6 ms·

I have a curious question. My local setup has worked for me for ages ever since arch decided to switch to systemd. Same on the servers I deal with, after Debian

by hks0 3mo ago

I have a curious question. My local setup has worked for me for ages ever since arch decided to switch to systemd. Same on the servers I deal with, after Debian's switch. At the same time, I can say I'm not involved with inner workings of a Linux system enough, to be affected by init system change and the pain it might bring. In other means consider me an average Joe of the Linux world. Hence this question: If it sucks so much, why did it become so widespread?

gf000 3mo ago
It doesn't suck, people are just emotional beings and have some "football team" level takes on technical stuff as well. The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good. Especially that systemd is pretty modular - at least the actual systemd program running as PID 1. It also refers to a project with many optional modules running under the same name, but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith.
- graemep 3mo ago
  That is a straw man. Plenty of people have different opinions on different issues. > but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith On the other hand it would be very rare to use Plasma without the KDE file manger. You lose all sorts of integration. Similarly, once you use systemd init its going to be a lot easier to replace everything else with the systemd equivalent.
- nubinetwork 3mo ago
  Both systemd and wayland were quite broken when they were first being pushed onto everyone... they're mostly fine now.
  - gf000 3mo ago
    It's the bazaar. No one is pushing anything on you, you have a wrong mental model if you think anything can be pushed.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - LtWorf 3mo ago
    You forgot pulseaudio to the list! Wayland's big problem right now is that libinput developers gatekeep improvements so if your device isn't on the golden list it will work badly and there is no escape. Which is why I'm not using wayland.
- cdud3 3mo ago
  The biggest advantage systems has is also it's biggest disadvantage: the amount of functionality. Even with lot of functionality being optional this days, dlopened at runtime if present, it's still bigger then a simple shell script or.tpur own 20 lines of C-code. The later may, in some cases like running anyways only one app in full screen, more then enough. In some embedded setups you may not even need that but just run your app as pid 1 and be fine.
- Izkata 3mo ago
  > The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good. Wayland is very much a monolith compared to X. I guess people never really realized how much desktop environments could be mix'n'matched under X, bringing window managers, system trays, hotkeys bindings, and a whole bunch of other things not designed together but that could still work together. Under Wayland it's all smushed together and you have to accept whatever your chosen desktop environment chose to implement. It's very similar to how systemd is going.
  - gf000 3mo ago
    ??? Wayland is a protocol, that sentence is in and of itself faulty. And there are multiple independent implementations of said protocol. Unlike in case of X, that has basically 1. With proprietary modules (that's how nvidia proprietary drivers work). With a goddamn printer inside. Don't mistake an X "window manager" which is basically just an extension on top of an X server with a whole display manager implementation of Wayland. Like an X window manager is more akin to a Gnome shell plugin that adds a dash to your screen.
    - Izkata 3mo ago
      > Like an X window manager is more akin to a Gnome shell plugin that adds a dash to your screen. Yes, that's exactly my point - on the user's side, X was modular, not monolithic. Wayland is the monolithic one where everything is "batteries included" (except not always everything) with no ability to add/replace functionality. Please continue reading the remainder of the sentence from my first comment: > and you have to accept whatever your chosen desktop environment chose to implement.
LtWorf 3mo ago
It doesn't suck "now". It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it. I mean it of course wasn't complete garbage but it had a lot of bugs and people generally don't like to be used as red hat's guinea pigs. When red hat switched to it, it was stable enough. Before then people were complaining because they did find bugs and issues (I know I did) and were being told to STFU by inexperienced users who have the most basic and standard use case and weren't encountering the issues (or were but didn't even notice). Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what.
- wink 3mo ago
  > Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what. I'm not sure that's a good argument because it goes both ways. Sure, times have moved on but having dozens or hundreds of machines is now nothing compared to thousands, but at some point it was - and people have experienced it then. And even without the number, I'm not really sure it's a good thing to count professional users (who often have access to support and resources) more than hobby users.
wink 3mo ago
It traded one set of problems for another set of problems. The people who are happy now don't complain (or are too new to init systems) and the people you hear are the ones who now have more problems than before. I suppose the majority either shouldn't comment because they never used anything before it to some degree, or they're just more, or they're really happier, good for them. I count myself as part of the latter group (nothing was broken, now I have some problems) but it's not catastrophic. I'm not arguing systemd is worse, I'm just saying I've repeatedly have problems I didn't have for the first 15 years of using Linux.
- Tor3 3mo ago
  I ran into issues early on, I used (and needed) an 'expect' script to run as part of a daemon startup, and that just didn't work with systemd. And then on another computer 'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd, and I never managed to find out what on earth triggered that. I didn't want to spend a lot of time to solve these things, so I simply switched all my computers from Debian to Devuan (aka Debian without systemd) and I've had zero problems with that switch, which happened years ago.
jeroenhd 3mo ago
systemd replaces the duct-tape-and-tie-wrap systems that many Linux distros used to run with a unified set of tools, which can be interchanged, but often aren't. You don't have to enable container support, DNS servers, or disk mounts in systemd, but support is there in case you need it. Some distros stopped shipping bespoke DNS servers, others still do, it depends on the distro; it's not like distros are forced to enable the whole set. I don't know any distro that actually does, actually. If you're the kind of person that wants to deliberately choose what software handles your DNS and what software configures your TTY and which cron daemon you use, then systemd limits your options somewhat. If you want to go in and re-write the init scripts for a system daemon because you have specific requirements, you still can but it adds a level of indirection to the whole thing. systemd works great for the 95% who can do with a reasonable set of defaults. The remaining 5% will run into annoyances about defaults and obscure configuration, and a small (but extremely loud) subset of those people hate the idea of one set of software taking over so many tasks. In reality, the option not to use systemd has always been there, but many distros find it much easier to use and most software doesn't bother with the ancient init scripts anymore. You can install openrc, but you're going to need to write most of your service management configuration (often shell scripts) yourself

by hks0 3mo ago

gf000 3mo ago

It doesn't suck, people are just emotional beings and have some "football team" level takes on technical stuff as well. The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good. Especially that systemd is pretty modular - at least the actual systemd program running as PID 1. It also refers to a project with many optional modules running under the same name, but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith.

