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I am a Gentoo user, and I use systemd. I also feel like I am at an AA meeting or something every time I state this fact. I have heard all the arguments against
by lrvick 11y ago
I am a Gentoo user, and I use systemd. I also feel like I am at an AA meeting or something every time I state this fact.
I have heard all the arguments against systemd and many are totally valid. Some of the implementations and management of the project leaves a lot to be desired.
That said, I have run Gentoo on my home desktop for over a decade, Arch on personal/work laptops, Debian on some personal development shell boxes, and CoreOS/Debian on the hundreds of servers I maintain between work/volunteer projects. I may touch all of these in a given day, and I can't tell you how great it is for my personal sanity to be able to run 'systemctl restart ...' or 'journalctl -fu someservice' on any of them. Having a common set of core system tools available across desktop/server distributions has huge advantages.
Also there are some real advantages of systemd design (bloated or not) a lot of people overlook. For one, I help maintain shell services for the general public. Giving users root is of course not sane, but at the same time users are constantly wanting to run their own databases, webservers, etc. Since migrating to systemd we can just tell them "create a unit file in ~/.config/systemd/units with whatever you want, and it will become a system daemon run as your user". This is a huge win for security, administration ease, and usability.
I have also used Gentoo to build base images for embedded systems with minimal resources, and systemd would of been a terrible choice for those use cases. It would of been a terrible choice for ChromeOS.
Choice is what Gentoo has always been about. Let's quit the zealotry and ensure Gentoo continues to be the Linux OS that offers the maximum choices to include the right tools for the problem you are solving.
I fully support the author here.
- anonbanker 11y agoYou're trying to tell us that, prior to systemd, Gentoo was a terrible choice for base images? Embedded wants parallel startup gains, sure, but there are videos floating around youtube of embedded systems booting linux kernels and a full GNU base system in less than a second using init scripts. Why the hell would you want a non-predictible bootup (which systemd does in the name of "speed in bootup") on an embedded system? All my KVM/Qemu VM's are currently gentoo (and arch+OpenRC) based. most use less than 10MB total. systemd requires more than 5 times that amount by default. CoreOS starts with gentoo and then strips it further, and it doesn't use systemd at all. Gentoo (minus systemd) is the base of ChromeOS and ChromiumOS. You had to have known that. I refuse to believe that you're one of the lucky 10,000 XKCD talks about. Your post, and the main article, are just quiet astroturfing/zealotry. You guys have plenty of distributions. We heard Lennart's "wake-up call", and ignored it, because he was leading the march towards a new operating system. We like GNU. We don't particularly like/need/want the Violate-GPL-Over-RPC functionality system Poettering implemented in PID1. Gentoo is not denying choice. We're denying you guys the right to have systemd be a default. The safest distros (Void, Gentoo, Calculate) are all avoiding systemd on purpose. You certainly have the choice to compromise your system and taint your GNU system, but don't expect your silly march off the cliff to become the default for those of us left with actual GNU systems.