6 ms·

Systemd is a suite of basic building blocks

37 points by Bluestein 27d ago

jauntywundrkind 27d ago
This is just the homepage. Bah. I was hopeful this might be more! I would genuinely love for some posting on systemd that can actually talk to this. There's posts on using systemd for this or that, which are fine, but it feels like the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally, to express ths vision, where-as the anti-vision (as ever) sells itself, is a magnet that makes common party out of all dissent.
- graemep 27d ago
  The vision is controversial so a lot of advocates find it easier to promote as an init system. It tends to be the anti-systemd people who keep saying its not just an init system.
  - deleted 27d ago
    [deleted]
- McGlockenshire 27d ago
  Yeah this is just a link to the branding page. I do appreciate the discussion of "system 500" at the bottom. But if you yank out the "brand" from the URL you'll get the actual site.
  - jauntywundrkind 27d ago
    Sure. These sites are fine rallying points, absolutely. But they are also very old, and there's very few efforts I've seen to pitch and promote systemd. It's found and enjoyed by a lot of people (particularly those who had to deal with the tangled haphazard sprawl of cobbled together systems from the before times), it makes nicely visible what is happening on the system, integrates cgroups and good least capabilities practices. But it feels to me like there ought be more ongoing and vocal celebration of this, enjoyment of this. More rallying points that trumpet the wins, that page people in to how nicely this helps. I want to see more positive tech advocacy, is what I'm saying. This is a fine site, yes, with lots of discussion. I've enjoyed decades of Lennart blog posts too. But I wish there was more. I wish this submission was a blog post of the same title. A fresh take, a fresh spin, on such a worthy-of-treatment topic.
- mxuribe 27d ago
  @jauntywundrkind I was about reply...but then @McGlockenshire said it best! Cut off the subdomain, and you'll get more info. ;-)
- Bluestein 27d ago
  - https://systemd.io/ https://systemd.io/ is full of documentation.-
  - cyberax 27d ago
    And it's crap. It still lists blog posts from 2012. There is NO good overall diagram of all the moving pieces in systemd.
    - dTal 26d ago
      Well, yes. Why would there be? It's a piece of software designed to turn all distros into Red Hat, and then sell consulting services to manage the untameable complexity. Legibility, composability, these would defeat the purpose.
- wmf 27d ago
  Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.
- nomel 27d ago
  > pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally I'm not aware of this sort of parading in open source software. Do you have a past example? I see it as competent people using things that they want to use, with the "better" being preferred, for whatever reasons (including momentum). "Advocating" for an init system seems like something that should be entirely and completely by merit, with maintainability, debugability, and fragility probably being the top metrics for most systems, speed being important for anything with a human sitting in front of it.
  - jauntywundrkind 27d ago
    Having everyone have to discover the pro/con's of every system themselves, in the dark, with no social media / blogging around it, seems like a very strange position to me. Technology should be highly social. Especially open source! It in unique-for-technology ways gives us something real to be social over. We can share and unfold and unpack. This isn't entirely what you are talking about but Architectures of Open Source is still one of the best "what is this" explorations of the tech world out there. I think good advocacy has a lot of these elements (if not so total) in it. In ways that can show the bigger pictures, which AOSA at it's best does! https://aosabook.org/en/ https://aosabook.org/en/
    - nomel 27d ago
      You're arguing a point I never made. Experience can be shared without the intent to manipulate/persuade towards a common cause, which is the definition of "rally". A blog post/social media about experience of use is NOT a rally, and a rally is NOT required, and in fact makes a post suspect, because that's means the person is probably hiding negative aspects, with their intent to promote, rather than just showing reality.
      - jauntywundrkind 27d ago
        You're taking a slant on the rally, to turn a possible downside into something greviously fatal. That's not intrinsic in what I was talking about. We can have clear identifying gathering points, touchstones, blog posts, etc that call the cause without having to hide and conceal. This argument you are making is extremely uncharitable, and assumes bad motives from the start. This is just a descent into more fervor, saying nothing. Let's skip the stupid lawyerly word picking of zero value contestation. Please. I think the macro subject stands. In neither the old world where everyone was doing their own thing nor the new one where >50% use systemd to run a significant amount of their systems: in neither case was or is there a strong practice of sharing and doing the work of exchange (certainly not without counterexample, yada yada, and I've already provided some in other threads, namely AOSA, but I stand by my assertion here). We can ignore which path is better, and simply say: both paths should do more to create broad discussion, ideally that is constructive, that covers what is working, the big picture outlook, and the negative sides of the world they're living in. I think of that as rallying not to zealotry, but as rallying to understanding, trying to draw people in, so we can see and perceive what are in fact stable, alluring points of the world. So that we can let people know what an option might be. I think the Din and Darkness is winning against those who want to gather and protect the light. The anti forces are everywhere and persistent, the doers are quiet and busy. Civilization would be healthier with more deliberate work to share the light, to show and exchange specifics (as most systemd touching blog posts do) but also broader pictures, wider stances.
