proc/asound/card*/pcm*/oss; do [ -e "${ossfile}" ] || continue local device=${ossfile##/proc/asound/} ; device=${device%%/oss} device="$(echo "${device}" | sed -e 's,/,_,g')" mkdir -p "${alsastatedir}/oss/" cp "${ossfile}" "${alsastatedir}/oss/${device}" done eend 0 } start() { if [ "${RESTORE_ON_START}" = "yes" ]; then restore fi return 0 } stop() { if [ "${SAVE_ON_STOP}" = "yes" ]; then save fi return 0 }That’s definitely longer than a systemd service, but you’d have to write an awful lot of them to be more code than all of systemd. Overall the entire /etc/init.d folder on my PC where all the init scripts even for the stuff I’m not using are stored is a grand total of 147.7 KiB. Not exactly an unmanageable amount of code, in my humble opinion.
Its certainly easier to read than most old init scripts and I can see why some distros and openbsd would pick it over systemd for more control. I’m not likely to pick a distro that uses it anytime soon, but i can see why some do.
That’s totally fair. I’m not some weird evangelist or anything. I just like options and think OpenRC is kinda neat. There’s nothing wrong with systemd, and honestly it’s more work using other options. Not for the actual init system, but for some of the other stuff systemd does. I’ve had to learn cron, and that has been… interesting. It feels like all of the documentation around cron just assumes you already know how cron works. I’m still not sure if I’m doing it right, but I’ve had a good time and my computer works, and really that’s good enough for me.
Almost looks like something taken from ASL linux.
OK luddite.
Luddites were champions of the working class and have been smeared by capitalist for over a century. I’d be proud to be called a Luddite.
(In before history nerds um, actually me: chill…I know)
OK commie.
Aww sweetie. You’re cute.
I am. A lot of people fail to see that.
To me systemd is fine, I am not really emotional at init systems. But on the other hand Linux is about choice and systemd kills that in some way because it does so much more than just starting services. GNOME is unusable without systemd, which makes it a no choice if you go into another rabbit hole. It’s kinda weird how deeply systemd is integrated in Linux these days. What I really dislike is that the log is in binary format by default which makes it necessary to deal with another tool to read logs. But well software changes, so do tools. But honestly the devs acted like dick heads sometimes, so I think most of the antipathy comes from their behavior and well yes MS now kinda pushing systemd because poettering works for them. I have fear that MS forces the systemd devs to implement things you cannot simply opt out of because it is so tightly integrated. Maybe copilot for writing systemd unit files would be nice though :P
GNOME is unusable without systemd
It is also unusable with systemd.
This comment was presented by the KDE gang.
Systemd is very customizable and flexible. I also fine it is faster than anything else. You can also choose what systemd services to use and what not to use
well yes MS now kinda pushing systemd because poettering works for them. I have fear that MS forces the systemd devs to implement things you cannot simply opt out of because it is so tightly integrated.
How has MS pushed systemd?
That’s a nonsense spin of things. There wasn’t/isn’t a need for Microsoft to push systemd, because it had been adopted by all major linux distributions before Poettering even made the switch. It’s a straw that init system luddites clutch at.
I have fear that MS forces the systemd devs to implement things you cannot simply opt out of because it is so tightly integrated.
What the hell? Code isn’t unpatchable, and neither is Microsoft the super evil villain trying to ruin the lives of Linux users that childishly.
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I feel like the people who complain about systemd have never tried to mess with sysVinit scripts before
6+ years ago, I was trying to configure a touchscreen HAT for a raspberry pi, and dicking with the init.rc script was a massive pain
The alternatives to systemd isn’t init.d or some other legacy init systems. I use runit, pretty easy to understand and use. Stop being lazy dude
Or dinit. dinit is awesome. s6 defeated me; an init system shouldn’t be that complex.
systemd has a lot of nice features, esp. in the area of dependencies and triggers. But it infects everything it touches, is enormous, and is buggy.
Frankly, I’m waiting for the PipeWire successor to systemd. Like systemd, Pulseaudio was everywhere by the time enough people realized how bad it really was and someone wrote a well-designed, well-written replacement. ALSA has problems that Pulseaudio fixed, but with a badly written solution; then a good software developer came up with a good solution that solves the same problems but isn’t just a giant hacky hot mess and now PA is slowly being replaced everywhere. Given that the same person, of questionable skill, who wrote PA also wrote systemd, I fully expect a better-designed solution to replace systemd.
