6 ms·

> The more fundamental problem is that the people who most like systemd are distribution managers. (...) a distribution manager doesn’t have to maintain, integr

> The more fundamental problem is that the people who most like systemd are distribution managers. (...) a distribution manager doesn’t have to maintain, integrate, and support a whole bunch of system utilities from different sources – systemd provides everything in one huge build. That’s actually a great lesson in optimizing your product for adoption.

exe34 2y ago
it's also why corporate software is so shit - it's shiny in all the ways it needs to be shiny for management to make the decision, but it's a pain for the actual users. the trick in both cases is to know your customers!
- oblio 2y ago
  Turns out, many people use systemd after what, 15? years of doomsday predictions :-)
  - stepupmakeup 2y ago
    Unfortunately not by choice
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    i don't notice anything good systemd does for me, just where it interferes, and that's a constant annoyance, a few days a week.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      Can you link some upstream issues you raised about the big annoyances?
      - exe34 2y ago
        not many people enjoy bikeshedding.
      - rjzzleep 2y ago
        Random example. They randomly broke suspect-then-hibernate then the community manager gaslit people into trying to make them believe they don’t actually need the feature in the way it’s used and then silently acknowledged that their fix is broken after all. This is a common pattern by the way. But easily the most irritating thing for me is the simple issue that you used to be able to just go to /var/log/lastlog to see what failed during the last boot and that just the other day I had to spend hours figuring what broke in the system that made journalctl not log properly. In the end I had to reinstall all currently installed packages. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zczdnq/systemctl_suspendthenhibernate_not_working_anymore/?rdt=49489 https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zczdnq/systemctl...
        viraptor 2y ago
        So there was a bug and bad interaction and everyone on non-rolling system didn't even notice, because it's been fixed in 2 months? (Nov to Jan) It sucks, but it's been fixed for almost 2 years at this point. For the last boot you can use "journalctl -b -1" as long as you enabled persistent logs. If you ended up reinstalling everything, I don't think we can say whether that was a systemd related issue or not. I was curious what the current daily issues are.
        strken 2y ago
        The linked GitHub issue is one of the most aggravating exchanges I've ever read: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269. I don't understand how you can read someone telling you that they want to suspend and then hibernate after a set duration, but A) not understand why this would be desirable, B) not understand that this is compatible with also hibernating at low battery, and C) not understand your own lack of comprehension.
        wongogue 2y ago
        What the issue author is asking for is also the default behavior of Windows (which is developed by his employer) on laptops.
        amatecha 2y ago
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - shakna 2y ago
        The cgroups changes [0] made my life more difficult for a while. "all the low level bits will go away without replacement". [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/ https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/
    - lambda 2y ago
      The thing is, the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work. They didn't used to "just work" like that before systemd. System boot is faster. I can have fewer things started up in the background, and instead have them start up when needed. Restarting services works consistently. Every application doesn't have its own bespoke and half baked management scripts which don't work half the time. They don't all have to invent their own daemonization support and logging; you just log to the journal. And that's just core systemd. Things like systemd-resolved give me proper support for split-DNS when using VPNs. systemd-networkd gives me consistent, powerful configurable networking setup that works across distros. Is it perfect? No, I do still have some complaints with it. But it's a hell of a lot better than what it's replacing. I wouldn't ever go back to sysvinit or upstart, and many other parts of systemd are compelling alternatives to the things they replace, like systemd-networkd over ifupdown.
      - fsckboy 2y ago
        >the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work sorry, no, at least in any meaningful sense, because init already just worked for me. and when something didn't, I could find how to fix it in a way that was transparent and I understood and could even modify or make better, without being connected to the internet looking for cargo cult incantations on stack overflow init was a tool; systemd is an adversary
        fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
        Yeah, the two systemd components GP mentioned have given me no end of trouble.
        cedilla 2y ago
        Okay, I'll bite. What kind of problems do you have with the part of systemd that replicates sysvinit /every other day/?
        richardfey 2y ago
        My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended, and unexplained/unexplainable changes to the order of boot of some components. For the former I have given up playing whackamole with all the timeouts you need to reconfigure, for the latter I didn't even try because I know that there's something peculiar about my setup that will never work nicely with systemd, there's simply not enough systems configured like that for upstream to care. I have accepted this new reality, but I know that before systemd I was able to fix any highly customised setup of mine, now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    Turns out many people don't care to change their distribution defaults.
    - oblio 2y ago
      Exactly, because I don't care about the plumbing in my house unless it's really bad. Systemd is opinionated and quirky but it does the job just fine for 99.999% of people and it provides a standardized approach to things just by virtue of how it works, and there is a lot of value in that.
      - akira2501 2y ago
        The real question is would anything else also be able to do 99.9999% of the job with less code and better semantics. People seem to think it is.
        oblio 2y ago
        Poettering actually took his idea to completion. A lot of people claim the same, but the proof is in the real life pudding. Don't forget that geeks idealize perfection and especially minimalist perfection.
        akira2501 2y ago
        > Poettering actually took his idea to completion. One of them. The others didn't work out so well. That's a curiosity in and of itself. > A lot of people claim the same, but the proof is in the real life pudding. Those claims are true. Those systems exist. People use them. Every day. I've got tons of business riding on them. Systemd's defaults are simply a non starter for any real production environment. > Don't forget that geeks idealize perfection and especially minimalist perfection. They prefer a system which leaves the options open. Systemd removes them in the name of simplistic cohesion. It's all based on the flawed idea that linux will ever be a popular desktop operating system if you just make it work like windows does. It misses the point on what computing is entirely, but hey, as long as it's "complete" implementation of this flawed vision I guess that's good enough for some people. And yet we're still no where near windows.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    What do you imagine this proves or disproves? How many people eat McDonalds? Or buy in to countless other things that can be trivially demonstrated to be against their own interests. I don't know about anyone else but I never heard the critiques of systemd to be based on any doomsday predictions. Everyone knew it would function, and that it even serves one use case better than before. The critique was only ever that it serves one purpose better at the expense of all others, and is a downgrade in flexibility and functionality from what already existed.
    - cbmuser 2y ago
      > How many people eat McDonalds? If you’re already starting like this it’s obvious that the following text will be non-scientific non-sense. As a reminder: There is no such thing as “healthy food” and “unhealthy food”, there is just healthy and unhealthy nutrition. Still baffles me that people think it would actually be legal to sell actual unhealthy food, i.e. poisonous food. Also, “organic food” is just a marketing scam. If you think your nutrition is better off if you stick to nature, you’ve missed a large part of human history where people starved to death by the thousands every year because they exclusively relied on “organic food”. systemd runs on billions of systems worldwide and everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers understand what a bad approach the crude hack that SysVInit with its collection of shell scripts was.
      - grosswait 2y ago
        And yet, you’ll still find many of us that think systemd is worse, but for different reasons. (I think the food analogy was lost)
      - righthand 2y ago
        It is legal to sell unhealthy food, ie poisonous food. Sugar is a poison, drugs are poisons. You can legally sell escolar a fish that if eaten too much is poisonous. What is poisonous food? You can sell plastic that breaks down into the environment and people are drinking it in water, eating it in fish. Is that legally sold poisonous food?
  - kelnos 2y ago
    I'm not a systemd hater, but I use it mainly only because my distro of choice (Debian) switched to it. If Debian chose something else, I'd be fine with that too. I'm a user out of necessity (or perhaps inertia), not out of choice.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  what a weird comparison...