- akerl_ 27d ago
  Given that the overwhelming majority of Linux distros have moved to systemd, it's not clear why the pro-systemd camp would need to be finding or making opportunities to rally. They're spending their time build and improving systemd's set of building blocks.
  - jauntywundrkind 27d ago
    The drift, the gap between the advanced guard of seasoned enjoyers and the rest of the world that doesn't know what their missing feels like material that deserves coverage to me? Just stay heads down and keep doing the world, don't share, dont socialize has been the plan so far in a lot of open source. And I think the outcomes would be better if we tried methodologies other than this. Freaking weird that this is just accepted.
- ares623 27d ago
  Do they need to? As an outsider, my view is that they already "won".
  - jauntywundrkind 27d ago
    Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of. If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy. Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Preach all your amazingness. I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. There's little science-y reasons. But there lurk Two Cultures problems everywhere. And figuring out how to bridge the technical to the world, how to sing praises, how to get the world to be interested in relating to, engaging in, giving it the ability to share in some of your wonder and awe: that is what turns Science Victory into a Cultural Victory. And it's what good worthy interesting projects deserve. And it should be an act we do, and help build. We should make appeals to the world, try to get them interested in relating to the upsides, and the downsides to, to give them something worth engaging. I feel like the negative creeps have absolutely slammed their way to Two Cultures wins, to appealing to the world with negativity, and I think some more deliberate, caring, thoughtful work and blogging would make a huge difference in building cultural momentum, in sealing in what ought be a Cultural Victory. That those who know systemd reasonably well largley agree with already, but that many people do not see or understand. (Am I missing other victory types?)
    - dTal 26d ago
      > I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. So.... mDNS works out of the box on any glibc system with libnss-mdns and a running avahi-daemon - not "kind of" works, just Works. cgroups are a kernel feature that is quite straightforward to use without systemd. "Workload isolation" and "least privileges" are vague but seem to me to just be describing cgroups again, or just general permissions. I realize that this was an off the cuff remark, not a blog post in defense of systemd, but you must know that every time a systemd skeptic reads a list like this, full of "features" that work fine without it, the impression is only further reinforced that what systemd really provides is marketing.
- egorfine 27d ago
  > the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally Why would they? Their leader was always "I know better than you, now f off". This kind of approach doesn't need any rallying or evangelism at all.
mxuribe 27d ago
This should be renamed to "Branding about..."...Because that seems to be the focus on this destination webpage...and not content specific to the underlying tech of systemd.
- kyleee 27d ago
  Yes a more accurate headline - systemd would like to be perceived as a suite of basic building blocks
deleted 27d ago
[deleted]
0xbadcafebee 27d ago
"Building blocks" makes it sound like things you can use to build other things. In reality it's more of an octopus, or a fungus.
- 9dev 27d ago
  But that’s precisely what it allows you to do: plug a socket unit into a service unit, connect a timer unit, then another service as a dependency… and that’s just for the init management. Systemd might not fit your personal stylistic preferences, but most of all it’s consistent.
  - Joker_vD 27d ago
    Yeah, like what Upstart did! Why did we switch away from that, again?
    - c-hendricks 27d ago
      Didn't have timers for one, or the same level of support around sockets.
    - the_why_of_y 26d ago
      Because firstly, it had a broken architecture. https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397/comments/21 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397/comments/21 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654/comments/6 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654/comments/6 Secondly, Canonical required copyright assignment for any contribution to Upstart, and Lennart/Kay decided that if they basically have to substantially rewrite it to fix the broken architecture, they better do it in a new project with no copyright assignment barriers. See the comments in this thread by Upstart author and former Canonical employee Scott James Remnant: https://web.archive.org/web/20140928104327/https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq https://web.archive.org/web/20140928104327/https://plus.goog... Had the CLA not been in place, the result of the LF Collab discussions would have almost certainly been contributions of patches from +Kay Sievers and Lennart (after all, we'd all worked together on things like udev, and got along) that would have fixed all those design issues, etc. But the CLA prevented them from doing that (I won't sign the CLA myself, which is one reason I don't contribute since leaving Canonical - so I hold no grudges here), so history happened differently. After our April 2010 meeting, Lennart went away and wrote systemd, which was released in July 2010 if memory serves.
