9 ms·

Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

52 points by fanf2 3y ago

ttfkam 3y ago
It's been fashionable to hate on systemd, but I definitely prefer it to the hodgepodge of inconsistent init scripts, logging hacks, and bespoke process monitors that preceded it. init.d was familiar to graybeards (like myself), but I'm loathe to consider them a superior solution.
- tetris11 3y ago
  I started on initrc but came to maturity on systemd, and though systemd does simplify the process of inspecting running tasks, its sheer lack-of-fun of getting those processes running in the first place always puts me off hacking my system to better suit my whims. It forces you to think of stability instead of creativity, and that might be great for people who value predictable things in their lives, but it stands rigidly in the way of fun.
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    It’s an init system and a process manager. How exactly can it be fun? Technically, I guess it’s interesting to design if you are an expert but as a user, having to use creativity is the last thing I want from low level pieces of my OS. If you want to tinker with OS design, you can always install Minix in a VM.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > It’s an init system and a process manager. How exactly can it be fun? I don't know about fun, but different people find different things fun. I find systemd to be often irritating, and sometimes infuriating. It has not made my life easier at all. Just the opposite. So, in that sense anyway, I'd say systemd is much less fun.
  - rhn_mk1 3y ago
    As someone who had to mess with init scripts for a couple of distros for someone who requested it, this was not far from my idea of pure anti-fun. Every distro did init scripts in different, exciting ways, so I had to start over from reading the not-inconsequential docs for each one. The init systems come with some high-level helpers, but only if you want to use the shell, which is very unfun in its own right.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    For me it was all about ease of access when investigating why something isn't working.
  - striking 3y ago
    Personally, I tend to have more fun when all of the other parts of my system don't need to be fixed while I work on adding new stuff.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  100%. My toes hurt every time Lennart Poettering steps on them, but every time I dig into the "why" it turns out to not only have been a good reason but a couldn't have worked any other way reason. If someone hadn't dragged Linux kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the arbitrary choices made in the definition of a config file format 50 years ago would cripple the ability to deliver basic features 50 years later in a manner that was robust/isolated/performant/etc.
  - johnklos 3y ago
    > good reason I've been looking for these for years: the reasons that might justify the removal of basic functionality and interoperability with other tools. Got any sources?
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Lennart's "Rethinking PID 1" was highly enlightening for me[1]. The LWN discussion on it was also really good[2]. [1]: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html [2]: https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/ https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  > It's been fashionable to hate on systemd, ... From what I can see, the dislike exists for far more practical reasons. In my experience, it has a tendency to break in ways that the numerous other init systems I've used over the decades never did. When it does break, it can easily prevent a computer from booting, which makes that computer pretty much useless until the problem is fixed. I've found that it has often been far more difficult, and takes far more effort, to debug and fix problems with it than with other init systems. Its tendency to become more invasive over time has also opened the door for even more problems involving it, well beyond its role as an init system. Given the large number of bug reports, questions, complaints, and so on about it that I've seen over the years, people don't dislike it just to be "fashionable". They dislike it because it's making their lives unnecessarily painful.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  I've liked it from the beginning (coming from upstart), but I think my one frustration is that you can't run systemd in an unprivileged container— and this is not simply an implementation gap, it's an intentional design choice: https://systemd.io/CONTAINER_INTERFACE/ https://systemd.io/CONTAINER_INTERFACE/ You can argue that a process manager for an unprivileged container should be more like supervisor or systemd user services. However, it would be really convenient to be able to globally install unit files (say, using a deb package), and have them work whether it's bare metal, a VM, or a container.
TekMol 3y ago
I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.
- evronm 3y ago
  Amen! I would happily contribute both time and funds to such an effort.
  - pantalaimon 3y ago
    https://www.devuan.org/ https://www.devuan.org/
- enriquto 3y ago
  > I would love if a major distro emerges Good news for you! You have slackware [0], void [1] and alpine [3], which are widely-used non-systemd distributions with sane scripts. They are well-maintained rolling releases which allow you to use much newer versions of the kernel and packages than your typical ubuntu/debian installs. I don't particularly care about systemd, but these distros are great by themselves! [0] http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ [1] https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/ [2] https://www.alpinelinux.org/ https://www.alpinelinux.org/
  - stryan 3y ago
    Note that only Slackware testing is rolling-release. Normal Slackware is about as far from rolling release as you can get. I do highly recommend it though! Slackware's init scripts were always a pleasure to use, part of why I was anti-systemd for a long time.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Of those, I think only Void is fully rolling release; Slackware, as you note, is very much not rolling, and Alpine has regular releases and you'd have to go to the "edge" version to get rolling releases.
daneel_w 3y ago