S6 isn’t it. dinit is close, but has some holes that need addressing before it could succeed systemd, and I think it won’t be it; I think systemd’s successor hasn’t been written yet, but I have confidence it will be.
+1 to runit. So much simpler than systemd unit files.
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Kind of sad there are still people raging over systemd. When it flares up in discussions there is the usual debunked nonsense:
- it only logs information to binary and this is somehow bad. Except it it can be configured to log to text as well and it uses binary so it can forward secure sign records to prevent tampering as well as offering database style query operations.
- it’s insecure because the repo has millions of lines of code. Except that they compile into hundreds of small binaries running with least privilege, and often replacing the task of far more dangerous processes (e.g. there is an NTP client in systemd which sets the time and nothing else).
- various rants about the primary author
What is more bizarre is the nostalgia and hearkening back to sysvinit scripts when systemd didn’t replace sysvinit! Systemd replaced upstart which replaced sysvinit. Because writing 100s of lines of script to stop/start/restart a process sucked - insecure, slow, didn’t scale, didn’t capture dependencies and everyone knew it. Upstart was the first attempt to solve the issue and was used in Debian / Ubuntu, Fedora / Red Hat, openSUSE and others until systemd came along.
Not really involved with Linux for the past 15 years so don’t know the ins and outs of the systemd saga butyour debunking is not as convincing as you make it sound. I do run a system at home that when all goes well I don’t need to login to or do troubleshootingfor months. (Ie. Movies and shows download fine, homeassistant works). I stumbled upon systemd a while ago when I had to google how to fucking find and look at some logs on my Ubuntu system. Wtf have been a sysadmin professionally for years until a decade ago. Never seen something changing like that, but I digress as for your points.
Being able to query logs like a database sounds appealing dont take me wrong. But If I am interested I will install splunk, graylog or whatever kids use these days, I don’t need a core component to make a major structural change (logging on Unix is expected to be in plain text, most tools on a Unix systems do some sort of manipulation of log files, and i expect to use cat, grep and tail to work on my logs). The fact that I can opt out is a minor consolation. Also if I want my logs not to be tampered with, I’ll look into how to do that with dedicated tools and technology. On most systems that’s not a concern, why would you even consider that something appealing?
As for sysvinit scripts pain, I hear you buy a) I am pretty sure most script I have written/modified were tens of lines of code, not hundreds, hardly an impossible task to deal with. And b) that’s not something your average user needs to do every day (or decade). Most likely a sysvinit script would be implemented once in the lifetime of a particular project by the developer themselves, or by a package maintainer. If the solution to such a big problem is to have millions of lines of compiled code (that’s news to me, I’ll trust you on that number) it makes me wonder even more.
Are you sure all the counterarguments are really just bizarre nostalgia and easily debunked? I haven’t even read much about it and even when people like you try to sell how good systemd is, it looks to me like the solution we didn’t ask for a problem we didn’t have.
Concerning logs:
- You can still log to text if you want by configuration (e.g. forward stuff to syslog) and you can use any tools you like to read those files you want. So if you like text logs you can get them. You can even invoke journalctl to output logs on an ad hoc / scheduled basis in a variety of text formats and delimited fields.
- Binary allows structured logging (i.e. each log message is comprised of fields in a record), indexing and searching options that makes searches & queries faster. Just like in a database. e.g. if you want to search by date range, or a particular user then it’s easy and fast.
- Binary also allows the log to be signed & immutable to prevent tampering, allow auditing, intrusion detection etc… e.g. if someone broke into a system they could not delete records without it being obvious.
- You can also use splunk with systemd.
So people object to systemd writing binary logs and yet they can get text, or throw it into splunk or do whatever they like. The purpose of the binary is make security, auditing and forensics better than it is for text.
As for scripts, the point I’m making is systemd didn’t supplant sysvinit, it supplanted upstart. Upstart recognized that writing massive scripts to start/stop/restart a process was stupid and chose an event driven model for running stuff in a more declarative way. Basically upstart used a job system that was triggered by an event, e.g. the runlevel changes, so execute a job that might be to kick off a process. Systemd chose a dependency based model for starting stuff. It seems like dists preferred the latter and moved over to it. Solaris has smf which serves a similar purpose as systemd.
