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If you're curious to know further critics regarding Systemd, then without-systemd[1] has got you covered. [1] : http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_

If you're curious to know further critics regarding Systemd, then without-systemd[1] has got you covered. [1] : http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

blablabla123 8y ago
Yeah I know that one. It puzzles me how systemd has such a broad support among distributions and end users. It just redoes ages of system management in such new ways that they don't exactly fit the picture. We all know that some stuff of Linux sucks but this can't seriously be the solution. Solving things the windows ways. ;)
- yarrel 8y ago
  SystemD doesn't have broad support among end users. It has weary resignation and a few people who don't know how grep works.
  - adontz 8y ago
    Honestly, if systemd is really that bad, why everyone adopted it? We can blame Red Hat as Lennard's employer for forcing systemd into their family of distributions (RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, CoreOS). But why Debian/Ubuntu? Why ArchLinux and Gentoo which were never ever targeted at "people who don't know how grep works"? Why SUSE? Either systemd brings more good, than harm; or we have to blame Illuminati and Masonry.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - insertcredit 8y ago
      You are using logical fallacies in your argument. First, not _everyone_ has adopted it (loaded language). Google, which controls the vast majority of Linux systems on the planet, has not. GNU has not. Others [1] have not. Second, the critique against systemd is substantial and solid enough to stand on its own regardless of popularity. Popularity does not imply quality, you should read "Worse is better" by Richard Gabriel. Politics, network effects and an octopus-like architecture that imposes itself via ever-increasing interdependencies are reasonable explanations to systemd adoption. For a distribution provider or package maintainer, it has gotten to the point where it's easier to go along with systemd than try and fight it, since the latter option means extra work. This is really a sad state of affairs. [1] http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
      - StreamBright 8y ago
        I would use cancer like architecture but yes.
      - adontz 8y ago
        OK, my bad, I admit. Not everyone. Most. Most popular distributions, because, let's make it clear: RedHat, Fedora, CoreOS, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora KDE, and all other members of these respected families will account for at least (data by different sources vary) 75% of all installations. Octopus-like architecture cannot be argument why it was adopted in the first place. People don't like dropping familiar/stable tools. Also, it was not so octopus in the first version. Politics and network effects sound to me like conspiracy theory. Sorry, but I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way. Problems solved by systemd exist. Systemd was not the only project trying to solve these problems, it was most successful/adopted. There was upstart. Remember Upstart? So, honestly, just reverting back to SysV init is not an option, it's just burying your head in the sand. Systemd is not perfect. It never was. Just SysV is worse. I look at http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_... and see that most arguments against systemd are either a) Ignore obvious fact, that systemd is not a single program, but suite of programs which play nice together and are optimized to exchange data in effective ways, keep configuration in similar manner, etc. You cannot compare systemd to initd, like you cannot compare Atom to nano. b) Simply nostalgic. c) Somewhat valid, but again, systemd is not perfect, it's just much better than SysV initd. That's why it was adopted, not because of politics.
        dane-pgp 8y ago
        > I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way. Let's go through these one by one then. * RedHat could certainly have adopted it because they saw it as a way to take control of the development of a central piece of GNU/Linux software architecture. An init system is the one piece of software (other than a kernel) that you can't run two of at the same time on the same bare metal, so this is obviously a tempting piece of real estate to capture to provide a competitive advantage in a commoditised landscape. * SUSE didn't want to be seen to be left behind with "old fashioned" sysvinit, and didn't have the resources to invest in their own competing init system, especially after Canonical had already thrown their own resources at Upstart. Siding with the RPM distro over the DEB based one was also an obvious choice. * Debian had a contentious debate about which init system should be the default (and, in practice, after choosing systemd, the only) fully supported init system. The decision was placed in the hands of the Technical Committee, who were split down the middle between choosing systemd or Upstart. The tie was resolved by a single vote, that of the committee's chairman, Bdale Garbee: https://lwn.net/Articles/585363/ https://lwn.net/Articles/585363/ He is, no doubt, an honourable man, but he is also a cheerleader for HPE: https://www.linux.com/NEWS/LINUX-LEADER-BDALE-GARBEE-TOUTS-POTENTIAL-HPES-NEWEST-OPEN-SOURCE-PROJECT https://www.linux.com/NEWS/LINUX-LEADER-BDALE-GARBEE-TOUTS-P... despite SUSE being HPE's preferred Linux distro: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-linux-distro/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-... * Canonical (that is, Ubuntu) went with systemd shortly after the Debian vote, once it became clear that single-handedly supporting Upstart was an unsustainable option for the company, especially as packages were starting to add dependencies on systemd: https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-linux-civil-war-ubuntu-to-adopt-systemd/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-linux-civil-war-ubuntu-t... * With all these top tier distros succumbing to systemd, more and more packages started to depend on it as the init system, to the point that it became all but impossible for another distro to ship packages that didn't depend on systemd in its base system. This is exactly the sort of slow creeping spread that systemd is notorious for, using the momentum gained from each small victory to help crush bigger and bigger targets, until it is unavoidable. The worst part, though, is the historical revisionism, and the suggestion that everyone just accepted systemd and abandoned all the software it replaces, based purely on the merits of systemd. Most people had to accept systemd whether they liked it or not. systemd is not a "suite of programs which play nice together", it is a suite of programs which only play nicely together, and which bully all the other programs into submission, despite systemd's technical flaws.
