[awilfox]

The monoculture problem is one that I really tried to cover in the article, indeed.

While I do agree that a "super server" listening to the network could be a new (or old, with (x)inetd) concern, a well-written and well-designed pid1 doing this isn't much more risky than having the services manage themselves. The listener could/should be just as unprivileged as the target daemon, nominally using the same uid/groups and root directory as the target as well. And indeed, systemd's .socket files support the same environment control variables (User=, Group=, SupplementaryGroups=, RootDirectory=, WorkingDirectory=, et al) that services do.

So that boils down to "are people writing socket activation units correctly", which is probably "no", but could be "yes".

[znpy]

> The monoculture problem is one that I really tried to cover in the article, indeed.

The issue is that the previous "multi-culture" really sucked real bad. It was a shit show, really.

systemd is rising the bar by A LOT in terms of systems management, and most alternatives are simply not keeping up.

But can you really blame it on systemd making a stellar job on its own?

If anything, we could blame it on the "alternative projects" doing a fairly poor job and delivering very little.

edit: systemd is so good that FreeBSD people have already started pondering if they should build something similar for themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

[dijit]

Fuuuuuck I hate that talk by Benno.

Mostly it strawmans the opposition, says its because they dont like change primarily.

Then he indicates that macos’s launchd is an improvement, despite it being one of the most painful parts of advanced macos administration.

Its a talk that comes up often in these threads but it completely betrays the idea of having a fruitful dialog about the pros and cons of this design and the situations where it can be beneficial.

[acdha]

> Then he indicates that macos’s launchd is an improvement, despite it being one of the most painful parts of advanced macos administration.

This seems like a rather hot take. Most of the Mac admins I knew when I worked in the field were quite happy to have a single standard way to solve that class of problems.