[globular-toast]

I find it fascinating how different people are with respect to being able to see the future, or at least caring about it. I find many people are like lumbering beasts in a forest complaining when a twig pokes them in the eye. While other saw the forest from miles away and just went around it.

Gentoo is still home to a sizeable number of users who noped out of systemd more than 10 years ago. This is exactly the kind of thing they saw on the horizon. Why does it take others so long to see the same thing?

[rcxdude]

>Why does it take others so long to see the same thing?

What thing, exactly? To me systemd has done what it has set out to do and I quite like it for it (not that it's perfect in every respect, but it's in general a welcome improvement on what came before it, especially in terms of consistency between distros instead of a million arbitrary differences). It's also important to note what systemd was offering to distro maintainers, as well. It substantially reduced the work involved in creating and packaging for a distro (though probably only Arch, which is explicitly a distro by and for the maintainers, really said that part loudly).

[adrian_b]

I am one of the happy Gentoo users, who have escaped from systemd until now.

Some years ago I have experimented with systemd for a month, by using Arch Linux. However I have encountered an ugly bug and eventually I wiped it out.

The problem was not that there was a bug, I assume that the bug must have been solved years ago. The problem was that the bug was not something that could be attributed to a random error, like a cut-and-paste error when editing. It was a bug that in my opinion demonstrated extremely poor judgment in the overall software system design. Thus I considered that the bug was too outrageous and I blacklisted systemd.

(The bug consisted in that the computer, could fail to shutdown, randomly, due to a race condition regarding messages sent on D-Bus, messages that were generated for some reason by systemd while shutting down, when the recipient of a certain message could have been killed before receiving the last message intended for it, or the D-Bus daemon could have been killed before the last attempt of a message transmission, which resulted in a stall. The fact that sending and receiving messages on D-Bus was necessary for being able to complete a shutdown, was in itself a proof of stupidity. In decades of using computers, from IBM mainframes and DEC minicomputers, until the latest computers of today, only with systemd I have seen a case when shutting down a computer could fail. Moreover, even when successful, shutdown was very slow, unlike the instant shutdown with which I am accustomed. For decades my computers have been optimized to boot in a few seconds, by using custom kernels, so the supposed fast boot of systemd had not brought any improvement in my case, while the shutdown was degraded.)

[nubinetwork]

That's funny, because I've been converting all of my Gentoo systems to systemd... from my point of view, the writing is on the wall, most distros use systemd already, so there's no sense in not learning it.

[matheusmoreira]

I enjoy using systemd but I'm glad Gentoo exists and I'm thankful that people are using and maintaining alternatives. Diverse ecosystems are not just good, they are necessary.

[simoncion]

> Gentoo is still home to a sizeable number of users who noped out of systemd more than 10 years ago.

As a Gentoo user for the past ~quarter-century, I'd say that it's more that -unlike Debian- Gentoo has been using a system service manager that's way better than the classic SysV init for approximately forever.

The early discussion of systemd-as-init [0] was pretty much 100% focused on how much better systemd-as-init was than classic SysV init. When restricted like this, systemd-as-init is an obvious winner. But, when you consider other init systems -such as OpenRC- that provide a bunch of useful scaffolding and support tools (rather than demanding you reimplement all that yourself) the benefits of using systemd-as-init are far less clear.

I've mentioned this before in an HN comment or two from way back when, but I'm really mad at myself for not recognizing how extremely important the "What should Debian adopt to replace the incredibly ancient SysV init?" discussion was and failing to take part in it. OpenRC was knocked out of contention for reasons that were never really clear to me, and I'd have loved to put a bunch of time and effort into fixing whatever deficiencies the Debian folks believed made it unworthy of consideration.

Oh well.

[0] ...as well as some-to-much contemporary discussion...

[JdeBP]

The OpenRC people in Debian only really noticed the discussion when it reached the technical committee. There was an effort to put OpenRC into contention, and all of the technical committee people who did evaluations included it in their evaluations. The problem was that OpenRC as it existed on Debian at the time was lacking. People argued that it could with a little work do the things that the technical committee people pointed out, but the counterargument was that the decision really had to be made at that point, given the argument that had built up. I do recommend reading the discussions by Russ Alberry and others about OpenRC on the technical committee mailing list back then.