So systemd is declarative - you describe a unit in a .service file - the process to start, the user id to run it with, what other units it depends on etc. and allow the system to figure out how to launch it and take care of other issues. It means stuff happens in the right order and in parallel if it can be. It’s fairly simple to write a unit file as opposed to a script. But if you needed to invoke a script you could do that too - write a unit file that invokes the script. You could even take a pre-existing init script and write a .service file that kicks it off.
As somebody who started my *nix journey on Unix System V, the OS that sysvinit came from, I think the grandparents comment is spot on.
Also, upstart could have been good, but it’s actually pretty great to see the majority of the ecosystem adopt a single new solution. We wouldn’t want the init landscape to be like the X vs Wayland and WM landscape.
Poettering works for MS now? That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
You are at the second step.
This sounds a bit ridiculous. If Linus started working at MS I wonder if people would suddenly think Linux was a MS project and start hating on it.
Hopefully Microsoft will never make a guide on how to install Firefox because then we’d have to have a panic about that too
people keep saying this, but what is their extinguish plan? how could they realistically extinguish linux? it’s not a company they can buy, or even a single thing they can ruin.
If you know the history of Linux, plenty of people almost did. Microsoft has especially tried. Usually through software patents, FUD, and suing the shit out of everybody. If everyone had to rip SystemD out of their systems tomorrow, would it kill Linux? Nah, probably not. But it would be enough to keep those with large pockets from ever picking it over Microsoft’s offerings.
They’ve effectively kept Linux out of their domain for a very long time now.
That is my point, they have tried and failed completely before when their main product was windows licenses. Now, linux is incredibly important to their azure business, they wouldn’t want to potentially cause detriment to that and is far more important to them than windows licenses.
Also why would we have to rip out systemd, even if they tried to claim ownership of it and make it proprietary, it could be forked from before the license change and we would keep on going like nothing happened.
I guess you don’t remember when Google forked java in Android and still got railed in the courts by Oracle, who simply bought SUN Microsystems in order to gain the rights to do so. It’s not as simple as “oh we’ll just fork it!” when it comes to patents, intellectual property, etc.
What are you even talking about? systemd is currently under an opensource license, they cant retroactively change that. Any changes would be for it going forward if it is even possible for them to buy the rights to it (which I’m not convinced it is as Lennart Poettering is not the sole contributor and Red Hat / IBM and many others also have a significant stake in it). Sun patented Java on it upon its creation and when oracle bought sun, they bought the rights to those patents. They aren’t comparable situations. Java was never open source, it was source available, but still proprietary.
SystemD was just an example my guy, it could be anything.
You know, it’s funny. I don’t actually have much of a strong opinion on The Unix Way or Lennart Poettering, and I’m not super fond of Red Hat, but it’s not like I’m going to avoid everything they’re involved in the maintenance of and still use Linux.
I do like alternatives though, so I’ve been trying out OpenRC recently, and I gotta say I really like it. Of course there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but honestly it’s just simple and fast and stays out of the way, and it’s nice to just open logs in any text editor I like. Systemd can do all kinds of crazy things, and if you need any of them then there’s no reason not to use it, but I don’t, and it’s just kinda pleasant to have something nice and straightforward that I actually kinda understand instead.
Who the fuck spells developed with two ‘p’s???
It’s a mistake indeed. And there’s a very logical explanation as to why I made that mistake. The reason’s simple, really. Obvious even. So much so that I won’t bother explaining.
A madman
…who uses systemd
(He’s insane)
Hi am noob why systemd bad? I use Debian, is fucked?
Honestly I’ve been hearing about this for a while now but never bothered to check, I’m too lazy for that.
It’s not inherently bad, it “fails” the Unix Philosophy of “Do one thing and do it well” but since Linux’s kernel is:
- Unix-like, not Unix
- Fails this philosophy, as it does more than one thing but does all of it pretty well
- systemd is just a bundle of tools that do one thing and do it well under one package, like Linux’s kernel
It used to be a mess, but that’s solved. The biggest reason to avoid systemd is mainly user preference, not anything malicious. 90% of current distros use systemd as its easier for the maintainers and package programmers to build for the general than each package and each distro having their own methods of how to do an init system and other tasks.
How Debian and Arch and Gentoo and Slackware and other big distros worked was different, and the maintainers of those packages had to know “Debian’s way” and not a general way that most places accept. Systemd actually solved the Too Many Standards! issue.
