12 ms·

It will be modular they said. It wont be invasive they said.

by setra 10y ago

busterarm 10y ago
systemd has turned Linux into a tire fire. I've spent 20 years with this platform and seriously worry about it being as useful the next 20.
- zxcvcxz 10y ago
  How has systemd effected you?
  - busterarm 10y ago
    It broke a few of my Arch installs. I had to learn a bunch of new tools which didn't improve my work in any way. The only things that it made easier were things that were already easy. More importantly, I think that some of the systemd maintainers have a track record of not really knowing what they're doing, as exemplified by this tmux issue. I have serious worry about running their process as PID 1. Other than that, totally positive effect: It deepened my interest in OS security and hastened my switch to OpenBSD which was probably happening anyway.
    - jamespo 10y ago
      Arch is an interesting choice of distro if you value stability
      - busterarm 10y ago
        For me, Arch very rarely delivered "omg nothing works" moments on upgrade for me. The only one that I can think of was the systemd upgrade. For every other breaking change, a fix was either easily apparent or well-documented on the wiki. "Stability" in the sense that OpenBSD provides though is something that I valued more over time of running Arch and my experiences with other things on the side (mainly QNX).
      - qb45 10y ago
        Arch is largely OK. The only troublesome and WTF-ish upgrades I recall were systemd (which I avoided) and symlinking of /bin and /lib to /usr.
  - TelmoMenezes 10y ago
    Systemd created him?
  - iam-TJ 10y ago
    Technically I appreciate much of the systemd design and implementation, but what repeatedly annoys me is when it 'takes over' - replaces - existing tooling and doesn't provide feature parity, resulting in regressions. The one that really annoyed me (and is still present) is when it replaced cryptsetup init scripts but did not implement support for root file-system key-files. For release-upgrades this will result in broken, unbootable, systems - it isn't difficult to imagine how this causes swearing and bad feeling! For new installs it means loss of required functionality, and lost time and productivity exploring and implementing work-arounds to counter the regression and return to the status quo. The reason for the lack of key-file support in systemd-cryptsetup? The purist idealism that key-file support patches will only be accepted if they use the Linux kernel's key-ring API (rather than replicate the existing cryptsetup init script behaviour).
  - Ace17 10y ago
    By making many of my systems totally unbootable after an upgrade?
- chrisper 10y ago
  I feel the same way about network manager. Maybe it's just me, but I am not a huge fan of nmcli.
  - msbarnett 10y ago
    networkmanager is a shocking mess, when you look at how simple this functionality is in the *BSDs.
    - justinsaccount 10y ago
      by "this functionality" do you mean things like * connecting to different wireless networks that use wpa enterprise authentication (which I think some of the bsds only recently added support for) * bringing up usb networking interfaces via cell phone tethering on demand * managing multiple different vpn clients and profiles from a single interface Or do you mean things like * Bringing up a networking interface with a static ip address Because I use network manager for the former on laptops, and remove it on servers that only need the latter.
      - msbarnett 10y ago
        The former. As with many things, yes, it took OpenBSD and FreeBSD longer to get that functionality. The tradeoff is that they delivered a well thought out, consistent, and well-engineered solution, rather than a poorly thought out mess of CADT-driven bloat.
  - ymse 10y ago
    You can just uninstall it and use something else to configure networking. It's one of the first things I purge on any distro. With systemd it's not so simple.
    - chrisper 10y ago
      What do you replace it with?
- pgtan 10y ago
  GENTOO has sys-fs/static-dev. With some effort I have server running without systemd, without udev, d-bus, pulseaudio ... plus not compiled support for ipv6, nls, ldap, etc.
  - justinsaccount 10y ago
    You could have saved yourself the effort and installed a linux distro from 1999.
    - qb45 10y ago
      Yeah, some 32-bit one that predates SATA and ships with 20 known remote vulns.
jitl 10y ago
I left Linux for BSD on my home computers. FreeBSD has the right mix of OS aesthetics and great practical tools. Between the new binary pkg tool, ezjail, and great native ZFS support, I am very happy with it.
- autoreleasepool 10y ago
  As a newcomer, FreeBSD's new pkg tool is what sold me to the platform. I am too new school to to deal with Ports. I don't get much of a rush out of compiling my own binaries.
  - clarry 10y ago
    Does it offer something beyond OpenBSD's pkg tools?
    - Sanddancer 10y ago
      A database backend which makes searching through packages, and occasionally being naughty and altering manifests, easi. It's fast as hell, like faster than apt, it lets you lock packages to a specific version, etc, so you can do things like have 2 or 3 packages built with special flags and still use the package management tools. It's fantastically clean too and well documented, as BSD software tends to be.
- themartorana 10y ago
  Did the same to our entire server stack (20+ servers). We were using Ubuntu and Upstart, and when Debian announced systemd, Ubuntu announced the end of Upstart. Having to move all our init scripts sucked, and while trying to select the best approach, the systemd war was just getting started. A friend who was hearing me weigh the merits of different approaches suggested FreeBSD, and I'm not sure why I hadn't considered it prior. We moved to it (a couple years back) and it's been a breath of fresh air. Even better, I can watch the systemd takeover from afar.
  - ultramancool 10y ago
derefr 10y ago
To reiterate something I just wrote in another post: Whatever you think of it, systemd is doing the "ground-up rewrite" correctly. Normally, you get 90% of the features for 10% of the code in a rewrite, but then the last 10% of the features are the "plugging this thing into the ecosystem of other crufty things" features which bloat the codebase into something exactly as bad as the original. The only successful way to do a rewrite is to scope your rewrite not to the size of one component, but rather to the size of the whole component ecosystem, such that you get to redefine all the crufty boundaries requiring convoluted code into clean and simple ones. This means you do have to rewrite more things, but each one can stay at that 10%-for-90% size, because none of the bad-API bloat has to come along. systemd is consuming components of the Linux userland and leaving cleaner boundaries in its wake. The sheer scope of that effort can make the project look bloated—but people forget to compare the codebase with the combined codebases of all the projects it took to have equivalent functionality before. People also forget to compare the functionality of the entire ecosystem of software—not just the big stuff everyone uses, but the niche stuff—before and after. Linux's original bazaar approach to system software meant that everything worked with whatever components it explicitly planned to work with, and nothing else. Do you know how many codebases contained some random subset of support for logging via STDOUT, logfiles (with or without rotation), syslog, rsyslog? That's what you get with a bazaar approach. systemd's "hub-and-spoke" cathedral approach means that everything just has to work with systemd, and then systemd can ensure that everything works with everything else.
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  Exactly.. The most amusing thing about this is people claiming they are going to switch to a bsd. As another said on the other thread: > I really dislike the idea of having one project handling everything on a box Which is crazy talk because that is one of the selling points to something like openbsd.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    I get what they mean and its not really crazy talk. The difference between a project in the sense of systemd and project in the sense of OpenBSD is pretty big. If I told you that wget was requiring changes to all user behavior, you would laugh it off and wonder where they got the agency to demand that. Many folks view the people with such agency as the kernel developers and the GNU project not a project such as systemd. They are probably wrong these days. This is different than the pick of a BSD.