seany 27d ago
We had reasonable building blocks before systemd...
- IshKebab 27d ago
  A bunch of barely working duck-taped Bash scripts? Hardly reasonable.
  - hnlmorg 27d ago
    You’d be surprised just how often systemd calls bash scripts.
  - kjs3 27d ago
    You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.
    - IshKebab 27d ago
      All Bash scripts are duck-taped by definition. It's a shitty duck-tape language. > thousands of servers running just fine Err yeah well you might have noticed these things called "laptops" and "desktops". SysVinit was... fine.. on servers. It worked badly on desktops and not really at all on laptops. I'm pretty sure the post introducing SystemD explained it all in detail if you want to learn something.
      - hnlmorg 26d ago
        Bash doesn’t just stop working because the x86 CPU is inside a different form factor. And actually Linux (and BSD too) did used to run on commodity desktop for local ISPs, newsgroups and so on and so forth. That was part of the reason for their success story: Linux and FreeBSD meant smaller Internet-facing business in the late 90s didn’t have to buy expensive mainframe hardware to run Unix software. The issue with Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, in the pre-systemd days wasn’t the init system. It was the lack of quality drivers. Now I’m not saying that systemd hasn’t brought improvements over sysv. But to say bash worked badly on laptops but fine on servers is just silly. That’s simply not how the technology works at all. And I don’t need to read some promotional piece from Redhat to know this. I’ve been running Linux on desktops and laptops longer than many adults have been alive. So I’ve lived through these massive ecosystem changes and have a first hand account of life before systemd.
badatnames 27d ago
Where "basic" follows a highly nuanced alternate definition, where if you step out of line without realising it, you lose 3 days debugging a complex undocumented interaction between 4 enterprise crapware daemons only to find out the answer is "you're wrong and won't fix" buried in a 6 year old bug report, when all you did was plug in a USB mouse or try to set the default audio output device, or something else. Total and utter propaganda, it's underdeveloped steaming garbage
- ux266478 27d ago
  I think the problem is that it's overdeveloped rather than underdeveloped.
  - badatnames 27d ago
    You know it's underdeveloped because everything is described as "basic" or "simple". There's no such thing in any complex design, yet somehow for all his purported seniority, he keeps pumping out designs using the same description.
  - 9dev 27d ago
    The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management - mostly because in the days of olde, everyone cobbled together their shell script Jenga towers in seclusion.
    - kqgnkqgn 27d ago
      If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions. An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.
      - fragmede 27d ago
        Analogies only go so far. Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous, but my smartphone has gigabytes of both ram and storage and a CPU that runs at gigahertz frequency, but weighs about the same as a dumb phone that does far less. It's not the 1970's anymore. We can be inefficient and stop counting every single little bit where it doesn't count. Yes, where it counts, we still want to be efficient and mean and lean, like in transcoding, but for starting up services on a laptop with gobs of ram and CPU cycles to spare, the added expense of the tracked vehicle to the grocery store is what, an extra 100 milliseconds of loading data from nvme storage to RAM? Yeah, don't port kubernetes to a microcontroller. Focus on the interface you have with it and let the complexity just sit there, being harmless.
tosti 27d ago
I can recommend the book "Savaged by Systemd" It's on AA
- blipvert 27d ago
  > It’s on AA Administrators Anonymous? Is that where the alt.sysadmin.recovery crowd go now?
  - tosti 27d ago
    https://annas-archive.gd/ https://annas-archive.gd/
- cyberpunk 27d ago
  I keep meaning to leave a copy of this around the office somewhere however i suspect it would trigger HR
cyberax 27d ago
Yeah, and these LEGO blocks are strewn around the room by a 3-year-old just waiting for you to step on them. It's the worst thing, there is no organization in systemd. No rhyme or reason to it. The basic core service supervision in systemd is great. And nearly everything else around it is bad as a result: command-line utilities, filesystem mount handling, virtualization integration, network configuration, etc. Just look at systemctl's `--help` if you don't believe me. Why does it have `service-log-level` to set the log level for the target, but not a way to actually _view_ the logs? Or why does it have a top-level `--firmware-setup` flag?
k310 26d ago
> systemd is a suite of basic building blocks So was linux before systemd. Choice is good. https://linuxstans.com/best-linux-distros-without-systemd/ https://linuxstans.com/best-linux-distros-without-systemd/ https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page/ https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page/ https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Linux_distributions_without_systemd/ https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Linux_distributio...

