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I don’t understand the obsession with systemd managing everything. I do not want it to manage my logs, NTP, DNS resolution, and I sure as hell don’t want it to

I don’t understand the obsession with systemd managing everything. I do not want it to manage my logs, NTP, DNS resolution, and I sure as hell don’t want it to manage /home.

strawhatguy 1y ago
Yeah big nope on this. Needs to be separate, if it’s useful at all, not systemd “separate”. I don’t run systemd at all, to be safe.
- aryonoco 1y ago
  Stay safe! Meanwhile, I want to be able to mount my home directory on an external drive, and have it shared between systems without UID/GID hell. And, Have an encrypted home directory and boot the system and be able to enter my password with my keyboard which is connected to a thunderbolt dock during boot. Something which has been possible on Mac and windows for a decade or two. Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux. Criticisms of systemd just because “it doesn’t smell like Unix” is all nice and fine, but ignores real quality of life and security features it provides. If you don’t have these usecases, you’re welcome to continue to ignore systemd, but some of us actually want these feature.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    You're comfortable sharing secret keys between systems?
    - bombcar 1y ago
      The keys would definitely be secreted hehehe
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux. It absolutely is not. [Full] disk encryption has been fine for... at least 15 years, probably more. Sharing a home directory requires consistent UID/GID, but that's not hard even fully manually (which is fine if you're just one person).
    - aryonoco 1y ago
      Maybe I wasn’t clear. Yes Linux has had FDE on for a long time, but with traditional FDE using LUKS etc, you cannot use accessories such as a thunderbolt keyboard during the boot process to enter the password to unlock the disk. Which is a problem if you’re like me and want to just connect your Linux laptop to a thunderbolt dock and use the keyboard attached to it. A problem which systemd-homed solves.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
        You could have been a little clearer, but the main communication problem is that I didn't know that was a problem that could exist so it was easy to not follow. After a few minutes of confused web searching, I found https://fedoramagazine.org/thunderbolt-how-to-use-keyboard-during-boot-time/ https://fedoramagazine.org/thunderbolt-how-to-use-keyboard-d... which appears to describe the problem and some solutions (that don't involve homed, not least because this article predates it). AIUI, the problem is that you have to log in so you can approve the keyboard; that might be a pain point with an encrypted root (albeit it looks solvable), but if it works with homed I struggle to believe that it wouldn't work with any other encrypted home setup. Mostly because that part of homed is mostly a thin wrapper of code and convention over existing stuff.
bluGill 1y ago
I want something to manage home though. I shouldn't be unable to access my files just because I'm on a different computer from last time. i'm not sure if that is what it does but I think that is a goal
- strawhatguy 1y ago
  Manage it do what now? Copy files between computers? Like rsync? Or… like iCloud? No on that last one, having Linux require some server seems to defeat the point. Why not a Mac then?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I don't want to think about it, just login and everything is there where and as I left it. I had this in college in the early 1990's with yp and nfs. However setting that up is hard on a dedicated network. Getting it to work with a laptop which might not even be connected to a network (as happened to me last night on amtrak in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      Okay, but systemd can't teleport data. This could let you carry your home directory on a thumbdrive or such, but it's not a synchronization daemon. It kinda sounds like you just want syncthing or the like?
      - bluGill 1y ago
        Roaming home directories are a goal of this project. It can work via home on a usb stick. I'm not sure how/if it works with network shares and usb both - something I want as I have several computers on my desk and lahtops I use for travel.
      - strawhatguy 1y ago
        I remember the systemd folks talking about this thumb drive portability of your homedir . Seems very niche. Is that the only advantage of homed?
quotemstr 1y ago
The free software world needed an API for managing system resources. Poettering came along and provided one. It's not perfect, but it solved problems. The resistance to systemd isn't proposing alternative ways of solving these problems. It's instead insisting these problems remain unfixed. Is it any wonder that the anti-systemd camp has become irrelevant?