Devuan (https://www.devuan.org/ https://www.devuan.org/) is a fork of Debian with the specific aim of removing systemd, as an alternative.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  It is unfortunately trivial to argue that Devuan is without point, as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd. As, indeed, they said they allow for would when they decided to adopt it. If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an entire distribution, rather than putting their effort into the much smaller problem space that is retaining functionality that Debian is quite happy to retain if its proponents are willing to put in the effort. So Debian is going to integrate more with systemd than it would if Devuan didn't exist, and I suppose for that I should thank the folk behind Devuan. But it's always disappointing when people expend their effort against something, rather than for something. Very happy Debian and systemd user here, in case you couldn't tell.
  - daneel_w 3y ago
    >"as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd" There's obviously more to this (and to Devuan) than just uninstalling systemd and installing sysvinit. Devuan's package repo (for which Debian is the upstream) contains a lot of customizations to allow certain packages to function with a sysvinit foundation.
    - andrewaylett 3y ago
      And my understanding is that Debian would be quite happy to have those customisations too -- maybe with a little more upfront effort, as they have to coexist with systemd support. But with less ongoing effort, as the code is at least present to be able to tell if a change will break it. Ultimately though it's entirely up to the developers where they put their effort. If folk prefer to work on a fork, they're entitled to do that. And it is a bit refreshing to see people putting at least some effort into not-systemd, rather than complaining about being "forced" to use it.
blakesterz 3y ago
This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I've never suffered data loss from systemd, but I certainly have encountered loss of functionality. There are a number of things that I just can't accomplish with systemd that I can accomplish without it.
  - lovelyviking 3y ago
    >There are a number of things that I just can't accomplish with systemd that I can accomplish without it. can you name those? I am eager to try them in system with minimum resources.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Sure. My most recent headache is with using a USB wifi dongle. During system startup, I want to attach some remote drives over wifi, so I need to be able to do that after the wifi connection is established. Systemd does not appear to be able to tell when that happens. It thinks the network is established before it actually is, and then the mount calls cause the startup process to pause for 3 minutes for those mount calls to time out before continuing.
      - lovelyviking 3y ago
        Thank you. I wish to add bluetooth dongle and expecting some headaches there. It seems setting up a full bluetooth stack would be challenging to say the least and I wander if systemd would contribute more to the challenge or to the solution.
      - 3y ago
nntwozz 3y ago
I didn't know this was a thing, ignorance truly is bliss.
bilalmaleq 3y ago
The hate towards systemd stems from a fact that it tries to do so many things -- which is clearly against Unix philosophy. Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.
- pengaru 3y ago
  > Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited. You're willfully conflating the systemd project repository with the init system. I use systemd the init system, but in-tree components like resolved and networkd have never run on any of my machines. Surely you can understand that a monorepo with code reuse across myriad components has its advantages, and that systemd the init system can be just a subset of that tree. One can argue the systemd project is simply following in the Linux kernel's footsteps here. It too is a monorepo chock full of all kernel functionality one might ever need, with the expectation that use cases will pick and choose what snowflake suits them best.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > One can argue the systemd project is simply following in the Linux kernel's footsteps here. It too is a monorepo chock full of all kernel functionality one might ever need, with the expectation that use cases will pick and choose what snowflake suits them best. Linux is openly a monolithic kernel that builds everything in one tree. Are you sure that's the analogy you want to pick?
- zokier 3y ago
  Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init. Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init. And most of the other components only work with the init system; systemd is modular, but it's one system. > Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces. Well-defined interfaces that the project specified themselves and that rarely have any other implementations.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
Or you could use https://www.devuan.org/ https://www.devuan.org/ (although Bookworm is still being worked on - https://www.devuan.org/os/releases https://www.devuan.org/os/releases) "Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice." https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom
mrweasel 3y ago
Does Bookworm then ship two init "script" for every single service? A sysv init script and a systemd unit file. That seems like a lot of work, especially the sysv script.
peter_d_sherman 3y ago
Distrowatch's Advanced Search page: https://distrowatch.com/search.php#advanced https://distrowatch.com/search.php#advanced Note that under the "Init Software" section (scroll down on page!), the following two choices (amongst numerous others, perhaps too many!) are included: [ ] systemd [ ] Not systemd In other words, here, the User, regardless of their opinion, regardless of their political ideology (or lack thereof!) -- has a happy choice! They can choose whatever they themselves believe to be the correct choice in the matter! Or they can choose to leave both checkmarks blank -- and let Distrowatch's Advanced Search -- decide for them, and perhaps "surprise" them! :-) You know, like you like Coke, I like Pepsi... You like Windows, I like Linux (or vice versa!)... You might think that it's a floor wax, I might think that it's a dessert topping -- but we could both be right! Ah, choice -- it's a beautiful thing! <g>
- PathfinderBot 3y ago
  Amen. The free software community is great.
egberts1 3y ago
Just this minute, I lost the kernel image after upgrading to Debian 12 Bookworm. Stuck at Lilo. "Not found". Standard Dell Optiplex 790. Time to breakout the Debian Rescue DVD. (sigh)
- egberts1 3y ago
  I am one of those few sysadmin who does not have /boot mounted at runlevel 3.

