7 ms·

Genuinely curious, for both casual and advanced users, what major reasons are there for not using systemd? I've used systemd for years bug-free

Genuinely curious, for both casual and advanced users, what *major* reasons are there for not using systemd? I've used systemd for years bug-free

superkuh 6y ago
Something I can't accept is the use of binary logs and the requirement for programs to access the contents of the logs. Yes, most distros will put compatibility layers in place and create text "logs" in parallel. But if everyone is doing that maybe systemd's paradigm isn't right for the desktop even if it's great for servers.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  Binary logs sound like a good thing to me since in most cases I want to just ship them off, and if I don't, a local consumer that can parse is just fine. Is there something I'm missing?
  - perryizgr8 6y ago
    How do you "ship off" .journal files? Whenever I do it either the timestamps are off or you can't read the file at all. I resort to `journalctl xyz.journal > xyz.log` and send the resulting text file to outside the system.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    Yes. The ability to use the giant ecosystem of text processing and piping infrastructure that underlies the entire idea of the unix philosophy. That something besides eyes is required to parse the logs is absurd and unacceptable. And no one on desktop is shipping off logs to somewhere else. That's cargo cult behavior.
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  It isn't right for server either. I want my server logs to be files in filesystem and readable with standard tools.
enriquto 6y ago
> what major reasons are there for not using systemd? ps aux | wc -l
- oblio 6y ago
  I don't get it.
  - posix_me_less 6y ago
    Probably too many useless systemd-related processes.
    - oblio 6y ago
      I imagine that the respective user wouldn't want to see the number of background processes for all the other modern OSes, in this case :-)
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        Alpine Linux boots with a fairly clean process table.
        oblio 6y ago
        Of course, this is the internet... Someone is going to point out exceptions. I was talking about Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, all mainstream Linux distros. What you did was like seeing someone talk about family cars and interjecting: yeah, but they're slower than my motorbike. It's not the same thing, is it?
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        You said > all the other modern OSes Alpine is a modern OS; I've been quite happy running on my desktop. I would argue that you're moving the goalposts because I pointed out an example that disagrees with you.
throwaway54095 6y ago
My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control. (Appart from the kernel of course). It is modular, but also dependant as a whole, so in the end, it spreads almost like an invasion, slowly leaving the admins not other option than accepting it. That's quite off from the Unix philosophy (do one thing, do it well, be really modular)... so my conclusion going back to the beggining, that didn't happen by mistake, but is a deliberate design choice, with shaddy political reasons behind it, so I reject it. And then we could talk about the convenience or not of putting such amount of tools and complexity under PID 1, the crazy binary logs, the weird behavior of the service utilities, and the possibility of being able to modify/add services using regular scripts instead of binary excutables...
- znpy 6y ago
  > My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control. it's really a dumb POV to have, given that systemd is FOSS (licensed LGPLv2.1+) like most of the software that red hat produces. as a sysadmin, systemd is a godsend. really, it brings uniformity and waaay better debuggability/predictability and tooling in system startup and configuration and troubleshooting. and, again, systemd is foss so red hat hasn't really that much control over other distros (and each distro had its own internal discussion and choose freely to adopt it). on another side, red hat took the time and spent the money to bring that improvement to the world. other people just complain under the shield of a throwaway hn account.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - deleted 6y ago
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  - necrotic_comp 6y ago
    I think people's beef with it is that it's hard to understand when things go wrong, Lennart's projects don't leave the best initial impression, and it's had significant scope creep since it was initially introduced.
arp242 6y ago
It's fine when it works, but it's very hard to solve problems when they happen as it's so complex, and doing stuff outside of "the standard thing" can be difficult. I once had "systemctl restart unbound" reset my volume, consistently. How do you even start debugging something like that without a deep dive in systemd? This particular issue turned out to be a systemd bug, and that such a bug can exist in the first place didn't exactly increase my confidence in the system. In another case I couldn't get my NFS to work at all, and it turned out that rpcbind.service somehow went missing. Not sure how that happened and it's a simple enough problem, but it was really non-obvious because systemd doesn't issue clear errors on this and the system is so complex it's not easy to spot either.
- nialv7 6y ago
  > I once had "systemctl restart unbound" reset my volume That's fascinating, do you have more information on this particular bug?
  - arp242 6y ago
    Bug report and commit that fixed it: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88401 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88401 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=6e392c9c45643d106673c6643ac8bf4e65da13c1 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=6e39...
dsr_ 6y ago
You should know that this is a religious topic like vim vs emacs, but worse: vim and emacs users don't feel that the other side is a threat to allowing them to continue using the software they prefer.
- infoseek12 6y ago
  Also kind of like religious syncretism, bridging the emac vs vim divide, there is evil mode.

