Unlike PulseAudio, dbus, and other userland components, it is perfectly possible to have a Linux system which works with most software without systemd. runit and OpenRC are two of the most popular init alternatives, which are just inits, and nothing else, unlike systemd. You might argue you have to use logind and udev, but that has been spun off into elogind and eudev. There is also seatd as an alternative to elogind, which is quite big itself.
Just use it? I am still confused why systemd is supposedly something that needs to be fixed. Like all major distributions "accidentally" switched to it.
These takes are just ridiculous. Debian, with a more democratic system than any country on Earth, voted twice over the issue, overwhelmingly supporting the support of only systemd. How is that commercial interest? Then arch decided for the same thing independently. I’m sure arch linux is the core interest of every commercial vendor, right?
Just accept it, package maintainers had enough of the absolute shitty state of init systems. Systemd solves this very complex problem elegantly, giving some standard userspace can depend on.
The decision in Debian didn't come that easily. The tech committee was locked in a filibuster over systemd for ages and the votes were 50-50. Then the chair cast his tie-breaker vote in favor of systemd and everyone on the other side flipped their shit.
That's quite true I'll give you that. But there are still issues with it. It keeps swallowing up bits like resolver and others. It should only do one thing well.
Systemd adherents cannot seem to get past this deficiency in the software's messaging.
Same with Wayland. "it's not a program it's a protocol"
Still sucks, still is a thorn in my side and gets in the way.
Systemd is an attempt to consolidate the OS/service layer into one thing. Compilation options don't mean shit when every component is tightly coupled to systemd, its journal, dbus, or some other quackery.
Systemd would have been better as an entire distro to itself.
But as usual, people cannot handle the idea of running anything other than what's shoved in their faces from corporate programmers.
If I wanted corporate software I'd buy Apple or Microsoft.
Your terms are impossible to meet. The moment I reach one goal, you'll invent another. Not worth it my dude.
I am doing something about it by researching ways to excise Red Hat from as much of the tech stack as possible. Can't do much about the kernel, but every layer above it is moldable.
I don't care to provide 'usefulness' to you; if you're not paying me why would I give up any value?
It was an arrogantly managed project using the guise of standardization to bypass people's social tendencies. People are stupid, so they fell for the 'only consider the code, not our social fuckery!' Hook, link, and sinker.
It really opened my eyes to how ignorant and passive a lot of techies actually are. They're happy to slurp up whatever's advertised to them as the better thing.
Systemd runs my current laptop and I hate having to dive under the hood for anything. In a sysvinit, runit, or OpenRC system, I can achieve things quickly and don't need a book's worth of corporate style documentation to operate my damn system.
Systemd still doesn't support a one-time script on boot. You have to hack together a unit for that. Most other systems just run an rc.local script in /etc!
Binary logs are only useful if systemd is running, and only that version of it too!
Good luck understanding journalctl output. It doesn't capture everything.
Long story short, systemd has not improved a single area of my computing life. I guess I can ogle at a boot time graph. But the main goal seems to be for systemd to take away knowledge of the lower levels of the stack.
Like it or not, open software ecosystems are resistant to standardization by default.
Systemd and dbus and friends would not have bothered me if they weren't coupled with weird ideology about One True Linux or other crap.
Systemd never solved problems for me. I'm sure it solves many business problems but none of them apply to me.
I think systemd was developed to make a libre replacement for SMF, that supported socket-based activation and deterministic boot. Those were two of the project's original goals, but the endgoal I think was to develop this capability for open source Red Hat, SuSE and friends, get it on every distro, then use their influence at lower levels of the stack -- only one higher than the kernel itself! -- to have effective control over the open source ecosystem at a low level.
Poettering worked for Red Hat during the development of both PulseAudio and systemd. If he was not writing code they wanted, he would have worked on another project. Ergo, one can conclude those projects to be Red Hat-oriented, or sponsored at minimum.
I firmly believe the profit motive in the software world is what leads to dark patterns, user-hostile design, and other maladies we face in the modern software world. Their obligation to seek profit over all other things leads to compromised values, leading to compromised software.
I like what Benno Rice said[1] concerning a third "system" layer other than kernel and userspace. Systemd tries to fill that space entirely by providing a suite of tools that integrate well with another. But you are not forced to use these all of these, you're not forced to use resolved over resolvconf.
> It should only do one thing well.
I know this is a popular principle that some believe to be part of the unix philosophy. But an OS should also be coherent. Some tools can do their own thing and be independent from the rest of the system. But I think this works best for simple userland tools, not tightly integrated system services.
I don't like its hard dependencies on glibc (specifically, with no support for other libc's) and dbus (I'd've preferred Poettering going full nih and developing his own RPC protocol).
Other than that, systemd provides a polished experience, so if you want to displace it you'll have to produce something equally polished and compatible with existing unit files, just as systemd was able to consume ye olde sysv startup scripts.
The only other contender that I'm aware of that isn't just one massive design flaw, is openrc, and it's somewhat inferior to systemd.
Just a side note, but it's hard to take you seriously when you resort to such childish name calling. I think your chance of convicting traders (me included) would be much higher if you used some technical arguments instead.