52 points by fanf2 3y ago

It's been fashionable to hate on systemd, but I definitely prefer it to the hodgepodge of inconsistent init scripts, logging hacks, and bespoke process monitors that preceded it. init.d was familiar to graybeards (like myself), but I'm loathe to consider them a superior solution.

tetris11 3y ago
I started on initrc but came to maturity on systemd, and though systemd does simplify the process of inspecting running tasks, its sheer lack-of-fun of getting those processes running in the first place always puts me off hacking my system to better suit my whims. It forces you to think of stability instead of creativity, and that might be great for people who value predictable things in their lives, but it stands rigidly in the way of fun.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  It’s an init system and a process manager. How exactly can it be fun? Technically, I guess it’s interesting to design if you are an expert but as a user, having to use creativity is the last thing I want from low level pieces of my OS. If you want to tinker with OS design, you can always install Minix in a VM.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > It’s an init system and a process manager. How exactly can it be fun? I don't know about fun, but different people find different things fun. I find systemd to be often irritating, and sometimes infuriating. It has not made my life easier at all. Just the opposite. So, in that sense anyway, I'd say systemd is much less fun.
- rhn_mk1 3y ago
  As someone who had to mess with init scripts for a couple of distros for someone who requested it, this was not far from my idea of pure anti-fun. Every distro did init scripts in different, exciting ways, so I had to start over from reading the not-inconsequential docs for each one. The init systems come with some high-level helpers, but only if you want to use the shell, which is very unfun in its own right.
- Izkata 3y ago
  For me it was all about ease of access when investigating why something isn't working.
- striking 3y ago
  Personally, I tend to have more fun when all of the other parts of my system don't need to be fixed while I work on adding new stuff.
jjoonathan 3y ago
100%. My toes hurt every time Lennart Poettering steps on them, but every time I dig into the "why" it turns out to not only have been a good reason but a couldn't have worked any other way reason. If someone hadn't dragged Linux kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the arbitrary choices made in the definition of a config file format 50 years ago would cripple the ability to deliver basic features 50 years later in a manner that was robust/isolated/performant/etc.
- johnklos 3y ago
  > good reason I've been looking for these for years: the reasons that might justify the removal of basic functionality and interoperability with other tools. Got any sources?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Lennart's "Rethinking PID 1" was highly enlightening for me[1]. The LWN discussion on it was also really good[2]. [1]: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html [2]: https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/ https://lwn.net/Articles/385536/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
VancouverMan 3y ago
> It's been fashionable to hate on systemd, ... From what I can see, the dislike exists for far more practical reasons. In my experience, it has a tendency to break in ways that the numerous other init systems I've used over the decades never did. When it does break, it can easily prevent a computer from booting, which makes that computer pretty much useless until the problem is fixed. I've found that it has often been far more difficult, and takes far more effort, to debug and fix problems with it than with other init systems. Its tendency to become more invasive over time has also opened the door for even more problems involving it, well beyond its role as an init system. Given the large number of bug reports, questions, complaints, and so on about it that I've seen over the years, people don't dislike it just to be "fashionable". They dislike it because it's making their lives unnecessarily painful.
mikepurvis 3y ago
I've liked it from the beginning (coming from upstart), but I think my one frustration is that you can't run systemd in an unprivileged container— and this is not simply an implementation gap, it's an intentional design choice: https://systemd.io/CONTAINER_INTERFACE/ https://systemd.io/CONTAINER_INTERFACE/ You can argue that a process manager for an unprivileged container should be more like supervisor or systemd user services. However, it would be really convenient to be able to globally install unit files (say, using a deb package), and have them work whether it's bare metal, a VM, or a container.

