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by loudmax 4281 days ago
To avoid using systemd in practice basically means switching distributions, or switching away from Linux entirely. Depending on your setup, this may be far from trivial.

I think systemd has a lot going for it, and it's been pretty stable on my Arch notebook, but I'm not too thrilled with the way it takes over so many tasks at once and eschews text log files. What's frustrating is that I didn't have much choice in the matter. Yeah, I could switch to another distro, but since Red Hat, Suse, and now Debian and Ubuntu are switching to systemd, that leaves Gentoo or BSD or something. Which are perfectly fine in their own right, but that's pretty drastic if I just want to avoid systemd.

1 comments

> but since Red Hat, Suse, and now Debian and Ubuntu are switching to systemd

With so many heavyweight linux enterprise companies jumping on systemd, one must wonder what consideration they have given the issue? I'd wager, a lot. Also, note that systemd is really designed with servers in mind, so it's not surprising for a desktop/laptop distro user to find it bothersome (it wasn't designed with your use-case in mind). With that said, the beauty of Arch is you can yank systemd out and go with whatever init system you desire.

RH just announced that their future will be cloud computing (Openstack). I think Ubuntu is following right behind. Suse i can't comment on as i haven't followed that distro in ages. Debian is more of a puzzle, but i suspect it was a case of "don't have the resources to be contrarian".

As for the Systemd design. I Think it started with Poettering drooling over OSX Launchd (his other projects also seem to be straight OSX feature clones), that since then has been hitched on the cloud computing push within RH.

In essence, the kind of server that Systemd seems to favor are cloud computing instances where storage and networking can come and go as the back end gets configured for new needs.

Traditional static big iron and clusters don't really benefit much from the "adaptive" nature of Systemd. If those breaks they usually have a hot reserve taking over while the admins get to work figuring out what broke.

try reading the actual discussion when systemd was being proposed to be used by default. It wasn't because "don't have the resources to be contrarian".
systemd is designed for all use cases in mind. I have yet to see any sentiment that it's specifically for servers, desktops or embedded. Lennart's "Biggest Myths" would have your statement decried as an utter falsehood.