In reference to: https://lemmy.world/post/23862757
I use Void btw
Image text:
Most people rejected his message.
“Systemd is Satan’s creation! Pure Evil!”
They hated Talking Pig because He told them the truth.
Just the meme/thread I was looking for. As someone that’s been out of the linux game for awhile, what’s the lastest on the controversy here? Do the systemd haters look more or less correct in the year 2025?
Upvoted because it belongs in this community, and should not be silenced, even though it is the wrong opinion
I don’t really get the hate for systemd. At least for someone who started really using Linux after it was introduced, it always seemed easier to control and manage than the init.d stuff.
Obviously it’s a hassle to migrate if you have a ton of legacy services, but it’s pretty nice.
It’s not just init.d that exists, alternative init systems such as dinit and OpenRC are a thing. The general complaint about systemd is that it’s too heavy and complicated for something as simple as an init system, and it has already gone way beyond that.
This does not only increase the attack surface of a Linux system drastically, giving way to exploits and potentially backdoors, but it also puts too much power in a piece of software’s hands as more and more things start depending on it.
And systemd is not even needed to create a user-friendly Linux system anyway. Chimera Linux with GNOME would be as smooth an experience as Fedora Linux if only it had more software in its repositories and PackageKit support.
It’s because you now need to do
systemctl restart sshdinstead of/etc/init.d/sshd restart, I see no other reason than having to learn new syntax.Arguably, init.d scripts were easier to understand, and systemd is a bit of a black box, it somehow works, but who knows where it writes logs or saves the process pid (it’s all in the documentation somewhere), with init.d script you can just open the script itself and look.
I think it’s okay to not 100% know every little detail of how a system works, as long as it’s possible to find out what you need when you need it.
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I prefer the ini files systemd uses to bash scripts
Don’t minimize those strengths. Init.d scripts are something you can figure out just knowing a bit of shell script, or historical knowledge from before there was an internet. For something I rarely use, why do I need to learn something more complex to do the same thing - I either haven’t been sold on all the new functionality they piled in or do not need it. After all these years crowing about the Unix/linux way being many independent flexible tools that can work together, why do we now have this all-in-one monstrosity that might as well have come directly from Microsoft?
I have the following complaints about systemd:
- It was created basically by lennart because after RHEL 6 did pretty much the worst implementation ever of upstart he got NIH syndrome about it
- Red Hat played a lot of dirty politics early on to get systemd everywhere (my tinfoil hat theory is that Red Hat let Lennart’s NIH syndrome run away with it because they thought having more control over the init system would be beneficial)
- It’s subsuming everything, often with no real benefit over what it replaces.
The first two aren’t actually issues with systemd, but rather are political issues I have around the way Red Hat bullies the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I’m not going to let that become a stopping point for my using what is actually a fairly good piece of tech. The third is actually an ongoing issue, but it’s not enough for me to try throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is, however, IMO a continuation of Red Hat’s sketchy political play.
What kind of dirty politics are we talking about here? I remember when Arch switched, the stated reasons from the devs was that their old init system was bad and nobody wanted to maintain it, for example.
There were several cases of shenanigans from other Red Hat controlled projects yanking upstart configs and sysvinit scripts from their projects and replacing them exclusively with systemd units even though those configs had active maintainers (often people who worked at Canonical or Google). This made packaging those supposedly community owned but de facto Red Hat controlled projects more difficult for any system that didn’t use systemd, since the packagers had to scramble to find or recreate those files and then maintain patch series for them. They also very quickly jumped on adding systemd-specific integrations where similar integrations to make the services work better with upstart had been rejected because services weren’t supposed to favour an init system.
Something not necessarily (or provably) from Red Hat - a whole lot of misinformation about upstart suddenly started appearing on mailing lists and message boards when Debian was considering whether to use upstart or systemd. While I think they made the right decision to go with systemd, that sudden influx of new accounts complaining about upstart likely influenced the decision in ways I’m really not comfortable with.
I don’t dislike systemd. I’m happy to use it and think it works quite well for many (though definitely not all) of the things it does. But I am concerned about how it’s yet another case of Red Hat having a large amount of control over the Linux ecosystem and Red Hat controlled projects and the supporters of Red Hat projects using dirty tricks to further that control. And with systemd consuming more and more of how a Linux system works, I am concerned about the influence that gives Red Hat. Are we going to see
systemd-packagedthat manages your packages, but somehow the patches to make it work with non-RPM packages keep getting rejected or just held up for years at a time? (We’ve already seen similar things with xdg portals, where portals Red Hat wants get approved and merged very quickly, but portals proposed by Canonical or SuSE spend years “in review” with more and more petty changes requested, sometimes to be rejected because a Red Hat backed portal that only implements part of the functionality suddenly appeared and was approved within a week or two.)
