2 ms·

The systemd "culture war" is just a side-effect of the hegemony server Linux enjoys over desktop Linux. A very small percentage of sysadmins really care about

The systemd "culture war" is just a side-effect of the hegemony server Linux enjoys over desktop Linux. A very small percentage of sysadmins really care about what init system is running on their servers. If you look at who's forking distros and making systemd-free variants, and look at who the vocal anti-systemd users are, they're overwhelmingly desktop-focused users. But this is strange because desktop Linux barely needs an init system at all. The long-running daemons on a desktop Linux system only need be started on startup, if they crash, restarting them is unlikely to leave the system in a workable state anyway. However, because server Linux dominates the Linux ecosystem discourse and distro news, people have an inflated view of how important these components are. So my take-away has been: it's safe to ignore systemd criticism, since it's overwhelmingly coming from hobbyists who have no real use for an init system anyway.

Arch-TK 5y ago
Vehement systemd defence also overwhelmingly comes from hobbyists who have no real use for an init system anyway. In fact, this whole argument is crap, most hatred of sysvinit comes from people who have never used it, is that a reason to discard all criticism of it? Of course not. I have had enormous issues with systemd, not when using it for desktop purposes, but precisely when using it for server applications. As an example, systemd can't handle a service which depends on a specific network interface (or specific bind address) before being brought up and the systemd developers blame the software for not listening to rtnetlink events or not relying on linux specific socket options[0]. This is unacceptable, it makes it incredibly difficult to run systemd on hosts connected to multiple segregated networks without lots of dirty tricks involving firewalls. [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTarget/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTar...
Too 5y ago
One could argue for the opposite also. On server side everybody uses containers anyway and has no use for an init system beyond docker-compose or k8.

Arch-TK 5y ago

Vehement systemd defence also overwhelmingly comes from hobbyists who have no real use for an init system anyway. In fact, this whole argument is crap, most hatred of sysvinit comes from people who have never used it, is that a reason to discard all criticism of it? Of course not. I have had enormous issues with systemd, not when using it for desktop purposes, but precisely when using it for server applications. As an example, systemd can't handle a service which depends on a specific network interface (or specific bind address) before being brought up and the systemd developers blame the software for not listening to rtnetlink events or not relying on linux specific socket options[0]. This is unacceptable, it makes it incredibly difficult to run systemd on hosts connected to multiple segregated networks without lots of dirty tricks involving firewalls. [0]: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTarget/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTar...

Too 5y ago

One could argue for the opposite also. On server side everybody uses containers anyway and has no use for an init system beyond docker-compose or k8.