TekMol 3y ago

I hate systemd with a passion, but I won't fiddle with Debian to get rid of it. I would love if a major distro emerges which works with human-readable scripts and logs and stays away from any "binary" formats for system configuration and logging.

evronm 3y ago
Amen! I would happily contribute both time and funds to such an effort.
- pantalaimon 3y ago
  https://www.devuan.org/ https://www.devuan.org/
enriquto 3y ago
> I would love if a major distro emerges Good news for you! You have slackware [0], void [1] and alpine [3], which are widely-used non-systemd distributions with sane scripts. They are well-maintained rolling releases which allow you to use much newer versions of the kernel and packages than your typical ubuntu/debian installs. I don't particularly care about systemd, but these distros are great by themselves! [0] http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ [1] https://voidlinux.org/ https://voidlinux.org/ [2] https://www.alpinelinux.org/ https://www.alpinelinux.org/
- stryan 3y ago
  Note that only Slackware testing is rolling-release. Normal Slackware is about as far from rolling release as you can get. I do highly recommend it though! Slackware's init scripts were always a pleasure to use, part of why I was anti-systemd for a long time.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Of those, I think only Void is fully rolling release; Slackware, as you note, is very much not rolling, and Alpine has regular releases and you'd have to go to the "edge" version to get rolling releases.

daneel_w 3y ago

Devuan (https://www.devuan.org/ https://www.devuan.org/) is a fork of Debian with the specific aim of removing systemd, as an alternative.

andrewaylett 3y ago
It is unfortunately trivial to argue that Devuan is without point, as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd. As, indeed, they said they allow for would when they decided to adopt it. If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an entire distribution, rather than putting their effort into the much smaller problem space that is retaining functionality that Debian is quite happy to retain if its proponents are willing to put in the effort. So Debian is going to integrate more with systemd than it would if Devuan didn't exist, and I suppose for that I should thank the folk behind Devuan. But it's always disappointing when people expend their effort against something, rather than for something. Very happy Debian and systemd user here, in case you couldn't tell.
- daneel_w 3y ago
  >"as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd" There's obviously more to this (and to Devuan) than just uninstalling systemd and installing sysvinit. Devuan's package repo (for which Debian is the upstream) contains a lot of customizations to allow certain packages to function with a sysvinit foundation.
  - andrewaylett 3y ago
    And my understanding is that Debian would be quite happy to have those customisations too -- maybe with a little more upfront effort, as they have to coexist with systemd support. But with less ongoing effort, as the code is at least present to be able to tell if a change will break it. Ultimately though it's entirely up to the developers where they put their effort. If folk prefer to work on a fork, they're entitled to do that. And it is a bit refreshing to see people putting at least some effort into not-systemd, rather than complaining about being "forced" to use it.

