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I have used Linux (mainly Ubuntu) exclusively for years and love it. I do some devops when needed, run a few websites etc. Granted, I'm not a full-time sysadmin

I have used Linux (mainly Ubuntu) exclusively for years and love it. I do some devops when needed, run a few websites etc. Granted, I'm not a full-time sysadmin but I do plenty of work with Linux. I don't understand why systemd is taking over or what benefit it has bought. It works for now, is that enough? It feels like a monstrosity of overly complex and questionable design. Yet, it spreads. Throwing "unix philosophy", a most agreeable set of ideas, out the window. Maybe I'm just being reactionary and slow to adapt.

Macuyiko 10y ago
I agree. First the whole thing about systemd closing nohup and screen processes on logout and now this... I have been thinking about switching to freebsd as well, at least for my server environments. Any good recommendations re: Linux distros that follow the Unix philosophy closely whilst still being up to date in terms of packages?
- akerro 10y ago
  The last on battle field are Void Linux, Slackware and Getnoo.
  - thde 10y ago
    Don't forget Alpine Linux
- dkarapetyan 10y ago
  I started using freebsd two weeks ago. My usual ruby stack carried over just fine and so far it's kinda fun. The stack being sinatra, thin, nginx, postgresql. I assume any other sane backend stack will carry over just as easily.
- snaky 10y ago
  https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd
- fridsun 10y ago
  PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) on my laptop works surprisingly nicely. It's been more stable than Xubuntu for me, and because of ZFS, capable of rolling back any wrongful update without an external backup. The ports system is straightforward and close to hand that I already want to contribute. I didn't know such system can be done with just a git cloned hierarchy of dirs with makefiles doing search. While its GUI app manager AppCafe resembles Ubuntu's user-friendliness, if not better. For server maybe you can give OpenBSD a spin for its fame of security.
ybx 10y ago
To be fair, most Linux distros haven't followed the Unix philosophy for a long time.
notalaser 10y ago
I've mostly lurked lately and have firmly vowed not to touch a systemd-related thread ever, but I'm waiting for a long compile and I'm going to bite. First, please, let's get the unix philosophy crap out of the way. Most of the modern Linux tools don't follow it. The people who passionately hate on systemd for not following the unix philosophy happily use Grub2, LibreOffice and whatnot. The Unix philosophy is nice to have, but quality software that does not follow it exists, nonetheless. The advantages that systemd has brought are hard to downplay. It gets a lot of hate because they're essentially non-existent for desktop users (and don't give me that shit about dynamically mounting storage devices or parallel startup and whatever, because those were available way, way before systemd was a thing). The unpleasant truth is that desktop Linux is largely irrelevant for a lot of the major players in the Linux world, and for the very few who care about it, the only relevant target is corporate workstations, where a tight integration with systemd is desirable. tl;dr it has real advantages which are desirable to most of the companies that pour money into Linux stuff and, unsurprisingly, these can dictate much of Linux development at the moment.
- 3princip 10y ago
  Fair enough on unix philosophy, I'm not a purist, compromise is understandable. Still, an expectation that lower level tools be more in line with it than, say, LibreOffice doesn't seem that crazy to me. So, what is the advantage systemd provides to companies?
  - notalaser 10y ago
    My answer is going to be very skewed towards what I do (embedded systems), but: - It offers a single, easily-configurable way to define startup tasks, issue various system-level commands (shutdown, suspend etc.), which is immensely helpful when you write a daemon that has to write on a dozen different targets. The official story is that SysV was nice and easy because it was just a shell script and we loved that. Truth is, writing startup scripts was a heart-wrenching adventure in figuring out the subtle differences between distributions. Systemd's solution is not better, IMHO, but it is certainly far, far easier... * ...which is a big deal when, now that Linux is suddenly the next big thing (especially in make-belief markets like IoT), you have to suddenly convert swarms of Android and Windows programmers to Linux programmers. Especially on platforms where there's a lot of integration and packing work to do (which often gets outsourced to someplace where programmers are cheap and super-specialized), this is useful, because it's a lot easier to teach people to write systemd service files than it is to teach them to write shell scripts. * Having a unified system for virtually every system-level task reduces the surface on which your customers can exercise their creativity, which reduces support costs. * For companies that write Linux software, as opposed to "just" integrating it, having a standardized system for virtually every system-level task means that, as long as you stick to using that interface, your software is going to run on whatever distribution or platform you deploy it on. Historically, this was problematic on Linux, as every distro did its subtly different thing and, consequently, you had to test on every distro. Edit: just to be clear -- these are all good things. My beef with systemd is related to its community's attitude towards reliability and bugs, the abysmal documentation that surrounds not just systemd, but its entire entourage (like D-Bus), its developers' lack of concern for anything that is not systemd or Gnome and runs on something other than their laptops, and the aggressive PR around it, the result of which is that a) now there's a bunch of systemd bigots who keep trying to push it into everything, even where it doesn't belongs, and b) there's another bunch of anti-systemd bigots who insist it's the doom but won't code a damn line to give us something else, and I have to keep explaining why systemd is OK sometimes.