- bluGill 1y ago
  i wouldn't mind the api where it must be different but all too often he had not invented here syndrom and reinvented things that worked great already while fixing what was broke. He also suffers from all the world is linux syndrom and so bsd needs to figure out how to solve the problem from scratch (mostly has not)
  - quotemstr 1y ago
    Worked great already? Like 3,000 line shell scripts parsing dependency information out of comments? That's what I mean when I say about insisting problems not be solved.
    - bluGill 1y ago
      That dependency problem needed to be fixed. However many other things go with it - I object to some
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  A lot of the resistance to systemd isn't resistance to the problems being solved, it's resistance to solving the problems with a big ball of interdependent components. As we saw in the xz attack, that's a huge attack surface to consider and the project's general hostility to producing small, focused libraries means that people often depend on it where they shouldn't.
ocdtrekkie 1y ago
If you come from any other platform, the idea of needing to look up which version of which flavor of Linux you have to find what specific commands you need to use to do basic things looks insane. systemd has done leaps and bounds for making Linux platforms look reasonably manageable and standardized.
- inferiorhuman 1y ago
  systemd has done leaps and bounds No it hasn't. For example going from Raspberry Pi OS to stock Debian I have to be mindful of where network manager is used in place of systemd. I have to be mindful of what version systemd is being used. Same hassle as before but now with less POSIX and more binary blobs.
- throw0101d 1y ago
  > If you come from any other platform, the idea of needing to look up which version of which flavor of Linux you have to find what specific commands you need to use to do basic things looks insane. As opposed to jumping between IRIX and AIX and Solaris? See Rosetta Stone for Unix: * https://bhami.com/rosetta.html https://bhami.com/rosetta.html * https://bhami.com/unix-rosetta.pdf https://bhami.com/unix-rosetta.pdf Wasn't one of the points of multiple distributions was to allow experimentation and allowing for different philosophies of doing things? If you're going to homogenize things what's the point of having multiple distributions in the first place? > systemd has done leaps and bounds for making Linux platforms look reasonably manageable and standardized. So I've gone from service foo start/stop (which also works on BSD) to systemctl foo start/stop. Yay! (Of course some distros use "ssh" and others "sshd", or "apache2" versus "httpd".)
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > If you come from any other platform, the idea of needing to look up which version of which flavor of Linux you have to find what specific commands you need to use to do basic things looks insane Right, which is why Windows home edition is managed via GPO and iOS exposes the same APIs as macOS. /s Different operating systems are different, even if they share a kernel.
IAmNotACellist 1y ago
When systemd came out people said you were a conspiracy theorist if you said it would be anything more than an init system. Now in the year of our Lord 2025 we're discussing "systemd-homed" as if that should ever be a real thing.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
I see the appeal. Imagine all the points of failure that are spread out all over the place in classical Unix. Systemd kind of combs these all into one place so there's a single point of failure. Now there's just one of them, so it's DRY.
- throw0101a 1y ago
  > Systemd kind of combs these all into one place so there's a single point of failure. Now there's just one of them, so it's DRY. A single point of failure is… good? (Or is your statement an example of Poe's law?)
- sgarland 1y ago
  I begrudgingly accept systemd for service control, but that’s about it. The other “points of failure” you mention are all incredibly well-tested and battle-hardened.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
I'm proud of my former distant coworker Russ Allbery resigned from Debian over systemd. It was shoved down most distro's throats, often with illiberal force over the objections of wiser elders and more experienced SA's.
Woodi 1y ago
It's easy to understand: RH is IBM which in turn is same business owners as MS and Apple so they preparing to destroy Linux, making it not a Windows or mainframes killer. Positioning... Holds even if systemd started before RH buyout. Works becouse RH is or was main developping force in open source. Ubuntu or SUSE or Debian or EU are just joke in software development. And RH [management] goes rogue... Think: back to pre-POSIX UNIX wars...

