[xfs]

This is the kind of false argument being thrown around often in OSS discourse that ignores the structural power differential.

Don't like it? Write your own/Leave.

The fact is you can't go back to it as an individual, because the system has changed and as an individual you're powerless to change the situation at all, especially against an army of developers paid full-time. The latest news from Debian is sysvinit support is no longer guaranteed.

[cycloptic]

If you can't pull your own weight and don't want to try anymore then yes, you should leave and come back when you can. Sorry if that sounds rude but this is the way it is. OSS (and software in general) has always been driven by people who are fortunate enough to have access to expensive computers and who have the free time and motivation to spend programming. You can't let what they do bother you, and there's nothing wrong with taking a break and coming back later when you're ready. I'm sure the companies who employ these armies of developers are hiring so you could probably work there too if you really wanted.

If anything the power differential has gotten much smaller in recent years with things like github, and last time I checked systemd was accepting pull requests. And even though they won't guarantee it, it sounds like Debian also will continue to accept contributions from those who want to spend time trying to support sysvinit. What exactly is the barrier you're having?

[rezonant]

Before I comment here: I am a fan of systemd in many ways, and I happily use it on my systems. That being said, you do really have to think about the systemic factors at play here. As noted in the original article, Debian found itself in a position where the amount of work to sustain a non-systemd path in a systemd-dominated ecosystem would be too much work _for them_. If you personally have more development time then the entirety of the Debian project, then by all means. Let's just not assume that this is a feasible thing for a single person to handle, and really for all intents and purposes, trying to maintain a Linux distribution (or even just a personal Linux system) without using systemd at this point is folly, no matter how much you dislike it.

That being said, SysV init is (in fact) terrible. I'd say put the effort into something that can supercede systemd some day. That part of the problem is tractable, though success is quite a long-shot given its entrenchment.

[JdeBP]

The person who wrote the headlined article also wrote commentary back in 2014 on discussions of systemd, which highlighted the false dichotomy that people propound that the decision is between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd. You are doing that very thing, years later.

That was never the case, especially so for Debian that you mention. In the Debian Hoo-Hah, the choices were van Smoorenburg init+rc, OpenRC, Upstart and systemd; the latter three being the main contenders, as was acknowledged partway through the affair. In Fedora and Ubuntu, the choice was between Upstart and systemd, Upstart having been what they used for some years before systemd.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20141222234706/http://uselessd.d...

[rezonant]

I do want to say that despite my comment here, seems like projects like Devuan, Void, and Arch are doing OK with this, in concert with projects like elogind and eudev etc that forego systemd while providing compatible replacements.

[martinflack]

> Debian found itself in a position where the amount of work to sustain a non-systemd path in a systemd-dominated ecosystem would be too much work _for them_

Just as a side note for the interested, there is a project named Devuan that launched to keep alive a Debian sans systemd.

https://devuan.org/

(I've never run it myself; I just happen to know it exists.)

[phatfish]

Lennart and the systemd team did exactly that 10 years ago. Why can't you?

The code is there for someone with enough skill to show how bad systemd is right?

[josefx]

> Lennart and the systemd team did exactly that 10 years ago. Why can't you?

It would be impressive if Lennart managed that by himself. Red Hat wanted it done, Ret Hat also has its hands in various open source projects that suddenly started to sprout hard dependencies to systemd. Projects like Gnome were Red Hat is by far the biggest contributor.

Not much an individual programmer can do compared to a corporation throwing its weight around to break things.

[brmgb]

> Red Hat wanted it done

Red Hat had zero interest into a new init system when Lennart started systemd. They had just moved to upstart and Red Hat customers don't really care about init systems. Red Hat customers pay for their systems to be stable and to have someone to call when something goes wrong.

Systemd gives Red Hat no competitive advantage whatsoever.

I'm probably not going to make myself a lot of friends by saying this but I don't really understand the systemd opponents.

The components systemd is slowly replacing or sitting on top, most of the low level userspace of linux, is mostly garbage and poorly documented garbage at that. PAM is aweful. I don't even want to talk about ConsoleKit. Cron has one of the worst configuration format ever and I'm certainly not going to miss fstab. I would find journald a step in the right direction even if the only thing it brought to the table was the ability to configure logging from the service file and not have to fiddle with logrotate.

Networkd gives you a nice, uniform and well documented way to configure both interfaces, rules, custom routing tables and vpn tunnels from declarative files. Who in their right mind can miss the hodgepodge of scripts that was there before ?

[kbenson]

> I'm probably not going to make myself a lot of friends by saying this but I don't really understand the systemd opponents.

I think sections 3.5 and 3.6 (all of them, including subsections outlines current problems pretty clearly. Summarized, systemd is complex to reason about, ambiguous in how it functions, and poorly documented in many cases. All the very similar directives with slight nuances paint a picture of people that didn't really understand the problem space as well as they thought they did (and to be fair, nobody did, and they probably had the best understanding, as woefully inadequate as it was). For a sysadmin, who rarely (but not never!) has to dive into the intricacies of unit files and the myriad directives and their nuanced behavior for creating a server but less rarely is affected by odd behavior introduced by systemd, it's a liability.

What we have now is a chance to learn from those missteps and build something even better. Systemd as a catalyst for rapid chance was wildly successful. As an init system that capitalizes on those changes in a way that users (that is, system/distro packagers) can take advantage of, not so much, since it's so wildly complex. The article posits that BPF will be used to create programs to take over some of these tasks, which may be right. Alternatively, we could start pulling out the components that systemd subsumed, and formalizing them into new standards that others could develop for. Whether that means actually pulling out the component (e.g. logind) to a new repo, or just formalizing API is up for debate.

[krzyk]

> Cron has one of the worst configuration format ever and I'm certainly not going to miss fstab. I would find journald a step in the right direction even if the only thing it brought to the table was the ability to configure logging from the service file and not have to fiddle with logrotate.

What you don't like about cron format? It is nice, consistent. Same for fstab, the only issue I have with it that e.g. Debian doesn't handle mounting network filesystems after the network is up (there are a couple of those and it shouldn't be hard to just grep the file for those).

As for journald, as long as they keep my log files in /var/log in pure text format it can stay.

The issue I have with systemd is that it tries to fiddle with my files, last year I noticed that /etc/resolv.conf contains some strange line with local resolver, WTF? I didn't install one for sure so why (and it was breaking my network).

[AsyncAwait]

> It would be impressive if Lennart managed that by himself. Red Hat wanted it done

RedHat wanted it done once Lennart convinced them it is the right thing to do and Lennart put in the effort to be at RedHat at the right time to have the ability to convince them.

In fact Lennart is one of the few people willing to put in the effort to touch the fundamental building blocks that otherwise rot, but nobody is willing to touch.

> Projects like Gnome were Red Hat is by far the biggest contributor

Yeah, I guess it's not that bad that in FLOSS, the people willing to ultimately sit down and put in the time and effort to actually write the code, even the non-sexy bits, get to steer the project over Hacker News commenters.

That's not the worst outcome out there if you ask me.

[The_Colonel]

> The fact is you can't go back to it as an individual, because the system has changed and as an individual you're powerless to change the situation at all...

Use Void Linux, help Devuan etc. You're not alone, but you're clearly in small minority.

[api]

My personal favorite is Alpine Linux. It ditches a ton of other unnecessary cruft too. It feels lean and modern.