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?
The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could’ve been fixed or replaced.
The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd’s development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn’t exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical’s Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows’ svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.
It’s not just an init system, it’s way waaay more. It’s supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the “do one thing right” approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.
I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you’re free to use systemd if you want to. That’s choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.
To be fair systemd hasn’t shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i’m forced to use at work.
YMMV. If you’re happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.
Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don’t know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.
Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.
It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.
All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.
While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system… no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.
I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering’s code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.
No, it’s not bad.
tbh, I’ve always like Apple’s launchd.
Getting a “control center” for your init, with user groups, modularity, memory limits and queryable status/control is great. (Sometime people forget how painful init scripts can be…)
The only problem I see is the tendency to cram everything into systemd.
I absolutely agree with you, but not quite on the las point. SystemD is modular, right? I can still pick and choose something else for tasks that SystemD handles. Also, it might be a good idea anyways to centralize some common tools for distros and devote developer ressources somewhere more specific and necessary.
It’ll always be an open field of software stacks to choose from, but having one big, featureful and solid base stack for most usecases seems like a win to me. It’s all completely FOSS anyway, it’s not like we are risking a vendor lock-in here.
It often feels like people only complain about things because they are not used to them
It’s one of those divisive FOSS matters that get parroted endlessly by people who think they’re smarter than they really are.
Does systemd have its problems? Sure.
Do those problems actually affect most of the people complaining? No.See also: “Linus said something funny ten years ago, and I heard from a guy who heard from a guy who heard from a guy who once had to edit xorg.conf by hand, so Nvidia is awful forever for everyone!”
Yes and yes.
Personally I always found systemd amazing, it brought logic and order in the init world.
Finally some consistent API and predictable behavior.
Exactly. People are pretty averse to consolidating on something new, but let’s be super honest here. SystemD is pure FOSS and not going away anytime soon. It’s design is reasonable and brings a good deal of useful features. Also, main distros being a little more similar because they all support SystemD’s API/config is an absolute win for me!
As service manager systemd nice, but look all services:
systemd + systemd/journal + systemd/Timers systemd-boot systemd-creds systemd-cryptenroll systemd-firstboot systemd-home systemd-logind systemd-networkd systemd-nspawn systemd-resolved systemd-stub systemd-sysusers systemd-timesyncdThat’s look as overkill. I use only systemd, journald, systemd-boot, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved and systemd-timesyncd, but that a lot systemd. Feel like system make monolith.
systemd-nspawn for example. Systems manager for containers. Seriously. Why than exists? I don’t understand. Really, someone use that daemon?
Feel like system make monolith.
you do know what the linux kernel is, right?
Spoiler: It’s a monolithic kernelIn the end your distro packager decided to not split systemd into different packages, I believe only Gentoo does actually guide you to this
so you actually barking on the wrong tree
