systemd, as a service manager, is decent. Not necessarily a huge improvement for most use cases.
systemd, the feature creep that decides to pull every single possible use case into itself to manage everything in one place, with qwirks because making a “generic, do everything” piece of software is not a good idea, is not that great.
systemd, the group of tools that decided to manage everything by rewriting everything from scratch and suffering from the same issue that were fixed decades ago, just because “we can do better” while changing all well known interfaces and causing a schism with either double workload or dropping support for half the landscape from other software developer is really stupid.
If half the energy that got spent in the “systemd” ecosystem was spent in existing projects and solutions that already addressed these same issues, it’s likely we’d be in a far better place. Alas, it’s a new ecosystem, so we spend a lot of energy getting to the same point we were before. And it’s likely that when we get close to that, something new will show up and start the cycle again.
Systemdeez nuts
Bullshit, there’s always reasons listed. Some more, some less opiniated, but there’s always lists.
For me personally:
- no portability
- not-invented-here syndrome
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- manages stuff it shouldn’t, like DNS
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- makes some configurations unneccessarily complicated
- more CVE than all other init together
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- service manager that runs with PID 0
To the feature creep: that’s kind of the point. Why have a million little configs, when I could have one big one? Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical. I get that there are use cases, but the average user doesn’t like having to tweak every component of the OS separately before getting to doom-scrolling.
And that feature creep and large-scale adoption inevitably has led to a wider attack surface with more targets, so ofc there will be more CVEs, which—by the way—is a terrible metric of relative security.
You know what has 0 CVEs? DVWA.
You know what has more CVEs and a higher level of privilege than systemd? The linux kernel.
And don’tme get started on how bughunters can abuse CVEs for a quick buck. Seriously: these people’s job is seeing how they can abuse systems to get unintended outcomes that benefit them, why would we expect CVEs to be special?
TL;DR: That point is akin to Trump’s argument that COVID testing was bad because it led to more active cases (implied: being discovered).
is it overengineering or just a push back against “make each program do one thing well,” and saying yeah but I have n things to do and I only need them done, well or not I just need them done and don’t want to dig through 20 files to do it…
I feel like anyone who genuinely has a strong opinion on this and isn’t actively developing something related has too much time on their hands ricing their desktop and needs to get a job
As someone who has strong opinions on this, and not only has a job but has a job related to exactly sort of thing… We use freebsd.
Specifically to avoid shit like systemd, and other questionable choices forced down people’s throats by idiots who can’t stop touching things that work well because they didn’t invent it.
What do you use freebsd for? Server or clients and what kind of workload?
As someone who’s not a developer at all and has been making a comic about systemd for a rather small audience, it’s worse than you think: We actually have stuff to do and procrastinate on them while spending time and thoughts in this, reading old blog posts and forum debates as if deciphering Sumerian epic poems. Many pages were made while I was supposed to be preparing for exams, which I barely passed. Others when I should’ve been cleaning up for moving. I think part of the reason why I haven’t made any in a while is that with a faithful audience being born and waiting for the next chapter, it’s started feeling like something I had to do, and therefore, the type of stuff I procrastinate on.
My full-time job literally involves dealing with systemd’s crap. There is a raspberry pi that controls all of our signage. Every time it is powered on, systemd gets stuck because it’s trying to mount two separate partitions to the same mount point, whereupon I have to take a keyboard and a ladder, climb up the ceiling, plug in the keyboard, and press Enter to get it to boot. I’ve tried fixing it, but all I did was break it more.
systemd gets stuck because it’s trying to mount two separate partitions to the same mount point
Uh… Sounds like it’s not really systemd’s fault, your setup is just terrible.
I’ve tried fixing it, but all I did was break it more.
If you’re unable to fix it, maybe get somebody else? Like, this doesn’t sound like it’s an unfixable issue…
Uh… Sounds like it’s not really system’s fault, your setup is just terrible.
I don’t know his specific issue, but the general behavior of systemd going completely nuts when something is a bit ‘off’ in some fashion that is supremely confusing. Sure, there’s a ‘mistake’, but good luck figuring out what that mistake is. It’s just systemd code tends to be awfully picky in obscure ways.
Then when someone comes along with a change to tolerate or at least provide a more informative error when some “mistake” has been made is frequently met with “no, there’s no sane world where a user should be in that position, so we aren’t going to help them out of that” or “that application does not comply with standard X”, where X is some standard the application developer would have no reason to know exists, and is just something the systemd guys latched onto.
See the magical privilege escalation where a user beginning with a number got auto-privileges, and Pottering fought fixing it because “usernames should never begin with a number anyway”.
Curious, how does changing one of them to a different mount point make things worse?
I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.
In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.
When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.
After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).
The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.
“I hate systemd, it’s bloated and overengineered” people stay, perched precariously on their huge tower of shell scripts and cron jobs.
Wait until you learn about debhelper.
If you use a debian-based system, unless you have actively looked at the DH source, the one thing that built virtually every package on your system, you do not get to say anything about “bloat” or “KISS”.
DH is a monstrous pile of perl scripts, only partially documented, with a core design that revolves around a spaghetti of complex defaults, unique syntax, and enough surprising side effects and crazy heuristics to spook even the most grizzled greybeards. The number of times I’ve had to look at the DH perl source to understand a (badly/un)documented behavior while packaging something is not insignificant.
But when we replaced a bazillion bash scripts with a (admittedly opinionated but also stable and well documented) daemon suddenly the greybeards acted like Debian was going to collapse under the weight of its own complexity.
huge tower of shell scripts and cron jobs.
That’s bloat. I start all my services manually according to my needs. Why start cupsd BEFORE I need to print anything?
“I hate systemd, it’s bloated and overengineered”
And built poorly by people who don’t work well with others and then payola’ed onto the world.
people stay, perched precariously on their huge tower of shell scripts and cron jobs.
Fucking UNIX is shell scripts and cron jobs, skippy. Add xinetd and you’re done.
yeah I just hate the move away from flat text files honestly. Its one thing I did not like about windows NT with the registry. databasing up the config.
Which part of systemd’s config is not text-based? The only “database” it uses for configuration is the filesystem
If systemd was only managing services there would be less opposition. People opposed don’t want a single thing doing services and boot and user login and network management and…
Are they also opposed to coreutils being a single project with dozens of executables doing different things?
