8 ms·

As someone who has learned Linux/Unix just the past few months using a systemd based distro, I find it a breeze to use. Great documentation, FOSS, and really ea

by 42jd 5y ago

As someone who has learned Linux/Unix just the past few months using a systemd based distro, I find it a breeze to use. Great documentation, FOSS, and really easy to pick up. I just don’t understand why there is so much dislike thrown around when that energy can be focused elsewhere on truly bad behavior/software. And from my understanding, there are distros out there that don’t use systemd for those who dislike it that much. It’s really perplexing to me as someone newer to the community.

voidfunc 5y ago
Disclaimer: I _still_ like systemd. My only real big pet peeve with Systemd is the documentation is somewhat lacking..., like it's all there in the manual, but its laid out poorly and makes it hard to understand. The interaction between unit files and dependencies is also quite convoluted when you start digging into how things are ordered. There's a ton of unit file options that enable weird conditional behavior. The moment you need to start comprehending the difference between Wants vs. Requires and not hooking into running when multi-user.target is reached (the most common situation) you are in for a world of trial-by-error testing. Systemd is great for starting simple background services on simple desktop and server environments. It becomes a real pain in the ass once you get beyond that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sofixa 5y ago
  > The moment you need to start comprehending the difference between Wants vs. Requires and not hooking into running when multi-user.target is reached (the most common situation) you are in for a world of trial-by-error testing. And the worst is that the tooling to test is very limited ( non-existent). I had a problem with conflicting/circular ndependencies ( my service had to be launched before networking but after dbus, which is just impossible because dbus needs networking itself), which worked 9 times out of 10. It was nearly impossible to debug, i had to use the graph tool that shows you visually how much time each service took to start, and completely by chance i noticed that dbus started after networking, which led me to look into it.
mst 5y ago
I'm an old school unixhead who's nonetheless made his peace with systemd because, honestly, it makes lots of things work way better than most previously available solutions did. Thing is, it also forcibly changed a bunch of things by introducing defaults that were not at all what people expected. They might have been better overall, but it still caused some nasty surprises. Let me try and explain a bit more concretely - An easy example (not a hypothetical one, btw): if you have a physical server with multiple hard drives and one of them doesn't start, old school unix would boot everything it -could- boot anyway. SystemD changed that behaviour to "if a filesystem doesn't come up, and you don't set an option to tell systemd it's ok if that doesn't happen, don't finish booting". Now, imagine you're somebody who has a physical server somewhere that has a big cache disk that you use a cheap drive for because if it fails, well, you've lost some cache space. Now imagine your server used to run a pre-systemd setup, and when you upgraded it to a systemd using version of the same distro you left all your settings as-is because everything seemed to be working fine. Now ... imagine that drive dies during a reboot ... and so the server doesn't finish booting, and so you can't even ssh in to it to figure out what's going on, and the only way to figure it out is to get physically in front of the console. If that server is four hours' drive away, you might not be very impressed. I still, overall, think systemd is pretty nice. But while some of the people annoyed with it are annoyed with it on a purely aesthetic/principle sort of basis, there are definitely some decisions the authors made that caused -very- surprising results for people who had been running servers for years already, and some of the dislike being thrown around is very much understandable.
- 42jd 5y ago
  That's a fantastic explanation, thanks! Yep, I can definitely understand the dislike of software coming with defaults that break commonly understood precedent.
- thefz 5y ago
  > SystemD changed that behaviour to "if a filesystem doesn't come up, and you don't set an option to tell systemd it's ok if that doesn't happen, don't finish booting". I still have to find a way to let it digest sshfs filesystems that may hang at boot without stopping the whole boot process.
lmm 5y ago
If forcibly "updating" my system so that it doesn't boot doesn't count as "truly bad behavior/software", I don't know what does. The difference between systemd and outright ransomware is only a matter of degree (frankly I'd prefer paying a bit of cash to having to learn a new set of config files and admin commands because someone decided they didn't like the old ones). (I don't particularly blame him for the specific non-booting bug, but I do blame him for the arrogance. Everyone makes mistakes, but most people learn from them and develop a bit of humility. Pottering continues to break people's computers every couple of years)
captainmuon 5y ago
Systemd by itself is alright, the problem for me is the larger movement from "Linux is about choice" to tightly integrated, opinionated tools. Examples: - Gnome started to depend on systemd features. Now non-systemd systems become second class citizens. - You used to be able to freely swap out window managers, taskbars, and so on, because everything was working with common standards. In the modern world, everything is integrated in your wayland compositor, and if you want to change the way window decorations look, you will also have to change everything else. Systemd is similar, it wants to take over so many responsibilities (task scheduling, DNS, session management), and if you want to swap out one part it is going to be difficult. - Pulseaudio, NetworkManager, Polkit: Written in the same spirit, in part from the same people. Work great if everything works as expected, if they break it is a nightmare to figure out why. But code depends on them, so they become de facto standard on desktop linux.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Wayland doesn’t mandate anything, it’s a goddamn protocol to put a rectangular window’s content to the screen. It is also freely extendable and has a very sane feature discovery in-built so basically any additional functionality can be created through a simple API (and many such exist already)
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    But can you run a remote application from another machine on your own machine? This is my biggest obstacle with Wayland. Xorg did it perfectly.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Yes you can with proper compression and usual streaming. X is no longer network transparent anyways (everyone uses proper GPU-acceleration with a litany of bitmaps so it’s not as easy as serialize drawing commands)
      - mrlonglong 5y ago