blakesterz 3y ago

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

JohnFen 3y ago
I've never suffered data loss from systemd, but I certainly have encountered loss of functionality. There are a number of things that I just can't accomplish with systemd that I can accomplish without it.
- lovelyviking 3y ago
  >There are a number of things that I just can't accomplish with systemd that I can accomplish without it. can you name those? I am eager to try them in system with minimum resources.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Sure. My most recent headache is with using a USB wifi dongle. During system startup, I want to attach some remote drives over wifi, so I need to be able to do that after the wifi connection is established. Systemd does not appear to be able to tell when that happens. It thinks the network is established before it actually is, and then the mount calls cause the startup process to pause for 3 minutes for those mount calls to time out before continuing.
    - lovelyviking 3y ago
      Thank you. I wish to add bluetooth dongle and expecting some headaches there. It seems setting up a full bluetooth stack would be challenging to say the least and I wander if systemd would contribute more to the challenge or to the solution.
    - 3y ago

nntwozz 3y ago

I didn't know this was a thing, ignorance truly is bliss.

bilalmaleq 3y ago

The hate towards systemd stems from a fact that it tries to do so many things -- which is clearly against Unix philosophy. Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.

pengaru 3y ago
> Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited. You're willfully conflating the systemd project repository with the init system. I use systemd the init system, but in-tree components like resolved and networkd have never run on any of my machines. Surely you can understand that a monorepo with code reuse across myriad components has its advantages, and that systemd the init system can be just a subset of that tree. One can argue the systemd project is simply following in the Linux kernel's footsteps here. It too is a monorepo chock full of all kernel functionality one might ever need, with the expectation that use cases will pick and choose what snowflake suits them best.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > One can argue the systemd project is simply following in the Linux kernel's footsteps here. It too is a monorepo chock full of all kernel functionality one might ever need, with the expectation that use cases will pick and choose what snowflake suits them best. Linux is openly a monolithic kernel that builds everything in one tree. Are you sure that's the analogy you want to pick?
zokier 3y ago
Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init. Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init. And most of the other components only work with the init system; systemd is modular, but it's one system. > Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces. Well-defined interfaces that the project specified themselves and that rarely have any other implementations.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

Or you could use https://www.devuan.org/ https://www.devuan.org/ (although Bookworm is still being worked on - https://www.devuan.org/os/releases https://www.devuan.org/os/releases) "Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice." https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom

mrweasel 3y ago

Does Bookworm then ship two init "script" for every single service? A sysv init script and a systemd unit file. That seems like a lot of work, especially the sysv script.

peter_d_sherman 3y ago

Distrowatch's Advanced Search page: https://distrowatch.com/search.php#advanced https://distrowatch.com/search.php#advanced Note that under the "Init Software" section (scroll down on page!), the following two choices (amongst numerous others, perhaps too many!) are included: [ ] systemd [ ] Not systemd In other words, here, the User, regardless of their opinion, regardless of their political ideology (or lack thereof!) -- has a happy choice! They can choose whatever they themselves believe to be the correct choice in the matter! Or they can choose to leave both checkmarks blank -- and let Distrowatch's Advanced Search -- decide for them, and perhaps "surprise" them! :-) You know, like you like Coke, I like Pepsi... You like Windows, I like Linux (or vice versa!)... You might think that it's a floor wax, I might think that it's a dessert topping -- but we could both be right! Ah, choice -- it's a beautiful thing! <g>

PathfinderBot 3y ago
Amen. The free software community is great.

egberts1 3y ago

Just this minute, I lost the kernel image after upgrading to Debian 12 Bookworm. Stuck at Lilo. "Not found". Standard Dell Optiplex 790. Time to breakout the Debian Rescue DVD. (sigh)

egberts1 3y ago
I am one of those few sysadmin who does not have /boot mounted at runlevel 3.