11 ms·

Escape from System D, episode VI: freedom in sight

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Nextgrid 7y ago
The lack of "monoculture" (whether systemd or something else - which the author says is a good thing) is the reason Linux software distribution is still a shit-show and every single distro has their own, incompatible way of doing things so you can't just provide a single binary and get on with your day like you can with Windows or Mac. Systemd might have its flaws but I'm so grateful that a service/unit file will work on pretty much any distro and that my knowledge of it will serve me on pretty much any modern Linux system, as opposed to years ago where every distro had their own unique way of managing services.
- turbinerneiter 7y ago
  This is especially true since any init system which sets out to "escape from systemd" will eventually end up doing everything that systemd does, at which point it will be as complex as systemd. HOWEVER - the Linux world has lived with these problems for ages and I deem it also a strength. You can switch around components, mix and match and it will mostly work. You can run KDE apps on GNOME no problemo. I think this is something we should consider a positive. If we can unify around a common service file language, we can swap out service managers easy.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    > You can run KDE apps on GNOME no problemo. well you can also run KDE apps on windows and macOS so it would be quite the shit show if they did not run on GNOME :-)...
    - turbinerneiter 7y ago
      That's ... a good point.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    You are basing your argument upon the false premise of doing everything that systemd does. Several people, perhaps most notably the Uselessd Guy, set out to do only a subset. After all, one of the common critiques is that one really does not have to reinvent things like a resolving proxy DNS server and an NTP server in order to manage services. (A resolving proxy DNS server is one of the things that is notoriously easy to reinvent badly, moreover. The DNS is full of traps for implementors.)
  - co_dh 7y ago
    I hate things mostly work. Countless of hour of debugging, refactoring on the way. A system need to be designed first, proved correct first.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > every single distro has their own, incompatible way of doing things This doesn’t have to be the case; there can be multiple implementations of one standard (like we have it the web).
  - darkwater 7y ago
    Unfortunately there is no such thing as an "init system standard".
    - LessDmesg 7y ago
      OpenRC
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      Indeed. This is one of the areas that the POSIX standardization effort specifically shied away from.
- sildur 7y ago
  I would very much prefer the so-called “shit show” to having a binary-only distro.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Strikes me as a false dichotomy. One does not preclude the other
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Having a monolithic approach can be advantageous but there are a lot of alternatives for that. For me linux just works. Windows couldn't sort desktop links in a sensible manner for months on the biannual channel and there are enough other problems. True about the knowledge part, but that often leads to the adoption of suboptimal solutions. I know that the quest for absolute purity is also a problem for a lot of devs but many newer "consolidated" operating systems, especially in the mobile segment, should serve as ample warnings. Yes, those are successful, but they are also basically shit. And that is an objective assessment.
- LessDmesg 7y ago
  > just provide a single binary Just provide a single source and get on with your day. It's Linux after all. No need for huge monolithic binary piles of crap from Poettering to start your system.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    Source is great, but it's not a usability improvement. Trying to compile someone's code source with awkward dependencies is not fun.
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      The ports trees in the BSDs make the process fairly straightforward.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    I said binary to make it faster. Sources would have the same problem when it comes to init scripts. Systemd unit files would at least work on pretty much any systemd-powered distro.
- viraptor 7y ago
  > so you can't just provide a single binary and get on with your day This was the motivation behind snap / flatpack / appimage. We're getting there. Not in the way I'd prefer, but for end-user apps it works.
- mongol 7y ago
  I think systemd has much improved the compatibility of daemon initialization between distros. It used to be that init.d shell scripts distributed with some software often would not work on an arbitrary distro, if it was included at all, because of details of that distro. With systemd, unit files seem to be mostly compatible between distros. So I think it is quite an improvement.
miloshadzic 7y ago
Dinit has been booting my own system for a long while, and other than a few hiccups on odd occasions it’s been quite reliable. Ok, compared to Systemd it lacks some features. It doesn’t know anything about Cgroups, the boot manager, filesystem mounts, dynamic users or binary logging. For day-to-day use on my personal desktop system, none of this matters, but then, I’m running a desktop based on Fluxbox and not much else; if I was trying to run Gnome, I’d rather expect that some things might not work quite as intended (on the other hand, maybe I could Elogind and it would all work fine… I’ve not tried, yet). On the plus side, compared to Systemd’s binary at 1.5mb, Dinit weighs in at only 123kb. It’s much smaller, but fundamentally almost as powerful, in my own opinion, as the former. I applaud the OP for writing a new init system, and in light of that, the few paragraphs above serve as a good counterpoint to everyone writing how systemd does too much, is doing everything etc. In the past several years it really has been insufferable to be in the vicinity of any discussion related to systemd/init systems.
xiaomai 7y ago
As someone who has been using Linux full time on servers/desktops/laptops/embedded devices and any other computing device I've had since 1998: Systemd is such an awesome improvement over everything that came before it. It benefits me on a daily basis. The power and ease of configuring services is so far beyond sysinit (and let's be honest, most of us weren't able to write our own init scripts back then and were resorting to stuff like rc.local or inittab anyway which were inadequate solutions). Timers are generally better than cron. I love that systemd does all the stuff I used to have to do on my own like balancing when jobs run and preventing DST issues. I like journalctl. I know it bothers some people that the logs are stored in some kind of binary format but the practical difference of journalctl is that logs are easier to filter in a variety of ways. Anyway, I think making a init system would be a fun hobby too, but the world is a better place because of systemd and I am sick of the belly-aching about it.