I don’t understand the obsession with systemd managing everything. I do not want it to manage my logs, NTP, DNS resolution, and I sure as hell don’t want it to manage /home.

strawhatguy 1y ago

Yeah big nope on this. Needs to be separate, if it’s useful at all, not systemd “separate”. I don’t run systemd at all, to be safe.

aryonoco 1y ago
Stay safe! Meanwhile, I want to be able to mount my home directory on an external drive, and have it shared between systems without UID/GID hell. And, Have an encrypted home directory and boot the system and be able to enter my password with my keyboard which is connected to a thunderbolt dock during boot. Something which has been possible on Mac and windows for a decade or two. Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux. Criticisms of systemd just because “it doesn’t smell like Unix” is all nice and fine, but ignores real quality of life and security features it provides. If you don’t have these usecases, you’re welcome to continue to ignore systemd, but some of us actually want these feature.
- msgodel 1y ago
  You're comfortable sharing secret keys between systems?
  - bombcar 1y ago
    The keys would definitely be secreted hehehe
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > Systemd-homed is the ONLY way to achieve these (and many others) in Linux. It absolutely is not. [Full] disk encryption has been fine for... at least 15 years, probably more. Sharing a home directory requires consistent UID/GID, but that's not hard even fully manually (which is fine if you're just one person).
  - aryonoco 1y ago
    Maybe I wasn’t clear. Yes Linux has had FDE on for a long time, but with traditional FDE using LUKS etc, you cannot use accessories such as a thunderbolt keyboard during the boot process to enter the password to unlock the disk. Which is a problem if you’re like me and want to just connect your Linux laptop to a thunderbolt dock and use the keyboard attached to it. A problem which systemd-homed solves.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      You could have been a little clearer, but the main communication problem is that I didn't know that was a problem that could exist so it was easy to not follow. After a few minutes of confused web searching, I found https://fedoramagazine.org/thunderbolt-how-to-use-keyboard-during-boot-time/ https://fedoramagazine.org/thunderbolt-how-to-use-keyboard-d... which appears to describe the problem and some solutions (that don't involve homed, not least because this article predates it). AIUI, the problem is that you have to log in so you can approve the keyboard; that might be a pain point with an encrypted root (albeit it looks solvable), but if it works with homed I struggle to believe that it wouldn't work with any other encrypted home setup. Mostly because that part of homed is mostly a thin wrapper of code and convention over existing stuff.

bluGill 1y ago

I want something to manage home though. I shouldn't be unable to access my files just because I'm on a different computer from last time. i'm not sure if that is what it does but I think that is a goal

strawhatguy 1y ago
Manage it do what now? Copy files between computers? Like rsync? Or… like iCloud? No on that last one, having Linux require some server seems to defeat the point. Why not a Mac then?
- bluGill 1y ago
  I don't want to think about it, just login and everything is there where and as I left it. I had this in college in the early 1990's with yp and nfs. However setting that up is hard on a dedicated network. Getting it to work with a laptop which might not even be connected to a network (as happened to me last night on amtrak in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    Okay, but systemd can't teleport data. This could let you carry your home directory on a thumbdrive or such, but it's not a synchronization daemon. It kinda sounds like you just want syncthing or the like?
    - bluGill 1y ago
      Roaming home directories are a goal of this project. It can work via home on a usb stick. I'm not sure how/if it works with network shares and usb both - something I want as I have several computers on my desk and lahtops I use for travel.
    - strawhatguy 1y ago
      I remember the systemd folks talking about this thumb drive portability of your homedir . Seems very niche. Is that the only advantage of homed?

quotemstr 1y ago

The free software world needed an API for managing system resources. Poettering came along and provided one. It's not perfect, but it solved problems. The resistance to systemd isn't proposing alternative ways of solving these problems. It's instead insisting these problems remain unfixed. Is it any wonder that the anti-systemd camp has become irrelevant?