    - Teknoman117 8y ago
      Just a nit, but systemd isn't the default init daemon in Gentoo. You can use systemd if you like, as the distro is about choice. It is, however, selected by default if you use the gnome 3 profile because gnome 3 is a pain in the butt to get working without systemd. It's possible, just painful.
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      Honestly, if heroin is so bad, why so many addicts?
      - adontz 8y ago
        Who said there are many addicts?
        StreamBright 8y ago
        I am just pointing out the fallacy in this argument.
        adontz 8y ago
        It's not an argument, it's a question. I'll rephrase to make it clear, sorry if it was not that clear. "If systemd is worse than other options, why is it so widely adopted?" And by widely I mean most popular distributions adopted it, so more than a half of installations use it. More like 3/4 or so. IDK how heroin addicts answer this question. You kind of ask me "If heroine is worse than other options, why is it so widely adopted?". My answer is - heroine is not widely adopted in the first place.
        loeg 8y ago
        The US media has been shouting about an opioid crisis for years now. The stories imply or outright claim that there are "many" opioid addicts for some definition of "many" that exceeds the number there "should" be. I think that shouting is out of proportion to the number of real addicts, and I'm not claiming to speak for the person you are replying to. But it's not outlandish for someone to mistakenly believe there are lots of heroin addicts.
      - comex 8y ago
        Because it acts directly on your brain to produce intense pleasure and make you crave it, at the expense of making rational decisions? As opposed to systemd, which… doesn’t.
    - gerbilly 8y ago
      Because in the tech/software industry, the second best thing always wins. Windows vs OS/2[1], x86 vs. Motorola, Atari vs. Intellivision, Betamax vs VHS ... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better [1] Windows vs. almost any other operating system of the time really...
      - tssva 8y ago
        All of those are examples of products that had better technical specs on paper but didn't fullfill the needs of the market. They were beat out by solutions which did a better job of doing so and therefore truly were the better solution.
        gerbilly 8y ago
        Some got to market earlier and the used network effects to retain the market.
        loeg 8y ago
        Getting to market earlier is just one way to better fulfill the needs of the market.
    - zzzcpan 8y ago
      Systemd is not widely adopted at all, only a handful of distros adopted it. That's like a few friends level of adoption. And adoption of something by a small group of people doesn't imply that it's a good or a bad thing. But it does suggest that this group shares something that influences their decision making. Users of those distros did not adopt systemd, they were forced to deal with distros that adopted systemd after upgrades. Just like they were forced to deal with new gnome and wayland. All of this is not without consequences of course. There are forks, brokenness, fragmentation, fatigue and general unattractiveness of linux desktop. Ecosystem is in a very sad state. I hope it's not on purpose, but it's definitely possible there is some "extend extinguish" strategy at play too.
      - Quekid5 8y ago
        To me this is a bizarre line of reasoning. I was "forced" to adopt systemd, but so far it's been leagues better than previous attempts (OpenRC, sysvinit) for integrated management of daemons, user-session daemons, a predictable way to access logs of a daemon ("systemctl -u postgresl", for example) without having to guess what it's log file name (if it even has one or logs into the syslog, etc.), etc. Painting this as some sort of nefarious "extend extinguish" strategy is just tin foil hattery. (Yes, there are still bugs, etc., but they will get fixed and the whole ecosystem will benefit. The security problems discussed ITT seem to stem more from the use of an unsafe language rather than design issues, per se.)
