With the exception of slackware (which aims to be the most Unix-like Linux distro) I don't understand all the hate for systemd and why people continually try to remove it from their system. I've read countless blogs on the pitfalls of systemd, but all the benefits of systemd outweigh the downsides. It seems there are a lot of people who get way too hung up on sticking to the UNIX philosophy as closely as possible without taking other factors into consideration.
Then quite simply you haven't been listening or paying attention. I'm a gnu/gpl proponent, so I come into the systemd debate leaning towards the side that is simply requesting (why should they even have to? They don't!) init diversity. I've heard plenty of reasoned debate between both sides though, and things like "why people continually try to remove" have been layed out time and time again.
So after showing you aren't even aware of the current debates which are still ongoing, you try to criticize their points as being "too hung up on sticking to the UNIX philosophy"? That's not a good description of the antisystemd sides arguments, because the positions I have seen taken are more varied than that. Essentially that was just a strawman you took out of your hat because its one that sounds good.
Oh and if it's worth anything, as a sysadmin who has to support all the distro's, systemd has not been a panacea as touted by any stretch of the imagination. For example, logging. Why is that now a systemd thing? Just cause systemd is the creepy uncle that likes to touch everything it can? So I'm just gonna pipe that crap into syslog anyway... and don't get me started on LP's shenanigans.
I fully support devuan and all others in their pursuit of init freedom, because the user deserves to have choice. I hope fully gplv3'd init wins (systemd being agplv2 I think).
The anti-systemd trolling puts me off the whole anti-systemd camp as well.
It's dishonest, as far as I can tell: People trying to stir up trouble simply because they think they've found a new stick to poke people with, who don't understand the issue except to the extent it apparently is an issue for some people, but who can damned well be loud and obstreperous and who can make it sound like you're the one who is ignorant and you're the one who should be shamed.
Well, no. I don't feel shame for my choice of software. Sorry.
I think the problem is that not all people regard statements like
> Just cause systemd is the creepy uncle that likes to touch everything it can?
as "reasoned debate". For these people, there's not much arguments coming from the systemd hater camp.
(Not to mention some Devuan supporters using notation like "(((Poettering)))" which says a lot more about there real motivation... See "Triple parentheses" on Wikipedia.)
That's a bit of an odd thing to focus on (and I say this as a GNU person). But if you're looking for an init under the GPLv3 (or later): the GNU Shepherd fits that query.
https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/
I like the Shepherd but I don't see it winning over people who compare its feature set with other more featureful init systems.
> Why is that now a systemd thing? Just cause systemd is the creepy uncle that likes to touch everything it can? So I'm just gonna pipe that crap into syslog anyway... and don't get me started on LP's shenanigans.
Feature creep falls under the umbrella of sticking to the UNIX philosophy too closely, the first point of the UNIX philosphy is:
> Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new "features".
In any case, I think it's arguable if it's feature creep or not. The goal of an init system is to start your system up, it makes sense that the thing that starts daemons would also monitor them, take logs, and do other support actions as well.
The only complaint I actually agree is that systemd/journald uses a binary format to store logs, but I don't think that's a good enough complaint to warrant all the hatred.
The goal of an init system is to start daemons. It shouldn't have any opinions about which daemons you run, and it has no business doing random tampering like intercepting logins and DNS requests and renaming device nodes. Breaking "nohup foo & logout" is shockingly inappropriate; end users should never ever care how an admin may have booted the system much less have to know how to interact with it!
> it has no business doing random tampering like intercepting logins and DNS requests and renaming device nodes
I agree with the resolving DNS requests complaint, wasn't aware of that to be honest. That actually does seem somewhat odd.
However the other two make sense, systemd is used to init your system. Supporting login functionality as well as mounting and managing devices through udev (which supports renaming devices, as you said) doesn't seem too odd to me.
> Breaking "nohup foo & logout" is shockingly inappropriate;
Can you explain this to me? I never heard about this and my googlefu isn't returning anything fruitful.
> end users should never ever care how an admin may have booted the system much less have to know how to interact with it!
Unless you have an advanced user running `systemctl --user` or trying to check logs then I highly doubt the average user will need to know which init system you are using. For the most part, if you are just using your computer as a facebook/youtube/netflix machine then you probably don't care about the init system your computer is using (which I suspect describes 75% of users), assuming you even know what an init system is.
I'm using Void Linux which uses runit. Systemd is fine but runit works just as well. Void Linux has a bunch of other nice things (musl, xbps, build system, etc.). It would be a shame to overlook this fine distribution.
I love runit. It's simple and elegant, is in tune with the Unix Philosophy, and doesn't try to absorb a ton of unrelated, independent services into itself like systemd does.
If something like runit was chosen by RedHat and the distros that followed it, this holy war wouldn't exist.
I had just recently tried to install this, but then I encountered a very strange bug with Firefox where any tab crashed immediately upon opening with some sort of IPC error, and I tried searching around but couldn't find any mention of it anywhere. I ended up just giving up on fighting systemd and install Xubuntu.
> There might be some issues with systemd, but systemd is by far much better than anything else we had before.
Upstart was perfectly fine and just as fast. I've been moving all my personal systems over to Alpine Linux. Many others are doing the same. More complex services are being containerized and will eventually be ported to CoreOS.
PotteringOS is adding too much complexity and cruft and bugs[1] to my otherwise simple systems. Linux/Unix is supposed to be boring, simple, predictable, stable. This is not the case with SystemD in my experience.
Upstart was on the good path, but had its own issues as well. Detecting which process it should track was rather tricky in some cases. For example any server optionally spawning an extra command before forking is not possible to configure in a generic way. Shutting things down properly without cgroups can be bad too. (It's server's fault, but good init can help here)
I imagine it would get better if upstart got a serious v2 or higher, but it seems it won't get serious changes anymore.