37 points by Bluestein 27d ago

This is just the homepage. Bah. I was hopeful this might be more! I would genuinely love for some posting on systemd that can actually talk to this. There's posts on using systemd for this or that, which are fine, but it feels like the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally, to express ths vision, where-as the anti-vision (as ever) sells itself, is a magnet that makes common party out of all dissent.

graemep 27d ago
The vision is controversial so a lot of advocates find it easier to promote as an init system. It tends to be the anti-systemd people who keep saying its not just an init system.
- deleted 27d ago
  [deleted]
McGlockenshire 27d ago
Yeah this is just a link to the branding page. I do appreciate the discussion of "system 500" at the bottom. But if you yank out the "brand" from the URL you'll get the actual site.
- jauntywundrkind 27d ago
  Sure. These sites are fine rallying points, absolutely. But they are also very old, and there's very few efforts I've seen to pitch and promote systemd. It's found and enjoyed by a lot of people (particularly those who had to deal with the tangled haphazard sprawl of cobbled together systems from the before times), it makes nicely visible what is happening on the system, integrates cgroups and good least capabilities practices. But it feels to me like there ought be more ongoing and vocal celebration of this, enjoyment of this. More rallying points that trumpet the wins, that page people in to how nicely this helps. I want to see more positive tech advocacy, is what I'm saying. This is a fine site, yes, with lots of discussion. I've enjoyed decades of Lennart blog posts too. But I wish there was more. I wish this submission was a blog post of the same title. A fresh take, a fresh spin, on such a worthy-of-treatment topic.
mxuribe 27d ago
@jauntywundrkind I was about reply...but then @McGlockenshire said it best! Cut off the subdomain, and you'll get more info. ;-)
Bluestein 27d ago
- https://systemd.io/ https://systemd.io/ is full of documentation.-
- cyberax 27d ago
  And it's crap. It still lists blog posts from 2012. There is NO good overall diagram of all the moving pieces in systemd.
  - dTal 26d ago
    Well, yes. Why would there be? It's a piece of software designed to turn all distros into Red Hat, and then sell consulting services to manage the untameable complexity. Legibility, composability, these would defeat the purpose.
wmf 27d ago
Every now and then there's a blog post or presentation that combines several systemd features to show how the result is a better overall system. The All Systems Go conference https://all-systems-go.io/ https://all-systems-go.io/ is a good place to learn about systemd.
nomel 27d ago
> pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally I'm not aware of this sort of parading in open source software. Do you have a past example? I see it as competent people using things that they want to use, with the "better" being preferred, for whatever reasons (including momentum). "Advocating" for an init system seems like something that should be entirely and completely by merit, with maintainability, debugability, and fragility probably being the top metrics for most systems, speed being important for anything with a human sitting in front of it.
- jauntywundrkind 27d ago
  Having everyone have to discover the pro/con's of every system themselves, in the dark, with no social media / blogging around it, seems like a very strange position to me. Technology should be highly social. Especially open source! It in unique-for-technology ways gives us something real to be social over. We can share and unfold and unpack. This isn't entirely what you are talking about but Architectures of Open Source is still one of the best "what is this" explorations of the tech world out there. I think good advocacy has a lot of these elements (if not so total) in it. In ways that can show the bigger pictures, which AOSA at it's best does! https://aosabook.org/en/ https://aosabook.org/en/
  - nomel 27d ago
    You're arguing a point I never made. Experience can be shared without the intent to manipulate/persuade towards a common cause, which is the definition of "rally". A blog post/social media about experience of use is NOT a rally, and a rally is NOT required, and in fact makes a post suspect, because that's means the person is probably hiding negative aspects, with their intent to promote, rather than just showing reality.
    - jauntywundrkind 27d ago