- enriquto 7y ago
  > Systemd is such an awesome improvement over everything that came before it. It benefits me on a daily basis. Curiously, I have the exact opposite experience. I never cared about init systems and I do not care now. But before systemd I could mostly ignore the existence of the init system (besides editing an occasional script). With systemd, on the contrary, my daily life is made miserable in many different ways due to systemd randombly breaking stuff, and having a state scattered through a myriad of different "configuration" files. When I manage to fold it to my liking, the next version always happens to break my hard-obtained configuration. It feels like it is not my computer anymore and I cannot wait enough to get rid of it. Besides, the people who had the idea to store the logs in binary format should be shot. In front of their families.
  - rbjorklin 7y ago
    What do you do with your systems? I adopted it fairly early and it’s been such an improvement for me over System V. Never had an issue really. What’s wrong with storing the logs in binary form when it’s super easy to filter and then pipe to whatever command you want?
  - 7y ago
jcelerier 7y ago
> Besides, the people who had the idea to store the logs in binary format should be shot. In front of their families. everything wrong with the anti-systemd crowd in one sentence
- JdeBP 7y ago
  Tarring a whole bunch of people with the same brush is a fairly poor show, too.
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    I would in general agree if some systemd core team members weren't receiving actual death threats. When this becomes a common occurence you have to wonder what are the systemic causes for that. Or do you also think that far-right-wing people should not be called out for the wrongness when their community repeatedly fails to condemn and take action for years leading the extremist faction to eventually run over people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack) ?
    - JdeBP 7y ago
      From tarring everyone with the same brush you have gone on to overgeneralizing from one incident. One person made one comment about hiring a hitman, once, just under seven years ago in an IRC channel. It is a fallacy to extend that to everyone else. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417369 This is a very poor show.
- gwd 7y ago
  > everything wrong with the anti-systemd crowd in one sentence Everything wrong with pro-systemd crowd in one sentence. Namely, ignoring real issues and focusing on strawmen. Look, systemd as such seems like a decent idea. The real problem I have with systemd is the attitude of the people who run it. Off the top of my head, issues I've seen with systemd: * At some point there was no way to say, "bring up this service once the network is up". I mean, there was technically a "network" target, but it considered "localhost" as a network. So if, say, you have automounted NFS, the automounter starts running before your main interface has DHCP. This setup been a widely-used configuration for decades; the systemd maintainers didn't care. * At some point, if you typed "reboot ; exit" in an ssh session, the "reboot" would hard-kill your ssh session and your shell before the "exit" would be run; so your ssh connection would then hang until the machine came up again and refused a TCP resend request. * The whole thing with systemd reading the kernel's command-line, deciding that "debug" was meant for it, and spamming the logs making it completely unable to boot; and forcing the kernel to introduce a work-around to hide "debug" from systemd. * The whole interface renaming thing that's happening in Debian now; every time we've upgraded our test systems from jessie to stretch, and then stretch to buster, we've had to spend dozens of man-hours figuring out why our network configurations aren't working. The problem here isn't so much that there are these sorts of bugs; the problem is that there seems to be an attitude of, "Well my set-up works; yours doesn't matter." That's not the attitude such a core piece of infrastructure should have. And your response has exactly the same attitude. "systemd is fine; anyone who doesn't like it must be a raving lunatic and can be safely ignored." Nobody should be threatened with violence over a piece of software, and the comment you responded to is absolutely out of line. But the reason people are becoming raving lunatics is because they're not being listened to.
jakeogh 7y ago
For anyone looking for an out, but wants to keep using linux... Gentoo. You can even use it with systemd. It's all about choice. Follow the handbook, it's worth it. Once that gets too tedious, checkout https://github.com/jakeogh/sendgentoo https://github.com/jakeogh/sendgentoo
- enriquto 7y ago
  There are many distributions without systemd. Voidlinux and slackware have rolling releases and are very clean, for example.
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    That's the point. Gentoo isnt one of those. You can use it with systemd, it's supported. Slackware(1993!) has been around longer than Gentoo(2000), but USE flags, slots, _choice_ and control over the compilation stack are pretty nice. NixOS's package manager and portage hopefully merge sometime in the future. I havent tried Void. We didnt need to have the init system debate, it was never a possibility that Gentoo would be monoinit.
LessDmesg 7y ago
I'm a Gentoo user and your problems with "systemd" look quaint to me. I mean I've heard about such a thing as "systemd" that turns Linux into Lindows, but I've no idea why anyone would use it when an awesome Linux (a real one, not Lindows) is within reach...
- miloshadzic 7y ago
  Wow I didn't think Gentoo Ricers[1] still existed [1]: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
  - jakeogh 7y ago
    What's Android based on?
    - duncaen 7y ago
      Not gentoo. I think you are thinking of chromeos.
- n0rbwah 7y ago
  You know Lindows used to be the name of a Linux distribution whose main focus was trying to look like windows and offering some compatibility with windows through wine? It was still a Linux distribution and back then, no one had ever thought of systemd. Saying using systemd turns Linux into Lindows just shows how ignorant you are of linux history, of that "systemd" thing you've just heard of and of what makes Linux and Windows different. Being a Gentoo user doesn't make one into a Linux guru. In fact, starting your comment by stating you're a Gentoo user as if it will give more weight to what follows is just plain arrogant. It shows that you're definitely not a linux guru, what distribution you use/have used don't matter at all for that. I feel for Gentoo users, people like you make them look bad.
  - mongol 7y ago
    Lindows, Corel Linux, yes those were the days...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

