| "The systemd supporters are soon going to take away the ability to run pretty much all background processes (including using "&" in a shell) by killing those processes when your X session logs out." WUT? (goes and downloads FreeBSD...) I've been a Linux user since 1993 and SystemV init was something definitely in need of replacement. But this was not even close to the most pressing problem in the Linux ecosystem. The most pressing problems were and are things like the clunkiness of package management, the inadequacy of the root/userland permission model, and general user experience and UI issues. Systemd is not addressing any of that and may actually be making some of those problems worse. After using systemd a bit, I've become a hater too. It's a clean slate reboot of init and yet it's somehow managed to be more arcane and confusing than sysV-init. That's an accomplishment, but not an admirable one. It tries to do way too many things at once in one vertically integrated system, has an arcane confusing non-intuitive syntax and configuration scheme, and just generally feels "enterprise" in the "over-engineered mess" pejorative sense of the term. Whenever I use it I find myself thinking "why would you do it like that?" and "who wanted that?" over and over again. It feels like the sort of system that's deliberately engineered for obtuseness so high priced consultants can be paid to operate it. Maybe it is. Unfortunately FreeBSD's init system seems at first glance to be even more primitive than Linux's old sysV-init. Checking out the docs it looks like a trip back to the 1970s. Is service management with a simple graph of dependencies really that hard? Come on. Good programmers solve these kinds of problems all the time on a much larger scale. We've got OSS hackers building distributed systems, fault tolerant databases, cryptocurrency, and 'permanent decentralized web' protocols and we can't solve init? |
You're better off looking at the rc system[1]. It leaves a lot to be desired, but it's much better than the sysV approach.
There are ongoing efforts to modernise things a bit. The 4Q 2015 report[2] mentions a few.
I like the look of nosh, personally.
1: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/rc-scripting/index.h... 2: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2016-Fe...