I’ve never really seen a big argument against systemd, but maybe I’ve just not heard it.
It also didn’t help that Poettering isn’t particularly popular on a personal level. I think there would have been a lot less drama if he had better people skills.
Yeah, but to be honest, I would have terrible “people skills” too if people sent me death threats over writing a free software.
Doesn’t take much to get death threats on the Internet, unfortunately. He probably would have received less of them with a better attitude, though. He wasn’t full-on Ulrich Drepper, but still pretty divisive.
Yeah he seems kind of like a weirdo jerk.
back when you had an init system and you got it just the way you wanted it, you would be pissed that you had to move to systemd
now its there when you install and it is stable so it isn’t a big deal. But old beards hate change.
Old beards built linux and everything around, have some respect.
It used to be a mess, but that’s solved.
Do you mean the past tense of the verb solve or the systemd service that solves mathematical equations? Because solveds code is still a mess. It used to too, but it still is.
🤓
No one knows to this day
I highly recommend you check out this video
SystemD is not really bad. Like 90% distros use it, and for good reasons. Some people just pointlessly hate it on it, same way some people like to hate on Wayland too.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I highly recommend you check out this video
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I believe partly because it takes over so many responsibilities that it becomes a requirement for things that don’t need to require it. Plus it diverged from the Linux principle of do only one thing.
Also, afair, it was buggy for a while.
FYI: It’s called Unix principle, not Linux
Oh yeah, thank you
No problemo
There is a fork of Debian without SystemD. https://www.devuan.org/
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The principle of “do one thing and do it well” still applies to SystemD as it builds into many different applications which each do one thing only. The problem is that you require most of them to have a fully functioning unit system which makes it function more like 1 big product rather than many smaller ones as it actually is.
A lot of the hate I feel started with Pottering which extended to SystemD. And while it certainly had downsides it had less than the other i it Systems which is also why It has become the new norm.
I am fine with systemd. It works. It is more complicated than init.d
Before you copied some random file you edited and put it in init.d and it worked. Now you copy some systemd services file into systemd and run enable and start and it doesn’t work because you don’t know what you are doing.
I didn’t know what I was doing in init.d too but now I have to learn systemd services. Once you know a bit it will work then (probably)
I disagree. Before I had to copy and edit a huge-ass script (100+ lines) in init.d where 80% of it was concerned with PID files. I just want to start a process on boot, why is it so hard?
Now I can look at the documentation and write a simple unit file myself. It’s like 4 lines.
init.d wasn’t really what you’d call an “init” “system.” It was shell + conventions about how to write shell scripts to manage each service. It effectively offloaded most of the work people wanted an init system/service supervisor to do onto developers that just needed to ship a system service. To be honest, it was insane. Templates/patterns/best practices emerged, but at the end of the day, init.d was just shell, and it caused tons of problems.
The extra complexity of systemd is in exchange for dependency management, service supervision, tons of things that are important/desirable for sysadmins/developers today, but are all far outside the scope of init. I’d much rather cope with the extra complexity of systemd in exchange for being able to write an actual service definition file.
Before you copied some random file you edited and put it in init.d and it worked.
Before you copied some random file you edited and put it in init.d and it appeared to be working but then failed in random ways the first time you restarted, the first time you rebooted, the first time you restarted it via sudo instead of directly as root since some environment variable differed,…
So really it only appeared to be working in my experience because you had no real way to check.
I mean it should be obviously clear that copying random files isn’t sth. You should do anyways
Well, in this context what we are talking about is some random init script from some other service because nobody wants to write all that crap from scratch every time.
The systemd init units should be setup when you install a package.
Me who doesn’t know what it is and just uses it because it came with my distro
Yeah. It was a controversy like 10 years ago at this point.
I mean I’ve briefly tried some of the modern distros that go without systemd recently, and honestly they just felt like I went back in time except they weren’t even the same as then so I had no idea what I was doing without reading documentation that is imo much worse than the arch wiki.
And as a bonus fuck man pages as I can’t in a pleasant way put them into my 1000s of categorized browser tabs for research and topic switching while being able to return without starting over.
OpenRC seems quite straightforward
It is! People have been burnt by others and have now settled for mediocrity. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose; nothing right, either.
Not compared to systemd
Basic commands, there isn’t really much difference at all
ITT: self-taught fanboys who don’t know how to spell “developed”.
Obligatory The Tragedy of Systemd
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