You don’t have to use systemd. However, the rest of the world left you behind. Systemd isn’t controversial since everyone has adopted it. No one is making you use it but keep in mind you are a very small minority. The rest if the community moved on after systemd was release 10 years ago.
This is fine for the memes but outside of that it is silly.
Windows isn’t controversial since everyone has adopted it. No one is making you use it but keep in mind you are a very small minority.
Hexbear user spotted (or at least that’s what my first impression is with the weird image)
Windows isn’t controversial since everyone uses it. That’s a true fact.
Hexbear user spotted (or at least that’s what my first impression is with the weird image)
Heck no, that’s just an ancient meme to indicate it’s just banter/harmless trolling, not an attempt at serious discourse.
I guess we’re old now, if folks don’t know trollface anymore.
The more you know I guess. I wasn’t on the internet in 2008.
Windows has about 80% market share (decreasing) in a very specific and shrinking niche (desktop PC’s).
All other computing devices used by most people daily on the client and server side are dominated by some form of Linux or BSD.
Hard disagree, I have been using Linux for over two decades and find sysd superior to sysv
I’m about 2 decades in too, really not here to argue since everything has already been said multiple times. I do see systemd in a somewhat similar light as Pulseaudio. Yes, some good ideas there and it’s a useful tool, but it wasn’t the be-all end-all solution.
Syswire when?
Iirc we can use emoji now, so Sys🎶 is a valid option.
In practice, what makes it so bad?
It’s new and different, and the Linux boomers who are still stuck on ALSA and ext2 hate it.
what are the better alternatives for ALSA and ext2 ?
PipeWire and btrfs
what is it? systemD is new?
When you entered the scene before epoch 0 I guess it is.
Everything else aside, my biggest gripes are with service control. Instead of just “service” they had to invent a new name that was super close to an existing function (systemctl vs sysctl) and reverse the switch order. (service sshd stop vs systemctl stop sshd.service)
Besides that, I absolutely hate that all the service configs are not in a standard location. Well, you get things like sshd.conf which are still in etc, but the systemctl configs are who knows where.
There are more important things to hate on with systemd, but I went for the superficial this time and I absolutely hate service management with systemd now.
wrt conf file location, they’re only generally in /usr/lib/systemd, /etc/systemd, or /run/systemd. You can always find out what’s getting read with
systemctl cat <service-name>. Way easier to find stuff than with some other random programs imo, I’ve seen crap have default conf files in dumb places like/usr/share/<service-name>/lib/etc.
Bad usability, binary logs, crummy architecture.
Poettering worked for Red Hat from 2008 to 2022.[2][3] He then joined Microsoft.
In 2017, Poettering received the Pwnie Award for Lamest Vendor Response to vulnerabilities reported in systemd.
This Mastodon stream from Lennart Poettering describes a sudo replacement — called run0 — that will be part of the upcoming systemd 256 release. It takes a rather different approach to the execution of privileged commands, avoiding the use of setuid (which he calls “SUID”) permissions entirely.
Basically Microsoft bloat confirmed, everyone switch back to OpenRC lol
Install what you want we’re in the land of the free (and open source software) here
Yeah, I’m planning to switch from Arch to Gentoo. Systemd isn’t the only reason, but it’s a big one.
(Yes, I know about Artix, but it’s… kindof a Frankenstein’s monster, still mostly depending on the Arch repos and still with certain relics of Systemd. Or at least it was when I last tried it.)
If you like Arch you might like Void, it has roughly similar ideals and a very fast package manager. No AUR equivalent though.
It can build packages from source like Gentoo though if I remember right
I’ve never really had issues with systemd, but I must say when I was setting up void I did really enjoy the runit init system 🤷♂️
Now we just need to find a way to integrate systemd into wayland and watch people lose their mind.
It sort of is, the whole elogind thing.
Hueheue i use artix btw
redpill me on artix. Why should I switch from something like gentoo that still enables me to avoid systemd?
I tried gentoo a while ago and couldn’t figure out portage, but that’s on me… The reason i switched to from standard arch was just because my pc took 3 miniutes to boot (from nvme) and changing my init sys to runit solved my issue. I’d love to actually figure out gentoo someday though
There’s a support channel on irc for things like this. Also portage is just a better pacman–it can do more and thusly a time investment is necessary to be in control of your hardware
This is high art.
system d struggle sessions should be integrated into SystemD
been out of lemmy for a while, what happened to the comic strip where openrc and runit battled systemd?
It was cropped and this is being passed off as new content
