Because people here accuse Poettering of being an asshole: I’ve read some of his blogposts and seen some talks of his and him doing Q&A: He answered professionally, did his best to answer truthfully, did acknowledge when he didn’t know something. No rants, no opining on things he didn’t know about, no taking questions in bad faith.
As far as I can tell all the people declaring him some kind of asshole are full of shit.
I don’t appreciate the attitude and arrogance of the guy behind systemd because he actually believes what he produces can replace everything that already “just works”. He wants to push out systemd-homed because “why not”. He wants to replace grub. He wants to replace a myriad of things that just flat out don’t need to get replaced. autofs, cron, you name it! That kind of thinking and one-size-fits-all mentality is backwards and does not benefit the community in any way. All it does is stuff everything into one bin and so long as influencers like this guy continue to restrict what works or doesn’t work according to their own work, the community and its users will not be able to freely develop FOSS. Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency on systemd and so when you’re trying to use something like Gentoo, it becomes very difficult to get that done and hacks have to made in order to get it working. FOSS shouldn’t work like that. He’ll keep stripping away legit projects from major distros until IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good. Sorry if I can’t rejoice in the woah whiplash.
The is the first time I’ve ever heard someone accusing grub of „just working“
lmao
He wants to replace grub.
I hope so!
I’ve been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.
The thing I don’t like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the “do one thing, do it well” Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.
My issues with systemd is that it isn’t an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it’s slow and doesn’t seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).
Recently I’ve been using dinit on a system, and I’m pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I’m running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.
Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?
I use it because I’m frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.
I’m a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the “unused ram is wasted ram” phrase that has caught on with people.
I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and…require you basically to be a developer to use them.
I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can’t imagine how fucked I’d be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.
Unused memory IS wasted memory and my Linux machines, AFAICR, always have buffered everything possible since twenty years ago, it’s not a systemd thing. It also speeds up things, why the long face?
So you just like having ram doing nothing? Unused ram is wasted ram. Distros cache a lot in ram because they can. I mean why hav RAM is you just want to stare at it and say ohh look at all the free RAM.
Even a system that uses 90mb of ram on a cold boot will accumulate gigs of stuff in cache if you’re using it. (assuming it has the memory for it) That isn’t what people have a problem with though.
Maybe this is an incorrect use of language on my part, but I feel like I’m not the only person who means “memory actively being used by a process” when referring to memory usage. I understand the whole linux ate my ram thing. That just isn’t what I or what I assume a lot of people mean when talking about this.
When I boot up my system, pull up my terminal, run htop, and see 800-1200mb being used just by processes (not in buffer, not in cache), that doesn’t raise any flags or anything, but I also know that some people have gotten their systems so streamlined they use 10x less than that. That’s all memory that could be used by other things. That could be the difference between a low memory system running a web browser or not. Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system. There are endless possibilities.
I’ve never used any other init system since I’m relatively new to Linux (8 years of use). So, systemd is all I know. I don’t mind it, but I have this one major issue with it. That “stop job for UID 1000…” Or whatever it says. It’s hands down the most annoying thing I have ever experienced in Linux. Making me wait for 3 minutes sometimes is just insane. I know I can go in and make it wait for 5 seconds
/etc/systemd/system.confor whatever, but why? Also, another one usually pops up.Other than that, I really like how I can make timers. I like how I can make scripts run on boot, logout or login. And I like how I can make an app a background service that can auto start if they ever crashed. Maybe all of this can be done with other init systems? I wouldn’t know, but I like these in systemd
Though I see Systemd as an improvement, I still do not like it.
The Chimera Linux FAQ captures my thoughts quite well:
https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-on-systemd
I decided to finally lean into using systemd more while i’ve been using NixOS, since the OS already relies heavily on it anyway. Created targets for my window managers, starting all my programs with services instead of autostart scripts, etc. And it worked fine for the most part, except for some reason, in qtile the systray widget refuses to load the nm-applet when it’s started through systemd. Waybar does not have this problem. I can’t help notice that systemd is not just a little slower, which isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it also tends to hang more often when shutting down, which is a bit annoying and reminds me of windows lol. Before NixOS i used Void, and while i never really cared too much about what init system i’m running, i can’t help but really appreciate runit for being so simple and fast. I’m thinking of moving back to Void but using the Nix package manager on top. I recently found a solution to the nix driver problem when using it on other distros, so now i should be able to combine the best of both worlds.
I totally agree.
I hate to admit I didn’t want anything to do with systemd because it took me forever to get somewhat familiar with some other mainstream init systems.
Then, I didn’t care for a while until I developed software that had to keep running using some sort of init system. The obvious choice was whatever the default I had (systemd) and I fell in love with the convenience of systemd (templates, timers, …). I started shipping sample systemd with the things I provide & yes, you are on your own if you use something else.