    - blaerk 8y ago
      Gentoo use openrc by default, they provide systemd as an option if you want that kind of stuff on your system(s).
  - geofft 8y ago
    This does not seem to be my experience as a professional systems engineer. Nobody says it's good code, but everyone is more excited about it than sysvinit, including people who do actually know how to use grep. (Except for a small number of people who let their biases override serious technical considerations, but those people tend to be poor employees for plenty of other reasons.)
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      Since when is the argument about systemd vs sysvinit?? How about systemd vs daemontools? How about systemd vs s6? How about systemd vs OpenRC? How about systemd vs SMF? How about systemd vs upstart? It seems that the distro maintainers (and not the users of those distros) picked the new an shiny instead of investigating what would be the best for the future of these projects and picked a crappy solution. Soon a mayhem followed and no we are dealing with DNS resolution issues because of it which where not in scope at the time when they decided the cut over. Kind of how drug dealers get new customers.
      - geofft 8y ago
        The expansive scope of systemd is what people like about it. daemontools, s6, OpenRC, and SMF are much more limited in scope; upstart is also somewhat limited though it tries to do some of the same things. (SMF also doesn't exist on Linux, and I've spent a lot of time working with both upstart and systemd professionally and my conclusion is that systemd genuinely has a better design and is genuinely more robust, although there are plenty of smart people who like upstart, I'll admit.) Again, I'm just speaking to my professional experience here and saying that the argument "Nobody wants systemd" is incorrect. People want systemd. People want what systemd does. Maybe they're wrong, but that's a separate argument.
        acdha 8y ago
        This matches my experience as well: in our devops group it's basically a weekly occurrence to have a statement like “this is much {easier,safer,more robust} when we can use systemd”. Upstart was better than SysV but it took many years to add basic functionality (e.g. setuid/setgid, console logging, etc.) and there are still problems like not being able to reliably keep a process unless you remember add things like post-stop sleep blocks.

blablabla123 8y ago

Yeah I know that one. It puzzles me how systemd has such a broad support among distributions and end users. It just redoes ages of system management in such new ways that they don't exactly fit the picture. We all know that some stuff of Linux sucks but this can't seriously be the solution. Solving things the windows ways. ;)

yarrel 8y ago
SystemD doesn't have broad support among end users. It has weary resignation and a few people who don't know how grep works.
- adontz 8y ago
  Honestly, if systemd is really that bad, why everyone adopted it? We can blame Red Hat as Lennard's employer for forcing systemd into their family of distributions (RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, CoreOS). But why Debian/Ubuntu? Why ArchLinux and Gentoo which were never ever targeted at "people who don't know how grep works"? Why SUSE? Either systemd brings more good, than harm; or we have to blame Illuminati and Masonry.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - insertcredit 8y ago
    You are using logical fallacies in your argument. First, not _everyone_ has adopted it (loaded language). Google, which controls the vast majority of Linux systems on the planet, has not. GNU has not. Others [1] have not. Second, the critique against systemd is substantial and solid enough to stand on its own regardless of popularity. Popularity does not imply quality, you should read "Worse is better" by Richard Gabriel. Politics, network effects and an octopus-like architecture that imposes itself via ever-increasing interdependencies are reasonable explanations to systemd adoption. For a distribution provider or package maintainer, it has gotten to the point where it's easier to go along with systemd than try and fight it, since the latter option means extra work. This is really a sad state of affairs. [1] http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
    - StreamBright 8y ago
      I would use cancer like architecture but yes.