Yes, everyone who has, in the succeeding 12 years, framed this as a choice between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd either didn't pay attention or is being woefully slapdash. Debian's choice was between Upstart, as established on Ubuntu at the time, and systemd, with OpenRC as a late entry.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html

Interesting tidbit:

People also made the argument that van Smoorenburg init+rc could be fixed. And in fact they did address some of it, The same year (2014), the sprawling shell scripts so characteristic of van Smoorenburg init+rc were being replaced by a new system, modelled somewhat after Mewburn rc on NetBSD and FreeBSD, where the scripts were much shorter, largely declarative, and reliant upon a new init-d-script interpreter that did all of the repetitive common stuff.

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/480897/5132

* https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/sysvinit-utils/init-d-scr...

[dijit]

Yes, exactly.

"Systemd-vs-SysV" was never the concern for me personally, it was always "Systemd as the last init we ever create" based on how it's being built, and I always tried to argue that it was a hard pill to swallow because there were already better foundations in the world (SMF, for my favourite example), people didn't want to have that discussion, they just wanted to talk about how bad SysV was and that systemd was progress... I was impeding progress...

But, we're here now, and replacing systemd at this point will require being API and bug compatible or else major software (like GNOME) won't run at all.

So, systemd is the last init we'll ever have, just like I feared.

[simoncion]

> "Systemd as the last init we ever create" ... they just wanted to talk about how bad SysV was and that systemd was progress... I was impeding progress...

Yeah, that rhetoric was maddening. Poettering and crew were -and continue to be- absolutely incapable of maintaining a project of such scope and importance.

Do you remember the fucking kdbus saga? I really wish the folks on the kernel side of that who were responsible for asking careful, technical questions, thinking deeply about the answers that they got, and cutting through the bluster and misdirection they received had been the ones in charge of deciding the new Debian init system for... Jessie, was it?

> But, we're here now, and replacing systemd at this point will require being API and bug compatible or else major software (like GNOME) won't run at all.

I've heard from many folks who have tried to reimplement substantial parts of the SystemD. [0] They report that the documentation is woefully inadequate, the interactions between components get incredibly complex, and the project maintainers have a habit of breaking things whenever they feel like it. This breakage doesn't matter to things they maintain, because they can make changes to account for it... but for "out of tree" reimplementations, well, they are -perhaps correctly- entirely disinterested in worrying about those.

> So, systemd is the last init we'll ever have, just like I feared.

Eh. I still hold hope that Debian or some other major distro will notice how unsuited the SystemD maintainers are to long-term stewardship of something so wide-reaching and critically important and cast about for alternatives. We'll see.

[0] This is a shorthand for "Systemd Project", not a slur against it. It sucks that systemd(1) and the project that contain it share the same name. [1]

[1] For a real-world example of the sort of conversation this confusion causes, check out [2]

[2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716382>

[LtWorf]

Because if you dare criticise or say "I encountered a bug" the mob will get you.

[simoncion]

Your comment is very poorly phrased, but, yeah, I've found both the SystemD [0] maintainers and boosters to be very, very unwelcoming to claims that the way something SystemD does is incompatible with a totally reasonable and long-standing way to use a computer.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, SystemD is great... until you hit a bug born of its accidental complexity, or you find can't do something because the SystemD maintainers -sometimes suddenly- decided that they didn't want to let people do it anymore.

[0] This is shorthand for "The Systemd Project", not a slur against it. It sucks shit that systemd(1) and the project it's part of share the same name... it's very confusing. [1]

[1] For a real-world example of the sort of conversation this confusion causes, check out [2]

[2] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48716382>

[shevy-java]

Gentoo is great from a philosophy point of view.

From a practical point of view, though, Gentoo kind of struggled a lot. Archlinux kind of took away a lot of the user base here and I don't think Arch is necessarily worse than Gentoo, even if Gentoo may still be better due to offering more choice, which is also true. I myself fell victim to the GoboLinux philosophy, so versioned AppDirs are the only logical way to install something (I don't use the GoboLinux naming scheme though, my naming scheme is simpler, but also flexible, e. g. I could use /pkg/htop/3.2.1/ as example, even though I opted for e. g. /home/Programs/Htop/3.2.1/ instead, just feeling nicer to read).

> Why does it take others so long to see the same thing?

People will have different opinions. Many bought into the pro-systemd advertisement without challenging it ever. Over the years this has also changed, what with the more recent "we love age sniffing" code change to systemd, but even still people don't want to think on their own. They like to adopt what is given to them as an opinion. If you look back in history, many articles about systemd were clearly written by a systemd developer. Naturally these are very biased articles.