Macuyiko 10y ago

I agree. First the whole thing about systemd closing nohup and screen processes on logout and now this... I have been thinking about switching to freebsd as well, at least for my server environments. Any good recommendations re: Linux distros that follow the Unix philosophy closely whilst still being up to date in terms of packages?

akerro 10y ago
The last on battle field are Void Linux, Slackware and Getnoo.
- thde 10y ago
  Don't forget Alpine Linux
dkarapetyan 10y ago
I started using freebsd two weeks ago. My usual ruby stack carried over just fine and so far it's kinda fun. The stack being sinatra, thin, nginx, postgresql. I assume any other sane backend stack will carry over just as easily.
snaky 10y ago
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd
fridsun 10y ago
PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) on my laptop works surprisingly nicely. It's been more stable than Xubuntu for me, and because of ZFS, capable of rolling back any wrongful update without an external backup. The ports system is straightforward and close to hand that I already want to contribute. I didn't know such system can be done with just a git cloned hierarchy of dirs with makefiles doing search. While its GUI app manager AppCafe resembles Ubuntu's user-friendliness, if not better. For server maybe you can give OpenBSD a spin for its fame of security.

ybx 10y ago

To be fair, most Linux distros haven't followed the Unix philosophy for a long time.

notalaser 10y ago

I've mostly lurked lately and have firmly vowed not to touch a systemd-related thread ever, but I'm waiting for a long compile and I'm going to bite. First, please, let's get the unix philosophy crap out of the way. Most of the modern Linux tools don't follow it. The people who passionately hate on systemd for not following the unix philosophy happily use Grub2, LibreOffice and whatnot. The Unix philosophy is nice to have, but quality software that does not follow it exists, nonetheless. The advantages that systemd has brought are hard to downplay. It gets a lot of hate because they're essentially non-existent for desktop users (and don't give me that shit about dynamically mounting storage devices or parallel startup and whatever, because those were available way, way before systemd was a thing). The unpleasant truth is that desktop Linux is largely irrelevant for a lot of the major players in the Linux world, and for the very few who care about it, the only relevant target is corporate workstations, where a tight integration with systemd is desirable. tl;dr it has real advantages which are desirable to most of the companies that pour money into Linux stuff and, unsurprisingly, these can dictate much of Linux development at the moment.

3princip 10y ago
Fair enough on unix philosophy, I'm not a purist, compromise is understandable. Still, an expectation that lower level tools be more in line with it than, say, LibreOffice doesn't seem that crazy to me. So, what is the advantage systemd provides to companies?
- notalaser 10y ago
  My answer is going to be very skewed towards what I do (embedded systems), but: - It offers a single, easily-configurable way to define startup tasks, issue various system-level commands (shutdown, suspend etc.), which is immensely helpful when you write a daemon that has to write on a dozen different targets. The official story is that SysV was nice and easy because it was just a shell script and we loved that. Truth is, writing startup scripts was a heart-wrenching adventure in figuring out the subtle differences between distributions. Systemd's solution is not better, IMHO, but it is certainly far, far easier... * ...which is a big deal when, now that Linux is suddenly the next big thing (especially in make-belief markets like IoT), you have to suddenly convert swarms of Android and Windows programmers to Linux programmers. Especially on platforms where there's a lot of integration and packing work to do (which often gets outsourced to someplace where programmers are cheap and super-specialized), this is useful, because it's a lot easier to teach people to write systemd service files than it is to teach them to write shell scripts. * Having a unified system for virtually every system-level task reduces the surface on which your customers can exercise their creativity, which reduces support costs. * For companies that write Linux software, as opposed to "just" integrating it, having a standardized system for virtually every system-level task means that, as long as you stick to using that interface, your software is going to run on whatever distribution or platform you deploy it on. Historically, this was problematic on Linux, as every distro did its subtly different thing and, consequently, you had to test on every distro. Edit: just to be clear -- these are all good things. My beef with systemd is related to its community's attitude towards reliability and bugs, the abysmal documentation that surrounds not just systemd, but its entire entourage (like D-Bus), its developers' lack of concern for anything that is not systemd or Gnome and runs on something other than their laptops, and the aggressive PR around it, the result of which is that a) now there's a bunch of systemd bigots who keep trying to push it into everything, even where it doesn't belongs, and b) there's another bunch of anti-systemd bigots who insist it's the doom but won't code a damn line to give us something else, and I have to keep explaining why systemd is OK sometimes.