The systemd debate is basically dead. There are very few against it, but many accept it by now. Just avoid phoronix forum and some other places.
Anytime I see a Phoronix article (very loosely) about systemd or Wayland I fill my insults bingo card.
What’s wrong with Wayland? I get the hate for systemd, even though I love it dearly, but I get the hate. But what’s wrong with Wayland? It’s amazing as far as I have used it. I started using with when Fedora 40 shipped plasma 6.
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a Wayland user (Hyprland, then KDE Plasma, and I’ll be giving Cosmic a fair shot), and don’t see myself returning to X and having to choose between massive screen tearing and massive input lag.
Wayland is missing many features that are required for some people or some applications. There’s no way for a multi-window application to tell the compositor where to place the windows, for example to have one window snap to and follow the other. Color profiles were implemented very recently. Wayland’s isolation of applications, while a significant improvement to security, has made remote input software and xdotool-like programs highly dependent on third-party interoperability solutions (specifically dbus and XDG Desktop Portal). The same isolation broke most accessibility tools like screen readers. Dockable windows, like the toolbars in QT Creator or QOwnNotes, are often difficult or impossible to dock back into the main window.
Because Wayland compositors have to implement all protocols (as opposed to deferring to the X.Org server; which is why wlroots is such a big deal) or rely on XDG Desktop Portal (which has never worked right for me), feature parity between compositors is never guaranteed, and especially problematic with GNOME dragging its heels.
Wayland is nowhere near feature parity with X11 today, and that is a legitimate prohibitive issue for many people. Wayland will never reach total feature parity with X11 in some areas, and that will always be prohibitive for some people.
But the worst (in my opinion) is the development process of the Wayland protocols. The proposal discussion threads read like the best and/or worst sitcom you’ve ever seen. It took them several months of back-and-forth just short of ad hominem attacks to decide how a window should set its icon. Several months for a pissing WINDOW ICON!
I still have weird glitches where applications don’t seem to update on screen (chrome and firefox, both natively doing wayland).
Lack of any solution for programmatic geometry interaction. This one has been afflicted with ‘perfect is enemy of good’, as the X way of allowing manual coordinates be specified is seen as potentially too limiting (reconciling geometry with scaling, non-traditional displays), so they do nothing instead of proposing an alternative.
The different security choices also curtail functionality. Great, better security for input, uh oh, less flexibility in input solutions. The ‘share your screen’ was a mess for a long time (and might be for some others still). Good the share your screen has a better security model, but frustrating when it happened.
Inconsistent experience between Wayland implementations. Since Wayland is a reference rather than a singular server, Plasma, Gnome, and others can act a little different. Like one supporting server side decorations and another being so philosophically opposed to the concept that they refuse to cater to it. While a compositing window manager effectively owned much of the hard work even in X, the X behavior between compositors were fairly consistent.
I’ve been using Plasma as a Wayland compositor after many failed attempts, and it still has papercuts.
Various mildly understandable to braindead reasons
- “it doesn’t work”
- “breaks my workflow”
- “Xorg is better”
- “Nvidia”
- “no reason to use it”
- “being pushed by IBM”
- “no SSH forwarding”
- “has taken too long to get to current state”
- “when I last tried it 5 years ago it didn’t work”
It’s missing a lot of features that Wayland “developers” (spec writers) don’t want to add because they personally don’t need them. For the few features they actually add, they leave it to WM developers to implement them, thus creating different incompatible implementations.
The systemd debate is basically dead.
But the Super Nintendo vs. Sega Genesis/Megadrive debate rages on.
“Just avoid places that sysadmins and security guys frequent and get your opinions on systemd from memes and people running arch on home machine”. Great plan.
Systemd is absolute and utter shit, especially from security perspective.
Noone was asking security guys but package maintainers.
My favorite systemd thing is booting up a box with 6 NICs where only 1 was configured during the initial setup. Second favorite is betting on whether it will hang on reboot/shutdown.
Great tool, 10/10.
My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from “hmm it’s not plugged in at boot, I’ll let the user know” to “not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can’t boot!”
This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines…
You could just use systemd mounts like a normal person. Fstab is for critical partitions
I’ve gotten into quite a lot of systemd-related flame wars so far, and what strikes me is that I haven’t heard a single reason why systemd is good and should be used in favor of openrc/sysvinit/whatever. The only arguments I hear in favor of systemd, even from the its diehard defenders, are justifications why it’s not that bad. Not once have I heard someone advocate for systemd with reasoning that goes likes “Systemd is superior to legacy init systems because you can do X much easier” or “systemd is more secure because it’s resistant against Y attack vector”. It’s always “Linus says it’s allright” or “binary logfiles aren’t a problem, you can just get them from journald instead of reading the file”, or “everyone already uses it”.
When it comes to online discourse, systemd doesn’t have advocates, it has apologists.
I’ve gotten into quite a lot of systemd-related flame wars so far, and what strikes me is that I haven’t heard a single reason why systemd is good and should be used in favor of openrc/sysvinit/whatever.
“Hi I’m new to Linux, I switched from Windows to Alpine Linux and my laptop’s battery life has gone from 6 hours to 30 minutes before needing a charge.”
Well, I’ll tell you that I prefer systemd because I can comprehend its declarative unit files and dependency-based system a lot better than the shell script DSLs and runlevels that I’ve had to mess with in other init systems. systemctl status has a quite nice output that can be really handy when debugging units. I like being able to pull up logs for just about any service on my system with a simple journalctl command instead of researching where the log file is.
Linus had an epic flame war with the systemd idiots for breaking Linux stupidly: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/
He didn’t do anything because he made it clear he owned the kernel and userspace was someone else’s problem, but also that the systemd guys were absolute morons who were a danger to themselves and everyone else.
“Just avoid places that sysadmins and security guys frequent and get your opinions on systemd from memes and people running arch on home machine”. Great plan.
So salty. Also twisting the things I said. I for sure like to visit phoronix, but I avoid the phoronix forum and advice was to avoid the forum.
Noone was asking security guys but package maintainers.
citation needed.
Keep using Devuan if it makes you happy.
Not really interested in debating with average “I run arch btw” user. We are not in the same universe, things I have to audit and maintain are not in the same universe with things you do, so having such a smart advice coming from you is not a surprise at all. I could, after all, just roll out my own distro if I am not happy, amirite?
I run systemd machines because I don’t have a choice. It doesn’t make it any less of a shit. Simple as that.
But hey, tell me some more about systemd, I am really new to all this 🤔