It will be modular they said. It wont be invasive they said.

by setra 10y ago

It will be modular they said. It wont be invasive they said.

systemd has turned Linux into a tire fire. I've spent 20 years with this platform and seriously worry about it being as useful the next 20.

zxcvcxz 10y ago
How has systemd effected you?
- busterarm 10y ago
  It broke a few of my Arch installs. I had to learn a bunch of new tools which didn't improve my work in any way. The only things that it made easier were things that were already easy. More importantly, I think that some of the systemd maintainers have a track record of not really knowing what they're doing, as exemplified by this tmux issue. I have serious worry about running their process as PID 1. Other than that, totally positive effect: It deepened my interest in OS security and hastened my switch to OpenBSD which was probably happening anyway.
  - jamespo 10y ago
    Arch is an interesting choice of distro if you value stability
    - busterarm 10y ago
      For me, Arch very rarely delivered "omg nothing works" moments on upgrade for me. The only one that I can think of was the systemd upgrade. For every other breaking change, a fix was either easily apparent or well-documented on the wiki. "Stability" in the sense that OpenBSD provides though is something that I valued more over time of running Arch and my experiences with other things on the side (mainly QNX).
    - qb45 10y ago
      Arch is largely OK. The only troublesome and WTF-ish upgrades I recall were systemd (which I avoided) and symlinking of /bin and /lib to /usr.
- TelmoMenezes 10y ago
  Systemd created him?
- iam-TJ 10y ago
  Technically I appreciate much of the systemd design and implementation, but what repeatedly annoys me is when it 'takes over' - replaces - existing tooling and doesn't provide feature parity, resulting in regressions. The one that really annoyed me (and is still present) is when it replaced cryptsetup init scripts but did not implement support for root file-system key-files. For release-upgrades this will result in broken, unbootable, systems - it isn't difficult to imagine how this causes swearing and bad feeling! For new installs it means loss of required functionality, and lost time and productivity exploring and implementing work-arounds to counter the regression and return to the status quo. The reason for the lack of key-file support in systemd-cryptsetup? The purist idealism that key-file support patches will only be accepted if they use the Linux kernel's key-ring API (rather than replicate the existing cryptsetup init script behaviour).
- Ace17 10y ago
  By making many of my systems totally unbootable after an upgrade?
chrisper 10y ago
I feel the same way about network manager. Maybe it's just me, but I am not a huge fan of nmcli.
- msbarnett 10y ago
  networkmanager is a shocking mess, when you look at how simple this functionality is in the *BSDs.
  - justinsaccount 10y ago
    by "this functionality" do you mean things like * connecting to different wireless networks that use wpa enterprise authentication (which I think some of the bsds only recently added support for) * bringing up usb networking interfaces via cell phone tethering on demand * managing multiple different vpn clients and profiles from a single interface Or do you mean things like * Bringing up a networking interface with a static ip address Because I use network manager for the former on laptops, and remove it on servers that only need the latter.
    - msbarnett 10y ago
      The former. As with many things, yes, it took OpenBSD and FreeBSD longer to get that functionality. The tradeoff is that they delivered a well thought out, consistent, and well-engineered solution, rather than a poorly thought out mess of CADT-driven bloat.
- ymse 10y ago
  You can just uninstall it and use something else to configure networking. It's one of the first things I purge on any distro. With systemd it's not so simple.
  - chrisper 10y ago
    What do you replace it with?
pgtan 10y ago
GENTOO has sys-fs/static-dev. With some effort I have server running without systemd, without udev, d-bus, pulseaudio ... plus not compiled support for ipv6, nls, ldap, etc.
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  You could have saved yourself the effort and installed a linux distro from 1999.
  - qb45 10y ago
    Yeah, some 32-bit one that predates SATA and ships with 20 known remote vulns.