    - adontz 8y ago
      OK, my bad, I admit. Not everyone. Most. Most popular distributions, because, let's make it clear: RedHat, Fedora, CoreOS, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Fedora KDE, and all other members of these respected families will account for at least (data by different sources vary) 75% of all installations. Octopus-like architecture cannot be argument why it was adopted in the first place. People don't like dropping familiar/stable tools. Also, it was not so octopus in the first version. Politics and network effects sound to me like conspiracy theory. Sorry, but I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way. Problems solved by systemd exist. Systemd was not the only project trying to solve these problems, it was most successful/adopted. There was upstart. Remember Upstart? So, honestly, just reverting back to SysV init is not an option, it's just burying your head in the sand. Systemd is not perfect. It never was. Just SysV is worse. I look at http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_... and see that most arguments against systemd are either a) Ignore obvious fact, that systemd is not a single program, but suite of programs which play nice together and are optimized to exchange data in effective ways, keep configuration in similar manner, etc. You cannot compare systemd to initd, like you cannot compare Atom to nano. b) Simply nostalgic. c) Somewhat valid, but again, systemd is not perfect, it's just much better than SysV initd. That's why it was adopted, not because of politics.
      - dane-pgp 8y ago
        > I really do not believe that there is someone so powerful to make RedHat, Debian, SUSE and Canonical, to name a few, to harm themselves in one and the same, very specific way. Let's go through these one by one then. * RedHat could certainly have adopted it because they saw it as a way to take control of the development of a central piece of GNU/Linux software architecture. An init system is the one piece of software (other than a kernel) that you can't run two of at the same time on the same bare metal, so this is obviously a tempting piece of real estate to capture to provide a competitive advantage in a commoditised landscape. * SUSE didn't want to be seen to be left behind with "old fashioned" sysvinit, and didn't have the resources to invest in their own competing init system, especially after Canonical had already thrown their own resources at Upstart. Siding with the RPM distro over the DEB based one was also an obvious choice. * Debian had a contentious debate about which init system should be the default (and, in practice, after choosing systemd, the only) fully supported init system. The decision was placed in the hands of the Technical Committee, who were split down the middle between choosing systemd or Upstart. The tie was resolved by a single vote, that of the committee's chairman, Bdale Garbee: https://lwn.net/Articles/585363/ https://lwn.net/Articles/585363/ He is, no doubt, an honourable man, but he is also a cheerleader for HPE: https://www.linux.com/NEWS/LINUX-LEADER-BDALE-GARBEE-TOUTS-POTENTIAL-HPES-NEWEST-OPEN-SOURCE-PROJECT https://www.linux.com/NEWS/LINUX-LEADER-BDALE-GARBEE-TOUTS-P... despite SUSE being HPE's preferred Linux distro: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-linux-distro/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/sweet-suse-hpe-snags-itself-a-... * Canonical (that is, Ubuntu) went with systemd shortly after the Debian vote, once it became clear that single-handedly supporting Upstart was an unsustainable option for the company, especially as packages were starting to add dependencies on systemd: https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-linux-civil-war-ubuntu-to-adopt-systemd/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-linux-civil-war-ubuntu-t... * With all these top tier distros succumbing to systemd, more and more packages started to depend on it as the init system, to the point that it became all but impossible for another distro to ship packages that didn't depend on systemd in its base system. This is exactly the sort of slow creeping spread that systemd is notorious for, using the momentum gained from each small victory to help crush bigger and bigger targets, until it is unavoidable. The worst part, though, is the historical revisionism, and the suggestion that everyone just accepted systemd and abandoned all the software it replaces, based purely on the merits of systemd. Most people had to accept systemd whether they liked it or not. systemd is not a "suite of programs which play nice together", it is a suite of programs which only play nicely together, and which bully all the other programs into submission, despite systemd's technical flaws.
  - Teknoman117 8y ago
    Just a nit, but systemd isn't the default init daemon in Gentoo. You can use systemd if you like, as the distro is about choice. It is, however, selected by default if you use the gnome 3 profile because gnome 3 is a pain in the butt to get working without systemd. It's possible, just painful.
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    Honestly, if heroin is so bad, why so many addicts?
    - adontz 8y ago
      Who said there are many addicts?
      - StreamBright 8y ago
        I am just pointing out the fallacy in this argument.
        adontz 8y ago
        It's not an argument, it's a question. I'll rephrase to make it clear, sorry if it was not that clear. "If systemd is worse than other options, why is it so widely adopted?" And by widely I mean most popular distributions adopted it, so more than a half of installations use it. More like 3/4 or so. IDK how heroin addicts answer this question. You kind of ask me "If heroine is worse than other options, why is it so widely adopted?". My answer is - heroine is not widely adopted in the first place.
