SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.
I’m old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don’t see that as an issue anymore. I don’t have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).
My 2 questions:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
Systemd (the collection of components present in a typical distro) is like many other large frameworks:
It can do a lot, has some good design ideas at its core, and is certainly useful to a lot of people.
But the implementation is opinionated and invasive, so if your needs don’t happen to match what its author(s) envisioned, it can easily become more of a liability than a benefit. Making matters worse, it is buggy as hell.
I don’t think it’s helpful to think of the topic as “a rant”. Criticisms of systemd are diverse, and at least some of them are founded in practical experience. Being dismissive of them only stirs up resentment and division.
To be fair, we knew before it would be buggy and invasive. The actual surprise for me was failure of project governance, even with Debian. It was enough to consider me moving to *BSD, thogh they have their own share of issues.