jitl 10y ago

I left Linux for BSD on my home computers. FreeBSD has the right mix of OS aesthetics and great practical tools. Between the new binary pkg tool, ezjail, and great native ZFS support, I am very happy with it.

autoreleasepool 10y ago
As a newcomer, FreeBSD's new pkg tool is what sold me to the platform. I am too new school to to deal with Ports. I don't get much of a rush out of compiling my own binaries.
- clarry 10y ago
  Does it offer something beyond OpenBSD's pkg tools?
  - Sanddancer 10y ago
    A database backend which makes searching through packages, and occasionally being naughty and altering manifests, easi. It's fast as hell, like faster than apt, it lets you lock packages to a specific version, etc, so you can do things like have 2 or 3 packages built with special flags and still use the package management tools. It's fantastically clean too and well documented, as BSD software tends to be.
themartorana 10y ago
Did the same to our entire server stack (20+ servers). We were using Ubuntu and Upstart, and when Debian announced systemd, Ubuntu announced the end of Upstart. Having to move all our init scripts sucked, and while trying to select the best approach, the systemd war was just getting started. A friend who was hearing me weigh the merits of different approaches suggested FreeBSD, and I'm not sure why I hadn't considered it prior. We moved to it (a couple years back) and it's been a breath of fresh air. Even better, I can watch the systemd takeover from afar.
- ultramancool 10y ago

derefr 10y ago

To reiterate something I just wrote in another post: Whatever you think of it, systemd is doing the "ground-up rewrite" correctly. Normally, you get 90% of the features for 10% of the code in a rewrite, but then the last 10% of the features are the "plugging this thing into the ecosystem of other crufty things" features which bloat the codebase into something exactly as bad as the original. The only successful way to do a rewrite is to scope your rewrite not to the size of one component, but rather to the size of the whole component ecosystem, such that you get to redefine all the crufty boundaries requiring convoluted code into clean and simple ones. This means you do have to rewrite more things, but each one can stay at that 10%-for-90% size, because none of the bad-API bloat has to come along. systemd is consuming components of the Linux userland and leaving cleaner boundaries in its wake. The sheer scope of that effort can make the project look bloated—but people forget to compare the codebase with the combined codebases of all the projects it took to have equivalent functionality before. People also forget to compare the functionality of the entire ecosystem of software—not just the big stuff everyone uses, but the niche stuff—before and after. Linux's original bazaar approach to system software meant that everything worked with whatever components it explicitly planned to work with, and nothing else. Do you know how many codebases contained some random subset of support for logging via STDOUT, logfiles (with or without rotation), syslog, rsyslog? That's what you get with a bazaar approach. systemd's "hub-and-spoke" cathedral approach means that everything just has to work with systemd, and then systemd can ensure that everything works with everything else.

justinsaccount 10y ago
Exactly.. The most amusing thing about this is people claiming they are going to switch to a bsd. As another said on the other thread: > I really dislike the idea of having one project handling everything on a box Which is crazy talk because that is one of the selling points to something like openbsd.
- protomyth 10y ago
  I get what they mean and its not really crazy talk. The difference between a project in the sense of systemd and project in the sense of OpenBSD is pretty big. If I told you that wget was requiring changes to all user behavior, you would laugh it off and wonder where they got the agency to demand that. Many folks view the people with such agency as the kernel developers and the GNU project not a project such as systemd. They are probably wrong these days. This is different than the pick of a BSD.