exe34 2y ago

it's also why corporate software is so shit - it's shiny in all the ways it needs to be shiny for management to make the decision, but it's a pain for the actual users. the trick in both cases is to know your customers!

oblio 2y ago
Turns out, many people use systemd after what, 15? years of doomsday predictions :-)
- stepupmakeup 2y ago
  Unfortunately not by choice
- fsckboy 2y ago
  i don't notice anything good systemd does for me, just where it interferes, and that's a constant annoyance, a few days a week.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Can you link some upstream issues you raised about the big annoyances?
    - exe34 2y ago
      not many people enjoy bikeshedding.
    - rjzzleep 2y ago
      Random example. They randomly broke suspect-then-hibernate then the community manager gaslit people into trying to make them believe they don’t actually need the feature in the way it’s used and then silently acknowledged that their fix is broken after all. This is a common pattern by the way. But easily the most irritating thing for me is the simple issue that you used to be able to just go to /var/log/lastlog to see what failed during the last boot and that just the other day I had to spend hours figuring what broke in the system that made journalctl not log properly. In the end I had to reinstall all currently installed packages. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zczdnq/systemctl_suspendthenhibernate_not_working_anymore/?rdt=49489 https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/zczdnq/systemctl...
      - viraptor 2y ago
        So there was a bug and bad interaction and everyone on non-rolling system didn't even notice, because it's been fixed in 2 months? (Nov to Jan) It sucks, but it's been fixed for almost 2 years at this point. For the last boot you can use "journalctl -b -1" as long as you enabled persistent logs. If you ended up reinstalling everything, I don't think we can say whether that was a systemd related issue or not. I was curious what the current daily issues are.
      - strken 2y ago
        The linked GitHub issue is one of the most aggravating exchanges I've ever read: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269. I don't understand how you can read someone telling you that they want to suspend and then hibernate after a set duration, but A) not understand why this would be desirable, B) not understand that this is compatible with also hibernating at low battery, and C) not understand your own lack of comprehension.
        wongogue 2y ago
        What the issue author is asking for is also the default behavior of Windows (which is developed by his employer) on laptops.
        amatecha 2y ago
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - shakna 2y ago
      The cgroups changes [0] made my life more difficult for a while. "all the low level bits will go away without replacement". [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/ https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/
  - lambda 2y ago
    The thing is, the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work. They didn't used to "just work" like that before systemd. System boot is faster. I can have fewer things started up in the background, and instead have them start up when needed. Restarting services works consistently. Every application doesn't have its own bespoke and half baked management scripts which don't work half the time. They don't all have to invent their own daemonization support and logging; you just log to the journal. And that's just core systemd. Things like systemd-resolved give me proper support for split-DNS when using VPNs. systemd-networkd gives me consistent, powerful configurable networking setup that works across distros. Is it perfect? No, I do still have some complaints with it. But it's a hell of a lot better than what it's replacing. I wouldn't ever go back to sysvinit or upstart, and many other parts of systemd are compelling alternatives to the things they replace, like systemd-networkd over ifupdown.
    - fsckboy 2y ago
      >the good things are the things you don't notice; the things that just work sorry, no, at least in any meaningful sense, because init already just worked for me. and when something didn't, I could find how to fix it in a way that was transparent and I understood and could even modify or make better, without being connected to the internet looking for cargo cult incantations on stack overflow init was a tool; systemd is an adversary
      - fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
        Yeah, the two systemd components GP mentioned have given me no end of trouble.
      - cedilla 2y ago
        Okay, I'll bite. What kind of problems do you have with the part of systemd that replicates sysvinit /every other day/?
        richardfey 2y ago
        My most common issues with systemd are related to those long timeouts when something at boot/shutdown is not working as intended, and unexplained/unexplainable changes to the order of boot of some components. For the former I have given up playing whackamole with all the timeouts you need to reconfigure, for the latter I didn't even try because I know that there's something peculiar about my setup that will never work nicely with systemd, there's simply not enough systems configured like that for upstream to care. I have accepted this new reality, but I know that before systemd I was able to fix any highly customised setup of mine, now I have to avoid that and minimise tinkering/hacking.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Turns out many people don't care to change their distribution defaults.
  - oblio 2y ago
    Exactly, because I don't care about the plumbing in my house unless it's really bad. Systemd is opinionated and quirky but it does the job just fine for 99.999% of people and it provides a standardized approach to things just by virtue of how it works, and there is a lot of value in that.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      The real question is would anything else also be able to do 99.9999% of the job with less code and better semantics. People seem to think it is.
      - oblio 2y ago
        Poettering actually took his idea to completion. A lot of people claim the same, but the proof is in the real life pudding. Don't forget that geeks idealize perfection and especially minimalist perfection.
        akira2501 2y ago
        > Poettering actually took his idea to completion. One of them. The others didn't work out so well. That's a curiosity in and of itself. > A lot of people claim the same, but the proof is in the real life pudding. Those claims are true. Those systems exist. People use them. Every day. I've got tons of business riding on them. Systemd's defaults are simply a non starter for any real production environment. > Don't forget that geeks idealize perfection and especially minimalist perfection. They prefer a system which leaves the options open. Systemd removes them in the name of simplistic cohesion. It's all based on the flawed idea that linux will ever be a popular desktop operating system if you just make it work like windows does. It misses the point on what computing is entirely, but hey, as long as it's "complete" implementation of this flawed vision I guess that's good enough for some people. And yet we're still no where near windows.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  What do you imagine this proves or disproves? How many people eat McDonalds? Or buy in to countless other things that can be trivially demonstrated to be against their own interests. I don't know about anyone else but I never heard the critiques of systemd to be based on any doomsday predictions. Everyone knew it would function, and that it even serves one use case better than before. The critique was only ever that it serves one purpose better at the expense of all others, and is a downgrade in flexibility and functionality from what already existed.
  - cbmuser 2y ago
    > How many people eat McDonalds? If you’re already starting like this it’s obvious that the following text will be non-scientific non-sense. As a reminder: There is no such thing as “healthy food” and “unhealthy food”, there is just healthy and unhealthy nutrition. Still baffles me that people think it would actually be legal to sell actual unhealthy food, i.e. poisonous food. Also, “organic food” is just a marketing scam. If you think your nutrition is better off if you stick to nature, you’ve missed a large part of human history where people starved to death by the thousands every year because they exclusively relied on “organic food”. systemd runs on billions of systems worldwide and everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers understand what a bad approach the crude hack that SysVInit with its collection of shell scripts was.
    - grosswait 2y ago
      And yet, you’ll still find many of us that think systemd is worse, but for different reasons. (I think the food analogy was lost)
    - righthand 2y ago
      It is legal to sell unhealthy food, ie poisonous food. Sugar is a poison, drugs are poisons. You can legally sell escolar a fish that if eaten too much is poisonous. What is poisonous food? You can sell plastic that breaks down into the environment and people are drinking it in water, eating it in fish. Is that legally sold poisonous food?
- kelnos 2y ago
  I'm not a systemd hater, but I use it mainly only because my distro of choice (Debian) switched to it. If Debian chose something else, I'd be fine with that too. I'm a user out of necessity (or perhaps inertia), not out of choice.
perching_aix 2y ago
what a weird comparison...