The lack of "monoculture" (whether systemd or something else - which the author says is a good thing) is the reason Linux software distribution is still a shit-show and every single distro has their own, incompatible way of doing things so you can't just provide a single binary and get on with your day like you can with Windows or Mac. Systemd might have its flaws but I'm so grateful that a service/unit file will work on pretty much any distro and that my knowledge of it will serve me on pretty much any modern Linux system, as opposed to years ago where every distro had their own unique way of managing services.

turbinerneiter 7y ago
This is especially true since any init system which sets out to "escape from systemd" will eventually end up doing everything that systemd does, at which point it will be as complex as systemd. HOWEVER - the Linux world has lived with these problems for ages and I deem it also a strength. You can switch around components, mix and match and it will mostly work. You can run KDE apps on GNOME no problemo. I think this is something we should consider a positive. If we can unify around a common service file language, we can swap out service managers easy.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  > You can run KDE apps on GNOME no problemo. well you can also run KDE apps on windows and macOS so it would be quite the shit show if they did not run on GNOME :-)...
  - turbinerneiter 7y ago
    That's ... a good point.
- JdeBP 7y ago
  You are basing your argument upon the false premise of doing everything that systemd does. Several people, perhaps most notably the Uselessd Guy, set out to do only a subset. After all, one of the common critiques is that one really does not have to reinvent things like a resolving proxy DNS server and an NTP server in order to manage services. (A resolving proxy DNS server is one of the things that is notoriously easy to reinvent badly, moreover. The DNS is full of traps for implementors.)
- co_dh 7y ago
  I hate things mostly work. Countless of hour of debugging, refactoring on the way. A system need to be designed first, proved correct first.
saagarjha 7y ago
> every single distro has their own, incompatible way of doing things This doesn’t have to be the case; there can be multiple implementations of one standard (like we have it the web).
- darkwater 7y ago
  Unfortunately there is no such thing as an "init system standard".
  - LessDmesg 7y ago
    OpenRC
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    Indeed. This is one of the areas that the POSIX standardization effort specifically shied away from.
sildur 7y ago
I would very much prefer the so-called “shit show” to having a binary-only distro.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Strikes me as a false dichotomy. One does not preclude the other
raxxorrax 7y ago
Having a monolithic approach can be advantageous but there are a lot of alternatives for that. For me linux just works. Windows couldn't sort desktop links in a sensible manner for months on the biannual channel and there are enough other problems. True about the knowledge part, but that often leads to the adoption of suboptimal solutions. I know that the quest for absolute purity is also a problem for a lot of devs but many newer "consolidated" operating systems, especially in the mobile segment, should serve as ample warnings. Yes, those are successful, but they are also basically shit. And that is an objective assessment.
LessDmesg 7y ago
> just provide a single binary Just provide a single source and get on with your day. It's Linux after all. No need for huge monolithic binary piles of crap from Poettering to start your system.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  Source is great, but it's not a usability improvement. Trying to compile someone's code source with awkward dependencies is not fun.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    The ports trees in the BSDs make the process fairly straightforward.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  I said binary to make it faster. Sources would have the same problem when it comes to init scripts. Systemd unit files would at least work on pretty much any systemd-powered distro.
viraptor 7y ago
> so you can't just provide a single binary and get on with your day This was the motivation behind snap / flatpack / appimage. We're getting there. Not in the way I'd prefer, but for end-user apps it works.
mongol 7y ago
I think systemd has much improved the compatibility of daemon initialization between distros. It used to be that init.d shell scripts distributed with some software often would not work on an arbitrary distro, if it was included at all, because of details of that distro. With systemd, unit files seem to be mostly compatible between distros. So I think it is quite an improvement.