Genuinely curious, for both casual and advanced users, what *major* reasons are there for not using systemd? I've used systemd for years bug-free

superkuh 6y ago

Something I can't accept is the use of binary logs and the requirement for programs to access the contents of the logs. Yes, most distros will put compatibility layers in place and create text "logs" in parallel. But if everyone is doing that maybe systemd's paradigm isn't right for the desktop even if it's great for servers.

staticassertion 6y ago
Binary logs sound like a good thing to me since in most cases I want to just ship them off, and if I don't, a local consumer that can parse is just fine. Is there something I'm missing?
- perryizgr8 6y ago
  How do you "ship off" .journal files? Whenever I do it either the timestamps are off or you can't read the file at all. I resort to `journalctl xyz.journal > xyz.log` and send the resulting text file to outside the system.
- superkuh 6y ago
  Yes. The ability to use the giant ecosystem of text processing and piping infrastructure that underlies the entire idea of the unix philosophy. That something besides eyes is required to parse the logs is absurd and unacceptable. And no one on desktop is shipping off logs to somewhere else. That's cargo cult behavior.
posix_me_less 6y ago
It isn't right for server either. I want my server logs to be files in filesystem and readable with standard tools.

enriquto 6y ago

> what major reasons are there for not using systemd? ps aux | wc -l

oblio 6y ago
I don't get it.
- posix_me_less 6y ago
  Probably too many useless systemd-related processes.
  - oblio 6y ago
    I imagine that the respective user wouldn't want to see the number of background processes for all the other modern OSes, in this case :-)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Alpine Linux boots with a fairly clean process table.
      - oblio 6y ago
        Of course, this is the internet... Someone is going to point out exceptions. I was talking about Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, all mainstream Linux distros. What you did was like seeing someone talk about family cars and interjecting: yeah, but they're slower than my motorbike. It's not the same thing, is it?
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        You said > all the other modern OSes Alpine is a modern OS; I've been quite happy running on my desktop. I would argue that you're moving the goalposts because I pointed out an example that disagrees with you.

throwaway54095 6y ago

My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control. (Appart from the kernel of course). It is modular, but also dependant as a whole, so in the end, it spreads almost like an invasion, slowly leaving the admins not other option than accepting it. That's quite off from the Unix philosophy (do one thing, do it well, be really modular)... so my conclusion going back to the beggining, that didn't happen by mistake, but is a deliberate design choice, with shaddy political reasons behind it, so I reject it. And then we could talk about the convenience or not of putting such amount of tools and complexity under PID 1, the crazy binary logs, the weird behavior of the service utilities, and the possibility of being able to modify/add services using regular scripts instead of binary excutables...

znpy 6y ago
> My POV: SystemD is a software driven not really by technical, but political reasons by RedHat, to put the most important parts of a GNU/Linux system under their control. it's really a dumb POV to have, given that systemd is FOSS (licensed LGPLv2.1+) like most of the software that red hat produces. as a sysadmin, systemd is a godsend. really, it brings uniformity and waaay better debuggability/predictability and tooling in system startup and configuration and troubleshooting. and, again, systemd is foss so red hat hasn't really that much control over other distros (and each distro had its own internal discussion and choose freely to adopt it). on another side, red hat took the time and spent the money to bring that improvement to the world. other people just complain under the shield of a throwaway hn account.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- necrotic_comp 6y ago
  I think people's beef with it is that it's hard to understand when things go wrong, Lennart's projects don't leave the best initial impression, and it's had significant scope creep since it was initially introduced.

arp242 6y ago

It's fine when it works, but it's very hard to solve problems when they happen as it's so complex, and doing stuff outside of "the standard thing" can be difficult. I once had "systemctl restart unbound" reset my volume, consistently. How do you even start debugging something like that without a deep dive in systemd? This particular issue turned out to be a systemd bug, and that such a bug can exist in the first place didn't exactly increase my confidence in the system. In another case I couldn't get my NFS to work at all, and it turned out that rpcbind.service somehow went missing. Not sure how that happened and it's a simple enough problem, but it was really non-obvious because systemd doesn't issue clear errors on this and the system is so complex it's not easy to spot either.

nialv7 6y ago
> I once had "systemctl restart unbound" reset my volume That's fascinating, do you have more information on this particular bug?
- arp242 6y ago
  Bug report and commit that fixed it: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88401 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88401 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=6e392c9c45643d106673c6643ac8bf4e65da13c1 https://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=6e39...

dsr_ 6y ago

You should know that this is a religious topic like vim vs emacs, but worse: vim and emacs users don't feel that the other side is a threat to allowing them to continue using the software they prefer.

infoseek12 6y ago
Also kind of like religious syncretism, bridging the emac vs vim divide, there is evil mode.