Average systemd debate

"I hate systemd, it's bloated and overengineered" people stay, perched precariously on their huge tower of shell scripts and cron jobs.
- 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?
  
  thats what systemd sockets are here for
- “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.
- 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?
- 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.
  
  Oh yes, fuck dh with a rusty pole. I've had to paclage some stuff at work, and it's a nightmare. I love having to relearn everything on new compat levels. But the main problem is the lack of documentation and simple guidelines

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.
  
  Part of me wants to troll and come up with crazy statements
- The systemd debate is basically dead.
  But the Super Nintendo vs. Sega Genesis/Megadrive debate rages on.
  
  Because Sega does what Nintendon’t
  
  Both have great games.
- "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...
  
  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.
  
  “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.
- Although there is an argument for not using it on (very) old systems
- The systemd debate is basically dead.
  Not until it isn't shite.
- I'm against it but I just found that BSD doesn't have it and I fits me better than Linux in many other ways too.
  So there's just no need left to debate :)

Systemdeez nuts
- Fuck me, I'm crylaughing at this

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
- Congratulations on passing your exams! Hang in there. 🙂
  
  Congrats on passing the exams!
  
  😁 It is a fun comic
- 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...
  
  Curious, how does changing one of them to a different mount point make things worse?
  
  can you get something besides a pi?
- 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?

text

[ *] (3 of 3) A stop job is running for User Manager for UID 1000... (1m12s / 3m)
- # nano /etc/systemd/{system,user}.conf ---- DefaultTimeoutStopSec=10s
  You're welcome.
  
  OH LOOK A CONF FILE TO EDIT.
  Full circle, bitches.
  
  What the fuck it even means for a stop job to run?
  
  What is the default of the default?
- Type reboot into an SSH session and play everyone's favorite game show...
  WILL IT ACTUALLY DO IIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

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
manages stuff it shouldn't, like DNS
makes some configurations unneccessarily complicated
more CVE than all other init together
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).
  
  Sure, some like overengineering.
- Try writing a init script on systemD.
  It's amazingly simple
  
  But only that.
  Btw, dinit is simpler. :)p

I will take OpenRC to my grave
- I'm more of a runit guy, but I started using Alpine recently, and I have to say, openrc is also pretty nice!
- Unit files, sockets and systemctl
  Stop it Patrick, you're scaring him!
  
  What "scares" me the most is the journal... for some reason it takes too long to get specific unit logs, and should anything break down in it, there is no way for me to fix it. Like logging has been solved forever, and I prefer specific unit logs to the abomination of journalctl.
  But like unit files are everywhere, and systemctl at its core is a nice cmd utility.
- science progresses one funeral at a time
  Planck's principle
  
  There is nothing scientific about systemd
- cool

Do people still debate about systemd?
- Neurotypical people do not.

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.
- agree. i find the dns resolver in particular a dumpster fire of shitfuckery. name resolution was shitty, but a solution based on wrapper is just ugh.
- same with rust?
- Learning how Systemd manages the network was a total mindfuck. There are so many alternatives, all of them being used differently by different tools, partially supported. networkd, Network Manager... There were other tools, they shared similar files but had them in different /etc or /usr folders. There were unexpected interactions between the tools... Oh man, it was so bad. I was very disappointed.
  I was really into learning how things really worked in Linux and this was a slap to my face because my mindset was "Linux is so straightforward". No, it is not, it is actually a mess like most systems. I know this isn't a "Linux" issue, I'm just ranting about this specific ecosystem.

What's system md? Sounds like the name of 90s anti-virus software.
- Norton McCaffersky System MD Super Scanner Virus Protection.

WILL IT ACTUALLY DO IIIIIIIIIIIIIIT