miloshadzic 7y ago

Dinit has been booting my own system for a long while, and other than a few hiccups on odd occasions it’s been quite reliable. Ok, compared to Systemd it lacks some features. It doesn’t know anything about Cgroups, the boot manager, filesystem mounts, dynamic users or binary logging. For day-to-day use on my personal desktop system, none of this matters, but then, I’m running a desktop based on Fluxbox and not much else; if I was trying to run Gnome, I’d rather expect that some things might not work quite as intended (on the other hand, maybe I could Elogind and it would all work fine… I’ve not tried, yet). On the plus side, compared to Systemd’s binary at 1.5mb, Dinit weighs in at only 123kb. It’s much smaller, but fundamentally almost as powerful, in my own opinion, as the former. I applaud the OP for writing a new init system, and in light of that, the few paragraphs above serve as a good counterpoint to everyone writing how systemd does too much, is doing everything etc. In the past several years it really has been insufferable to be in the vicinity of any discussion related to systemd/init systems.

xiaomai 7y ago

As someone who has been using Linux full time on servers/desktops/laptops/embedded devices and any other computing device I've had since 1998: Systemd is such an awesome improvement over everything that came before it. It benefits me on a daily basis. The power and ease of configuring services is so far beyond sysinit (and let's be honest, most of us weren't able to write our own init scripts back then and were resorting to stuff like rc.local or inittab anyway which were inadequate solutions). Timers are generally better than cron. I love that systemd does all the stuff I used to have to do on my own like balancing when jobs run and preventing DST issues. I like journalctl. I know it bothers some people that the logs are stored in some kind of binary format but the practical difference of journalctl is that logs are easier to filter in a variety of ways. Anyway, I think making a init system would be a fun hobby too, but the world is a better place because of systemd and I am sick of the belly-aching about it.

enriquto 7y ago
> Systemd is such an awesome improvement over everything that came before it. It benefits me on a daily basis. Curiously, I have the exact opposite experience. I never cared about init systems and I do not care now. But before systemd I could mostly ignore the existence of the init system (besides editing an occasional script). With systemd, on the contrary, my daily life is made miserable in many different ways due to systemd randombly breaking stuff, and having a state scattered through a myriad of different "configuration" files. When I manage to fold it to my liking, the next version always happens to break my hard-obtained configuration. It feels like it is not my computer anymore and I cannot wait enough to get rid of it. Besides, the people who had the idea to store the logs in binary format should be shot. In front of their families.
- rbjorklin 7y ago
  What do you do with your systems? I adopted it fairly early and it’s been such an improvement for me over System V. Never had an issue really. What’s wrong with storing the logs in binary form when it’s super easy to filter and then pipe to whatever command you want?
- 7y ago

jcelerier 7y ago

> Besides, the people who had the idea to store the logs in binary format should be shot. In front of their families. everything wrong with the anti-systemd crowd in one sentence