bluGill 1y ago
i wouldn't mind the api where it must be different but all too often he had not invented here syndrom and reinvented things that worked great already while fixing what was broke. He also suffers from all the world is linux syndrom and so bsd needs to figure out how to solve the problem from scratch (mostly has not)
- quotemstr 1y ago
  Worked great already? Like 3,000 line shell scripts parsing dependency information out of comments? That's what I mean when I say about insisting problems not be solved.
  - bluGill 1y ago
    That dependency problem needed to be fixed. However many other things go with it - I object to some
AlotOfReading 1y ago
A lot of the resistance to systemd isn't resistance to the problems being solved, it's resistance to solving the problems with a big ball of interdependent components. As we saw in the xz attack, that's a huge attack surface to consider and the project's general hostility to producing small, focused libraries means that people often depend on it where they shouldn't.

ocdtrekkie 1y ago

If you come from any other platform, the idea of needing to look up which version of which flavor of Linux you have to find what specific commands you need to use to do basic things looks insane. systemd has done leaps and bounds for making Linux platforms look reasonably manageable and standardized.

inferiorhuman 1y ago
systemd has done leaps and bounds No it hasn't. For example going from Raspberry Pi OS to stock Debian I have to be mindful of where network manager is used in place of systemd. I have to be mindful of what version systemd is being used. Same hassle as before but now with less POSIX and more binary blobs.
throw0101d 1y ago
> If you come from any other platform, the idea of needing to look up which version of which flavor of Linux you have to find what specific commands you need to use to do basic things looks insane. As opposed to jumping between IRIX and AIX and Solaris? See Rosetta Stone for Unix: * https://bhami.com/rosetta.html https://bhami.com/rosetta.html * https://bhami.com/unix-rosetta.pdf https://bhami.com/unix-rosetta.pdf Wasn't one of the points of multiple distributions was to allow experimentation and allowing for different philosophies of doing things? If you're going to homogenize things what's the point of having multiple distributions in the first place? > systemd has done leaps and bounds for making Linux platforms look reasonably manageable and standardized. So I've gone from service foo start/stop (which also works on BSD) to systemctl foo start/stop. Yay! (Of course some distros use "ssh" and others "sshd", or "apache2" versus "httpd".)
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> If you come from any other platform, the idea of needing to look up which version of which flavor of Linux you have to find what specific commands you need to use to do basic things looks insane Right, which is why Windows home edition is managed via GPO and iOS exposes the same APIs as macOS. /s Different operating systems are different, even if they share a kernel.

IAmNotACellist 1y ago

When systemd came out people said you were a conspiracy theorist if you said it would be anything more than an init system. Now in the year of our Lord 2025 we're discussing "systemd-homed" as if that should ever be a real thing.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

I see the appeal. Imagine all the points of failure that are spread out all over the place in classical Unix. Systemd kind of combs these all into one place so there's a single point of failure. Now there's just one of them, so it's DRY.

throw0101a 1y ago
> Systemd kind of combs these all into one place so there's a single point of failure. Now there's just one of them, so it's DRY. A single point of failure is… good? (Or is your statement an example of Poe's law?)
sgarland 1y ago
I begrudgingly accept systemd for service control, but that’s about it. The other “points of failure” you mention are all incredibly well-tested and battle-hardened.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

I'm proud of my former distant coworker Russ Allbery resigned from Debian over systemd. It was shoved down most distro's throats, often with illiberal force over the objections of wiser elders and more experienced SA's.

Woodi 1y ago

It's easy to understand: RH is IBM which in turn is same business owners as MS and Apple so they preparing to destroy Linux, making it not a Windows or mainframes killer. Positioning... Holds even if systemd started before RH buyout. Works becouse RH is or was main developping force in open source. Ubuntu or SUSE or Debian or EU are just joke in software development. And RH [management] goes rogue... Think: back to pre-POSIX UNIX wars...