by 42jd 5y ago

voidfunc 5y ago

Disclaimer: I _still_ like systemd. My only real big pet peeve with Systemd is the documentation is somewhat lacking..., like it's all there in the manual, but its laid out poorly and makes it hard to understand. The interaction between unit files and dependencies is also quite convoluted when you start digging into how things are ordered. There's a ton of unit file options that enable weird conditional behavior. The moment you need to start comprehending the difference between Wants vs. Requires and not hooking into running when multi-user.target is reached (the most common situation) you are in for a world of trial-by-error testing. Systemd is great for starting simple background services on simple desktop and server environments. It becomes a real pain in the ass once you get beyond that.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sofixa 5y ago
> The moment you need to start comprehending the difference between Wants vs. Requires and not hooking into running when multi-user.target is reached (the most common situation) you are in for a world of trial-by-error testing. And the worst is that the tooling to test is very limited ( non-existent). I had a problem with conflicting/circular ndependencies ( my service had to be launched before networking but after dbus, which is just impossible because dbus needs networking itself), which worked 9 times out of 10. It was nearly impossible to debug, i had to use the graph tool that shows you visually how much time each service took to start, and completely by chance i noticed that dbus started after networking, which led me to look into it.

mst 5y ago

I'm an old school unixhead who's nonetheless made his peace with systemd because, honestly, it makes lots of things work way better than most previously available solutions did. Thing is, it also forcibly changed a bunch of things by introducing defaults that were not at all what people expected. They might have been better overall, but it still caused some nasty surprises. Let me try and explain a bit more concretely - An easy example (not a hypothetical one, btw): if you have a physical server with multiple hard drives and one of them doesn't start, old school unix would boot everything it -could- boot anyway. SystemD changed that behaviour to "if a filesystem doesn't come up, and you don't set an option to tell systemd it's ok if that doesn't happen, don't finish booting". Now, imagine you're somebody who has a physical server somewhere that has a big cache disk that you use a cheap drive for because if it fails, well, you've lost some cache space. Now imagine your server used to run a pre-systemd setup, and when you upgraded it to a systemd using version of the same distro you left all your settings as-is because everything seemed to be working fine. Now ... imagine that drive dies during a reboot ... and so the server doesn't finish booting, and so you can't even ssh in to it to figure out what's going on, and the only way to figure it out is to get physically in front of the console. If that server is four hours' drive away, you might not be very impressed. I still, overall, think systemd is pretty nice. But while some of the people annoyed with it are annoyed with it on a purely aesthetic/principle sort of basis, there are definitely some decisions the authors made that caused -very- surprising results for people who had been running servers for years already, and some of the dislike being thrown around is very much understandable.

42jd 5y ago
That's a fantastic explanation, thanks! Yep, I can definitely understand the dislike of software coming with defaults that break commonly understood precedent.
thefz 5y ago
> SystemD changed that behaviour to "if a filesystem doesn't come up, and you don't set an option to tell systemd it's ok if that doesn't happen, don't finish booting". I still have to find a way to let it digest sshfs filesystems that may hang at boot without stopping the whole boot process.

lmm 5y ago

If forcibly "updating" my system so that it doesn't boot doesn't count as "truly bad behavior/software", I don't know what does. The difference between systemd and outright ransomware is only a matter of degree (frankly I'd prefer paying a bit of cash to having to learn a new set of config files and admin commands because someone decided they didn't like the old ones). (I don't particularly blame him for the specific non-booting bug, but I do blame him for the arrogance. Everyone makes mistakes, but most people learn from them and develop a bit of humility. Pottering continues to break people's computers every couple of years)

captainmuon 5y ago

Systemd by itself is alright, the problem for me is the larger movement from "Linux is about choice" to tightly integrated, opinionated tools. Examples: - Gnome started to depend on systemd features. Now non-systemd systems become second class citizens. - You used to be able to freely swap out window managers, taskbars, and so on, because everything was working with common standards. In the modern world, everything is integrated in your wayland compositor, and if you want to change the way window decorations look, you will also have to change everything else. Systemd is similar, it wants to take over so many responsibilities (task scheduling, DNS, session management), and if you want to swap out one part it is going to be difficult. - Pulseaudio, NetworkManager, Polkit: Written in the same spirit, in part from the same people. Work great if everything works as expected, if they break it is a nightmare to figure out why. But code depends on them, so they become de facto standard on desktop linux.

kaba0 5y ago
Wayland doesn’t mandate anything, it’s a goddamn protocol to put a rectangular window’s content to the screen. It is also freely extendable and has a very sane feature discovery in-built so basically any additional functionality can be created through a simple API (and many such exist already)
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  But can you run a remote application from another machine on your own machine? This is my biggest obstacle with Wayland. Xorg did it perfectly.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Yes you can with proper compression and usual streaming. X is no longer network transparent anyways (everyone uses proper GPU-acceleration with a litany of bitmaps so it’s not as easy as serialize drawing commands)
    - mrlonglong 5y ago