JdeBP 7y ago
Tarring a whole bunch of people with the same brush is a fairly poor show, too.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  I would in general agree if some systemd core team members weren't receiving actual death threats. When this becomes a common occurence you have to wonder what are the systemic causes for that. Or do you also think that far-right-wing people should not be called out for the wrongness when their community repeatedly fails to condemn and take action for years leading the extremist faction to eventually run over people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack) ?
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    From tarring everyone with the same brush you have gone on to overgeneralizing from one incident. One person made one comment about hiring a hitman, once, just under seven years ago in an IRC channel. It is a fallacy to extend that to everyone else. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417369 This is a very poor show.
gwd 7y ago
> everything wrong with the anti-systemd crowd in one sentence Everything wrong with pro-systemd crowd in one sentence. Namely, ignoring real issues and focusing on strawmen. Look, systemd as such seems like a decent idea. The real problem I have with systemd is the attitude of the people who run it. Off the top of my head, issues I've seen with systemd: * At some point there was no way to say, "bring up this service once the network is up". I mean, there was technically a "network" target, but it considered "localhost" as a network. So if, say, you have automounted NFS, the automounter starts running before your main interface has DHCP. This setup been a widely-used configuration for decades; the systemd maintainers didn't care. * At some point, if you typed "reboot ; exit" in an ssh session, the "reboot" would hard-kill your ssh session and your shell before the "exit" would be run; so your ssh connection would then hang until the machine came up again and refused a TCP resend request. * The whole thing with systemd reading the kernel's command-line, deciding that "debug" was meant for it, and spamming the logs making it completely unable to boot; and forcing the kernel to introduce a work-around to hide "debug" from systemd. * The whole interface renaming thing that's happening in Debian now; every time we've upgraded our test systems from jessie to stretch, and then stretch to buster, we've had to spend dozens of man-hours figuring out why our network configurations aren't working. The problem here isn't so much that there are these sorts of bugs; the problem is that there seems to be an attitude of, "Well my set-up works; yours doesn't matter." That's not the attitude such a core piece of infrastructure should have. And your response has exactly the same attitude. "systemd is fine; anyone who doesn't like it must be a raving lunatic and can be safely ignored." Nobody should be threatened with violence over a piece of software, and the comment you responded to is absolutely out of line. But the reason people are becoming raving lunatics is because they're not being listened to.

jakeogh 7y ago

For anyone looking for an out, but wants to keep using linux... Gentoo. You can even use it with systemd. It's all about choice. Follow the handbook, it's worth it. Once that gets too tedious, checkout https://github.com/jakeogh/sendgentoo https://github.com/jakeogh/sendgentoo

enriquto 7y ago
There are many distributions without systemd. Voidlinux and slackware have rolling releases and are very clean, for example.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  That's the point. Gentoo isnt one of those. You can use it with systemd, it's supported. Slackware(1993!) has been around longer than Gentoo(2000), but USE flags, slots, _choice_ and control over the compilation stack are pretty nice. NixOS's package manager and portage hopefully merge sometime in the future. I havent tried Void. We didnt need to have the init system debate, it was never a possibility that Gentoo would be monoinit.

LessDmesg 7y ago

I'm a Gentoo user and your problems with "systemd" look quaint to me. I mean I've heard about such a thing as "systemd" that turns Linux into Lindows, but I've no idea why anyone would use it when an awesome Linux (a real one, not Lindows) is within reach...

miloshadzic 7y ago
Wow I didn't think Gentoo Ricers[1] still existed [1]: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Gentoo-is-Rice.html https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
- jakeogh 7y ago
  What's Android based on?
  - duncaen 7y ago
    Not gentoo. I think you are thinking of chromeos.
n0rbwah 7y ago
You know Lindows used to be the name of a Linux distribution whose main focus was trying to look like windows and offering some compatibility with windows through wine? It was still a Linux distribution and back then, no one had ever thought of systemd. Saying using systemd turns Linux into Lindows just shows how ignorant you are of linux history, of that "systemd" thing you've just heard of and of what makes Linux and Windows different. Being a Gentoo user doesn't make one into a Linux guru. In fact, starting your comment by stating you're a Gentoo user as if it will give more weight to what follows is just plain arrogant. It shows that you're definitely not a linux guru, what distribution you use/have used don't matter at all for that. I feel for Gentoo users, people like you make them look bad.
- mongol 7y ago
  Lindows, Corel Linux, yes those were the days...