4 ms·

Oh good, the monthly HN systemd 5 minute hate is upon us once again.

gjvc 6y ago
It's worth considering why the topic makes such a regular appearance. I suggest it might be because that so many users of this website find it to be a remarkable example of not only how something so widely unpopular can become so widely established, but also being something that they have to contend with frequently.
- sneak 6y ago
  It would appear from distribution adoption that systemd is a lot more popular than it is unpopular.
  - dralley 6y ago
    One of the reasons distributions appreciate systemd because systemd unit files are easy to write and can easily be written and maintained upstream and used with very few if any modifications downstream. Your average HN user doesn't see or particularly care that it makes things easier for distro maintainers, so it's much easier to push the corporate conspiracy angle than to accept that a lot of the hand-wringing takes huge amounts not-very-fun volunteer labor for granted.
    - rleigh 6y ago
      This is one thing which is often claimed, but to my mind is poorly justified. As a (Debian) package maintainer for over a decade, this used to be a non-issue. They were write and forget. The average package was just some simple boilerplate.
      - esarbe 6y ago
        I love not having to maintain half a dozen init scripts for three distributions but just one unit file for a well defined service manager.
    - bandrami 6y ago
      As a Slackware and OpenBSD user I've really never understood this complaint. The init scripts they ship with are neither difficult to understand nor hard to read, and new ones are very easy to write. Maybe the LSB stuff was awful; I never used it, and for that matter I can't think of a reason I would want to. It's the old FreeDesktop.org issue: it's a probably-interesting solution to a problem I just don't have.
  - bzb3 6y ago
    Red Hat made systemd a hard dependency for gnome, forcing all distros that have no manpower to patch gnome to use systemd.
    - sneak 6y ago
      Seems to me there are several options: 1) run the last version of gnome that works without systemd 2) run a patched later version of gnome from another distro that works without systemd 3) don't use gnome, use a different desktop environment 4) fork/patch gnome and remove the dependency yourself systemd can't take any of those away from you. If the people actually working on gnome want to add another dependency to gnome, that's their business, is it not? It doesn't break the existing, pre-systemd versions of gnome.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dijit 6y ago
    Please read the article before commenting. > Indeed, one ought to observe that the most important consumers of an init system are not sysadmins and ops people as commonly believed, but rather distro maintainers. It is their laziness that determines the balance.
    - sneak 6y ago
      I had. :( Users choose their distribution, ultimately. I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion there.
      - dijit 6y ago
        That's an oversimplification. The article goes into detail about why there was a desire from some distro maintainers to switch to something else. (clean slate). The reason I accused you of not reading the article is because it's very clear why systemd was adopted. 1) RH Made it, that doesn't automatically make it good, but there was a lot of posturing from the RH devs to get more things tied in to it under the guise of "all distros will use us eventually, they're already in the process of adopting us!" 2) There was a strong desire to get off of sysvinit, many alternatives had come and gone, though most had the desire to be backwards compatible, none could get any real traction, mostly because it was hacks on hacks. Upstart was promising but people didn't use it properly. 3) GNOME added a hard dependency. Small in isolation but then. 4) UDEV was made systemd-only. UDEV being something that underpins a lot of software. A fork was made (eudev) but that was only the beginning because krdb was next to be systemd only. 5) when it came time for Debian to talk about systemd as the last major upstream distribution (IE: one that sysadmins actually deploy and one that other distros are essentially variants of): it was not "systemd or alternatives" it was "how much systemd do we have to take to be able to support most software." 6) When your distro can't take a major desktop environment, that's a lot of points off of your distro. -- People choose their distro, but their distro often chooses a distro. If you're a business building your company, you don't trust Gentoo- you run it on RHEL, Debian or potentially Ubuntu these days.
  - bandrami 6y ago
    Oh God no. Alpine is the most-used Linux distro out there (containers count, remember) and it's mostly used specifically to avoid the opaque mass of spaghetti unit files that is systemd service management.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Is it actually unpopular or is there just a vocal minority constantly complaining about it while a much larger part of the user base is happily using it?
  - riskyfive 6y ago
    It's unpopular. It has funding. No other project in the space has funding, so it wins by default.
    - asdf21 6y ago
      Sounds like a backdoor to me.
    - gjvc 6y ago
      Exactly. This is the measure of the situation. Well put.
  - meddlepal 6y ago
    Mostly just unpopular here from what I've seen in industry as a programmer with lots of sysadmin, ops, and infra engineering experience. The usual arguments are it is not "Unixy" and then fall back on original designer intent and philosophical attacks, or worse ad hominems against Red Hat or Linus Pottering.