graemep 3mo ago
That is a straw man. Plenty of people have different opinions on different issues. > but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith On the other hand it would be very rare to use Plasma without the KDE file manger. You lose all sorts of integration. Similarly, once you use systemd init its going to be a lot easier to replace everything else with the systemd equivalent.
nubinetwork 3mo ago
Both systemd and wayland were quite broken when they were first being pushed onto everyone... they're mostly fine now.
- gf000 3mo ago
  It's the bazaar. No one is pushing anything on you, you have a wrong mental model if you think anything can be pushed.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- LtWorf 3mo ago
  You forgot pulseaudio to the list! Wayland's big problem right now is that libinput developers gatekeep improvements so if your device isn't on the golden list it will work badly and there is no escape. Which is why I'm not using wayland.
cdud3 3mo ago
The biggest advantage systems has is also it's biggest disadvantage: the amount of functionality. Even with lot of functionality being optional this days, dlopened at runtime if present, it's still bigger then a simple shell script or.tpur own 20 lines of C-code. The later may, in some cases like running anyways only one app in full screen, more then enough. In some embedded setups you may not even need that but just run your app as pid 1 and be fine.
Izkata 3mo ago
> The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good. Wayland is very much a monolith compared to X. I guess people never really realized how much desktop environments could be mix'n'matched under X, bringing window managers, system trays, hotkeys bindings, and a whole bunch of other things not designed together but that could still work together. Under Wayland it's all smushed together and you have to accept whatever your chosen desktop environment chose to implement. It's very similar to how systemd is going.
- gf000 3mo ago
  ??? Wayland is a protocol, that sentence is in and of itself faulty. And there are multiple independent implementations of said protocol. Unlike in case of X, that has basically 1. With proprietary modules (that's how nvidia proprietary drivers work). With a goddamn printer inside. Don't mistake an X "window manager" which is basically just an extension on top of an X server with a whole display manager implementation of Wayland. Like an X window manager is more akin to a Gnome shell plugin that adds a dash to your screen.
  - Izkata 3mo ago
    > Like an X window manager is more akin to a Gnome shell plugin that adds a dash to your screen. Yes, that's exactly my point - on the user's side, X was modular, not monolithic. Wayland is the monolithic one where everything is "batteries included" (except not always everything) with no ability to add/replace functionality. Please continue reading the remainder of the sentence from my first comment: > and you have to accept whatever your chosen desktop environment chose to implement.

LtWorf 3mo ago

It doesn't suck "now". It sucked when fedora and arch switched to it. I mean it of course wasn't complete garbage but it had a lot of bugs and people generally don't like to be used as red hat's guinea pigs. When red hat switched to it, it was stable enough. Before then people were complaining because they did find bugs and issues (I know I did) and were being told to STFU by inexperienced users who have the most basic and standard use case and weren't encountering the issues (or were but didn't even notice). Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what.

wink 3mo ago
> Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what. I'm not sure that's a good argument because it goes both ways. Sure, times have moved on but having dozens or hundreds of machines is now nothing compared to thousands, but at some point it was - and people have experienced it then. And even without the number, I'm not really sure it's a good thing to count professional users (who often have access to support and resources) more than hobby users.

wink 3mo ago

It traded one set of problems for another set of problems. The people who are happy now don't complain (or are too new to init systems) and the people you hear are the ones who now have more problems than before. I suppose the majority either shouldn't comment because they never used anything before it to some degree, or they're just more, or they're really happier, good for them. I count myself as part of the latter group (nothing was broken, now I have some problems) but it's not catastrophic. I'm not arguing systemd is worse, I'm just saying I've repeatedly have problems I didn't have for the first 15 years of using Linux.

Tor3 3mo ago
I ran into issues early on, I used (and needed) an 'expect' script to run as part of a daemon startup, and that just didn't work with systemd. And then on another computer 'udev' spiked to 100% CPU after Debian switched to systemd, and I never managed to find out what on earth triggered that. I didn't want to spend a lot of time to solve these things, so I simply switched all my computers from Debian to Devuan (aka Debian without systemd) and I've had zero problems with that switch, which happened years ago.

jeroenhd 3mo ago

systemd replaces the duct-tape-and-tie-wrap systems that many Linux distros used to run with a unified set of tools, which can be interchanged, but often aren't. You don't have to enable container support, DNS servers, or disk mounts in systemd, but support is there in case you need it. Some distros stopped shipping bespoke DNS servers, others still do, it depends on the distro; it's not like distros are forced to enable the whole set. I don't know any distro that actually does, actually. If you're the kind of person that wants to deliberately choose what software handles your DNS and what software configures your TTY and which cron daemon you use, then systemd limits your options somewhat. If you want to go in and re-write the init scripts for a system daemon because you have specific requirements, you still can but it adds a level of indirection to the whole thing. systemd works great for the 95% who can do with a reasonable set of defaults. The remaining 5% will run into annoyances about defaults and obscure configuration, and a small (but extremely loud) subset of those people hate the idea of one set of software taking over so many tasks. In reality, the option not to use systemd has always been there, but many distros find it much easier to use and most software doesn't bother with the ancient init scripts anymore. You can install openrc, but you're going to need to write most of your service management configuration (often shell scripts) yourself