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by matheusmoreira 20 days ago
Nope. Systemd is pretty great. It's pretty well designed, fully featured, very easy to use and quite nice program against. And it's GPL licensed free software.

Systemd bothers people because it's not "the Unix way". In other words, it's not some painful lowest common denominator POSIX nonsense. That's a feature, not a bug. POSIX is garbage and restricting oneself to it is pure masochism.

Every unixlike deviates from POSIX and for good reason. That includes the BSDs, but somehow I don't see people complaining endlessly about all the nifty exclusive features they keep accumulating for themselves. Why is it that only Linux gets singled out?

2 comments

Your binary spaghetti monstrosity, our carefully designed literate API.

Wait.

Systemd is farther into the "carefully designed" territory than POSIX will ever be. Never forget who gave us signals and locales.
The definition of a strawman.
It's like flogging a straw herring in the foot.
Not at all.

The point was that using systemd is somehow "mandated". It's not, people chose systemd because it's actually better and made life easier compared to some POSIX nonsense.

The point was that this non-existent "mandate" caused a "bifurcation" from "standards-based" software to Linux-specific. If anything is being "mandated" here, it's the POSIX compliance. Nobody is obligated to follow this like it's some sort of religion. The standard is garbage and should be forgotten.

The point was that systemd was "the bane" of FLOSS. Systemd is itself FLOSS, it's literally GPL'd. And pretty good FLOSS at that. It's just not "standards compliant" which makes it heretical or something. Total nonsense.

There are no "strawmen" here. Just downvote silently if you disagree and don't want to argue.

> It's not

If you're using RedHat or Debian and most of their derivative distributions, it is.

> people chose systemd because it's actually better

No, they did not. Most people did not choose systemd, their Linux distributions did.

RedHat chose their own system for their own distributions; on Debian, a controvertial process foisted it onto the distribution using gaslit rhetoric; and I don't know much about the process elswehre.

> The point was

That was not the point.

> It's just not "standards compliant"

This is the straw man you've created. Neither my post nor most critique of systemd regards "standards compliance".

> If you're using RedHat or Debian and most of their derivative distributions, it is.

Use a better distribution.

Arch Linux has entire wiki pages dedicated to alternative init systems. Anyone can download, install and use OpenRC or whatever they want if they really care enough. People actually took the time to document the process.

Linux is whatever you make of it. There is nothing stopping you from installing whatever you want. I could write an init today and start using it immediately. I don't need anybody's permission to do it.

> Most people did not choose systemd, their Linux distributions did.

By "people" I meant the people who make and maintain the distributions. They're the ones who actually choose what to ship in their projects. Users either accept it, look elsewhere or take on the maintenance burden unto themselves.

No doubt they chose systemd because it made their lives monumentally easier. Maintaining my own computer with systemd is pretty much painless. I don't even remember what it was like before.

> Neither my post nor most critique of systemd regards "standards compliance".

> we've started to see this sort of bifrucation of a lot more FOSS away from being standard-based and multi-platform to being Linux-specific.

No idea what "standard" you're referring to if not POSIX.