      - loeg 8y ago
        The US media has been shouting about an opioid crisis for years now. The stories imply or outright claim that there are "many" opioid addicts for some definition of "many" that exceeds the number there "should" be. I think that shouting is out of proportion to the number of real addicts, and I'm not claiming to speak for the person you are replying to. But it's not outlandish for someone to mistakenly believe there are lots of heroin addicts.
    - comex 8y ago
      Because it acts directly on your brain to produce intense pleasure and make you crave it, at the expense of making rational decisions? As opposed to systemd, which… doesn’t.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    Because in the tech/software industry, the second best thing always wins. Windows vs OS/2[1], x86 vs. Motorola, Atari vs. Intellivision, Betamax vs VHS ... See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better [1] Windows vs. almost any other operating system of the time really...
    - tssva 8y ago
      All of those are examples of products that had better technical specs on paper but didn't fullfill the needs of the market. They were beat out by solutions which did a better job of doing so and therefore truly were the better solution.
      - gerbilly 8y ago
        Some got to market earlier and the used network effects to retain the market.
        loeg 8y ago
        Getting to market earlier is just one way to better fulfill the needs of the market.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    Systemd is not widely adopted at all, only a handful of distros adopted it. That's like a few friends level of adoption. And adoption of something by a small group of people doesn't imply that it's a good or a bad thing. But it does suggest that this group shares something that influences their decision making. Users of those distros did not adopt systemd, they were forced to deal with distros that adopted systemd after upgrades. Just like they were forced to deal with new gnome and wayland. All of this is not without consequences of course. There are forks, brokenness, fragmentation, fatigue and general unattractiveness of linux desktop. Ecosystem is in a very sad state. I hope it's not on purpose, but it's definitely possible there is some "extend extinguish" strategy at play too.
    - Quekid5 8y ago
      To me this is a bizarre line of reasoning. I was "forced" to adopt systemd, but so far it's been leagues better than previous attempts (OpenRC, sysvinit) for integrated management of daemons, user-session daemons, a predictable way to access logs of a daemon ("systemctl -u postgresl", for example) without having to guess what it's log file name (if it even has one or logs into the syslog, etc.), etc. Painting this as some sort of nefarious "extend extinguish" strategy is just tin foil hattery. (Yes, there are still bugs, etc., but they will get fixed and the whole ecosystem will benefit. The security problems discussed ITT seem to stem more from the use of an unsafe language rather than design issues, per se.)
  - blaerk 8y ago
    Gentoo use openrc by default, they provide systemd as an option if you want that kind of stuff on your system(s).
- geofft 8y ago
  This does not seem to be my experience as a professional systems engineer. Nobody says it's good code, but everyone is more excited about it than sysvinit, including people who do actually know how to use grep. (Except for a small number of people who let their biases override serious technical considerations, but those people tend to be poor employees for plenty of other reasons.)
  - StreamBright 8y ago
    Since when is the argument about systemd vs sysvinit?? How about systemd vs daemontools? How about systemd vs s6? How about systemd vs OpenRC? How about systemd vs SMF? How about systemd vs upstart? It seems that the distro maintainers (and not the users of those distros) picked the new an shiny instead of investigating what would be the best for the future of these projects and picked a crappy solution. Soon a mayhem followed and no we are dealing with DNS resolution issues because of it which where not in scope at the time when they decided the cut over. Kind of how drug dealers get new customers.
    - geofft 8y ago
      The expansive scope of systemd is what people like about it. daemontools, s6, OpenRC, and SMF are much more limited in scope; upstart is also somewhat limited though it tries to do some of the same things. (SMF also doesn't exist on Linux, and I've spent a lot of time working with both upstart and systemd professionally and my conclusion is that systemd genuinely has a better design and is genuinely more robust, although there are plenty of smart people who like upstart, I'll admit.) Again, I'm just speaking to my professional experience here and saying that the argument "Nobody wants systemd" is incorrect. People want systemd. People want what systemd does. Maybe they're wrong, but that's a separate argument.
      - acdha 8y ago
        This matches my experience as well: in our devops group it's basically a weekly occurrence to have a statement like “this is much {easier,safer,more robust} when we can use systemd”. Upstart was better than SysV but it took many years to add basic functionality (e.g. setuid/setgid, console logging, etc.) and there are still problems like not being able to reliably keep a process unless you remember add things like post-stop sleep blocks.