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! 😂
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Ironically, pipewire is built to replace pulseaudio.
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.
anyone ever seen a goldwing? it was supposed to be a motorcycle but for some reason has a fridge, microwave and what not added.
it is still a motorcycle. you can ride it. it starts right away and has all sorts of extra functions.
and now look at it. it is an ugly piece of engineering that only the weirdest of people like.
dont ride a goldwing. dont use systemd.
No clue about motorcycles but those things look neat and win awards. I want one now. Thanks for turning me on to this neat bike.
yeah sure. enjoy that and some systemd. everyone likes different things.
What are you talking about? The goldwing has been consistently hailed as one of the best touring motorcycle for almost 40 years. Every long distance rider I’ve spoken to says the goldwing is their favorite bike for cross country rides, and the ones who have sold theirs for a BMW or Harley touring bike have expressed regrets about changing.
Just because something has a lot of features, doesn’t mean it’s bad.
where i live ppl laugh about goldwing riders. it is considered the idiots bike: https://avida.cs.wright.edu/personal/wischgol/fsr/Guenther/Goldwing.html
…just one example.
google suggest in my country autocompletes goldwing with “mikrowelle” (microwave).
maybe we just have a different taste.