gjvc 6y ago

It's worth considering why the topic makes such a regular appearance. I suggest it might be because that so many users of this website find it to be a remarkable example of not only how something so widely unpopular can become so widely established, but also being something that they have to contend with frequently.

sneak 6y ago
It would appear from distribution adoption that systemd is a lot more popular than it is unpopular.
- dralley 6y ago
  One of the reasons distributions appreciate systemd because systemd unit files are easy to write and can easily be written and maintained upstream and used with very few if any modifications downstream. Your average HN user doesn't see or particularly care that it makes things easier for distro maintainers, so it's much easier to push the corporate conspiracy angle than to accept that a lot of the hand-wringing takes huge amounts not-very-fun volunteer labor for granted.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    This is one thing which is often claimed, but to my mind is poorly justified. As a (Debian) package maintainer for over a decade, this used to be a non-issue. They were write and forget. The average package was just some simple boilerplate.
    - esarbe 6y ago
      I love not having to maintain half a dozen init scripts for three distributions but just one unit file for a well defined service manager.
  - bandrami 6y ago
    As a Slackware and OpenBSD user I've really never understood this complaint. The init scripts they ship with are neither difficult to understand nor hard to read, and new ones are very easy to write. Maybe the LSB stuff was awful; I never used it, and for that matter I can't think of a reason I would want to. It's the old FreeDesktop.org issue: it's a probably-interesting solution to a problem I just don't have.
- bzb3 6y ago
  Red Hat made systemd a hard dependency for gnome, forcing all distros that have no manpower to patch gnome to use systemd.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Seems to me there are several options: 1) run the last version of gnome that works without systemd 2) run a patched later version of gnome from another distro that works without systemd 3) don't use gnome, use a different desktop environment 4) fork/patch gnome and remove the dependency yourself systemd can't take any of those away from you. If the people actually working on gnome want to add another dependency to gnome, that's their business, is it not? It doesn't break the existing, pre-systemd versions of gnome.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 6y ago
  Please read the article before commenting. > Indeed, one ought to observe that the most important consumers of an init system are not sysadmins and ops people as commonly believed, but rather distro maintainers. It is their laziness that determines the balance.
  - sneak 6y ago
    I had. :( Users choose their distribution, ultimately. I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion there.
    - dijit 6y ago
      That's an oversimplification. The article goes into detail about why there was a desire from some distro maintainers to switch to something else. (clean slate). The reason I accused you of not reading the article is because it's very clear why systemd was adopted. 1) RH Made it, that doesn't automatically make it good, but there was a lot of posturing from the RH devs to get more things tied in to it under the guise of "all distros will use us eventually, they're already in the process of adopting us!" 2) There was a strong desire to get off of sysvinit, many alternatives had come and gone, though most had the desire to be backwards compatible, none could get any real traction, mostly because it was hacks on hacks. Upstart was promising but people didn't use it properly. 3) GNOME added a hard dependency. Small in isolation but then. 4) UDEV was made systemd-only. UDEV being something that underpins a lot of software. A fork was made (eudev) but that was only the beginning because krdb was next to be systemd only. 5) when it came time for Debian to talk about systemd as the last major upstream distribution (IE: one that sysadmins actually deploy and one that other distros are essentially variants of): it was not "systemd or alternatives" it was "how much systemd do we have to take to be able to support most software." 6) When your distro can't take a major desktop environment, that's a lot of points off of your distro. -- People choose their distro, but their distro often chooses a distro. If you're a business building your company, you don't trust Gentoo- you run it on RHEL, Debian or potentially Ubuntu these days.
- bandrami 6y ago
  Oh God no. Alpine is the most-used Linux distro out there (containers count, remember) and it's mostly used specifically to avoid the opaque mass of spaghetti unit files that is systemd service management.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Is it actually unpopular or is there just a vocal minority constantly complaining about it while a much larger part of the user base is happily using it?
- riskyfive 6y ago
  It's unpopular. It has funding. No other project in the space has funding, so it wins by default.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    Sounds like a backdoor to me.
  - gjvc 6y ago
    Exactly. This is the measure of the situation. Well put.
- meddlepal 6y ago
  Mostly just unpopular here from what I've seen in industry as a programmer with lots of sysadmin, ops, and infra engineering experience. The usual arguments are it is not "Unixy" and then fall back on original designer intent and philosophical attacks, or worse ad hominems against Red Hat or Linus Pottering.