4 ms·

> Systemd gets a lot of hate but it really solves a lot of problems. From my perspective, it got a lot of hate in its first few years (decade?), not because th

by gwd 1y ago

> Systemd gets a lot of hate but it really solves a lot of problems. From my perspective, it got a lot of hate in its first few years (decade?), not because the project itself was bad -- on the contrary, it succeeded in spite of having loads of other issues, because it was so superior. The problem was the maintainer's attitude of wantonly breaking things that used to work just fine, without offering any suitable fixes. I have an old comment somewhere with a big list. If you never felt the pain of systemd, it's either because you came late to the party, or because your needs always happened to overlap with the core maintainer's needs.

Aldipower 1y ago
Full ack. Systemd broke a lot of things that just worked. Combined with the maintainer's attitude this produced a lot of anti reaction.
gwd 1y ago
Found my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897993
- godelski 1y ago
  Thanks for adding the perspective. I was much more of a casual user at the time so didn't see as much of this side. Just knew Arch always being Arch lol
- Izkata 1y ago
  I got one missing from your list - systemd would kill screen and tmux sessions by design: https://superuser.com/questions/1372963/how-do-i-keep-systemd-from-killing-my-tmux-sessions https://superuser.com/questions/1372963/how-do-i-keep-system... From what I remember that's still the default in the project, but people stopped complaining because the individual distros started overriding the relevant settings.
p_l 1y ago
It didn't win on being superior [1] but because it was either systemd or you don't get to to use GNOME 3.8. On more than one distro it was the reason for switching towards systemd. I will fully admit though that upstart was worse (which is an achievement), but the solution space was not at all settled. [1] systemd project tackles a lot of important problems, but the quality of implementation, experience of using it, working with it, etc are not really good, especially the further you get from simplest cookie cutter services - especially because both systemd handling of defaults is borked, documentation when you hit that maybe makes sense to author, and whoever is the bright soul behind systemctl kindly never make CLIs again (with worst example being probably systemctl show this-service-does-not-exist)
- Sammi 1y ago
  Why did GNOME and basically all the large distros all jump with both feet in on using systemd? Because it was better. It was simply significantly better than all the alternatives. For the vast majority it was a no-brainer upgrade. The holdouts were the one's who had simple needs and were already happy with what they had. The rest of the world jumped on systemd. Because it was better.
  - p_l 1y ago
    GNOME and systemd teams were in many ways joined at the hip, and GNOME unilaterally decided that from 3.6 to 3.8 they would switch certain APIs from one already deployed widely (polkit and related) to one that was documented like north korea is democratic (logind) which also didn't work in isolation from systemd. Trying to run GNOME 3.8 without logind caused significant problems and instabilities, trying to implement the same APIs turned out a futile endeavour though one OpenBSD guy got sufficiently motivated and kept patching GNOME for OpenBSD for years - though too late for the forced switch. The large distros jumping "both feet" on systemd were essentially Fedora/Redhat (where it originated and who was employing major maintainers), and IIRC SuSE. Arch was still seen as something of niche and - crucially - was very neophyte about adopting systemd related ideas for significant amount of time with little regard for stability. The holdouts were not just those who were happy with debian/redhat simplistic run-parts script. They were also those interested in solving the problems in different way. Hell, systemd was pretty late to the party, the major difference was that it had funding behind it

by gwd 1y ago

Aldipower 1y ago

Full ack. Systemd broke a lot of things that just worked. Combined with the maintainer's attitude this produced a lot of anti reaction.

gwd 1y ago

Found my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21897993

godelski 1y ago
Thanks for adding the perspective. I was much more of a casual user at the time so didn't see as much of this side. Just knew Arch always being Arch lol
Izkata 1y ago
I got one missing from your list - systemd would kill screen and tmux sessions by design: https://superuser.com/questions/1372963/how-do-i-keep-systemd-from-killing-my-tmux-sessions https://superuser.com/questions/1372963/how-do-i-keep-system... From what I remember that's still the default in the project, but people stopped complaining because the individual distros started overriding the relevant settings.

p_l 1y ago

It didn't win on being superior [1] but because it was either systemd or you don't get to to use GNOME 3.8. On more than one distro it was the reason for switching towards systemd. I will fully admit though that upstart was worse (which is an achievement), but the solution space was not at all settled. [1] systemd project tackles a lot of important problems, but the quality of implementation, experience of using it, working with it, etc are not really good, especially the further you get from simplest cookie cutter services - especially because both systemd handling of defaults is borked, documentation when you hit that maybe makes sense to author, and whoever is the bright soul behind systemctl kindly never make CLIs again (with worst example being probably systemctl show this-service-does-not-exist)

Sammi 1y ago
Why did GNOME and basically all the large distros all jump with both feet in on using systemd? Because it was better. It was simply significantly better than all the alternatives. For the vast majority it was a no-brainer upgrade. The holdouts were the one's who had simple needs and were already happy with what they had. The rest of the world jumped on systemd. Because it was better.
- p_l 1y ago
  GNOME and systemd teams were in many ways joined at the hip, and GNOME unilaterally decided that from 3.6 to 3.8 they would switch certain APIs from one already deployed widely (polkit and related) to one that was documented like north korea is democratic (logind) which also didn't work in isolation from systemd. Trying to run GNOME 3.8 without logind caused significant problems and instabilities, trying to implement the same APIs turned out a futile endeavour though one OpenBSD guy got sufficiently motivated and kept patching GNOME for OpenBSD for years - though too late for the forced switch. The large distros jumping "both feet" on systemd were essentially Fedora/Redhat (where it originated and who was employing major maintainers), and IIRC SuSE. Arch was still seen as something of niche and - crucially - was very neophyte about adopting systemd related ideas for significant amount of time with little regard for stability. The holdouts were not just those who were happy with debian/redhat simplistic run-parts script. They were also those interested in solving the problems in different way. Hell, systemd was pretty late to the party, the major difference was that it had funding behind it