      You're taking a slant on the rally, to turn a possible downside into something greviously fatal. That's not intrinsic in what I was talking about. We can have clear identifying gathering points, touchstones, blog posts, etc that call the cause without having to hide and conceal. This argument you are making is extremely uncharitable, and assumes bad motives from the start. This is just a descent into more fervor, saying nothing. Let's skip the stupid lawyerly word picking of zero value contestation. Please. I think the macro subject stands. In neither the old world where everyone was doing their own thing nor the new one where >50% use systemd to run a significant amount of their systems: in neither case was or is there a strong practice of sharing and doing the work of exchange (certainly not without counterexample, yada yada, and I've already provided some in other threads, namely AOSA, but I stand by my assertion here). We can ignore which path is better, and simply say: both paths should do more to create broad discussion, ideally that is constructive, that covers what is working, the big picture outlook, and the negative sides of the world they're living in. I think of that as rallying not to zealotry, but as rallying to understanding, trying to draw people in, so we can see and perceive what are in fact stable, alluring points of the world. So that we can let people know what an option might be. I think the Din and Darkness is winning against those who want to gather and protect the light. The anti forces are everywhere and persistent, the doers are quiet and busy. Civilization would be healthier with more deliberate work to share the light, to show and exchange specifics (as most systemd touching blog posts do) but also broader pictures, wider stances.
akerl_ 27d ago
Given that the overwhelming majority of Linux distros have moved to systemd, it's not clear why the pro-systemd camp would need to be finding or making opportunities to rally. They're spending their time build and improving systemd's set of building blocks.
- jauntywundrkind 27d ago
  The drift, the gap between the advanced guard of seasoned enjoyers and the rest of the world that doesn't know what their missing feels like material that deserves coverage to me? Just stay heads down and keep doing the world, don't share, dont socialize has been the plan so far in a lot of open source. And I think the outcomes would be better if we tried methodologies other than this. Freaking weird that this is just accepted.
ares623 27d ago
Do they need to? As an outsider, my view is that they already "won".
- jauntywundrkind 27d ago
  Is your Civilization victory a Science, Military or Cultural one? I think that depends on how and if the technology is socialized and spoken of. If people feel like it's an oppressor, something they don't understand that has rolled in, and now defacto is (is shipped in every distribution of note): it feels like a Military victory. Over them. It sparks no joy. Appealing to the nerds can be a strong science victory. Preach all your amazingness. I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. There's little science-y reasons. But there lurk Two Cultures problems everywhere. And figuring out how to bridge the technical to the world, how to sing praises, how to get the world to be interested in relating to, engaging in, giving it the ability to share in some of your wonder and awe: that is what turns Science Victory into a Cultural Victory. And it's what good worthy interesting projects deserve. And it should be an act we do, and help build. We should make appeals to the world, try to get them interested in relating to the upsides, and the downsides to, to give them something worth engaging. I feel like the negative creeps have absolutely slammed their way to Two Cultures wins, to appealing to the world with negativity, and I think some more deliberate, caring, thoughtful work and blogging would make a huge difference in building cultural momentum, in sealing in what ought be a Cultural Victory. That those who know systemd reasonably well largley agree with already, but that many people do not see or understand. (Am I missing other victory types?)
  - dTal 26d ago
    > I personally can go on and on and on about how awesome it is that systemd offers workload isolation, least privileges, cgroups for juggling priorities. I love that mdns kind of just works for me, and integrates well with my resolver. So.... mDNS works out of the box on any glibc system with libnss-mdns and a running avahi-daemon - not "kind of" works, just Works. cgroups are a kernel feature that is quite straightforward to use without systemd. "Workload isolation" and "least privileges" are vague but seem to me to just be describing cgroups again, or just general permissions. I realize that this was an off the cuff remark, not a blog post in defense of systemd, but you must know that every time a systemd skeptic reads a list like this, full of "features" that work fine without it, the impression is only further reinforced that what systemd really provides is marketing.
egorfine 27d ago
> the pro-systemd camp doesn't find or make opportunities to rally Why would they? Their leader was always "I know better than you, now f off". This kind of approach doesn't need any rallying or evangelism at all.

mxuribe 27d ago

This should be renamed to "Branding about..."...Because that seems to be the focus on this destination webpage...and not content specific to the underlying tech of systemd.

kyleee 27d ago
Yes a more accurate headline - systemd would like to be perceived as a suite of basic building blocks

deleted 27d ago

[deleted]

0xbadcafebee 27d ago

"Building blocks" makes it sound like things you can use to build other things. In reality it's more of an octopus, or a fungus.

9dev 27d ago
But that’s precisely what it allows you to do: plug a socket unit into a service unit, connect a timer unit, then another service as a dependency… and that’s just for the init management. Systemd might not fit your personal stylistic preferences, but most of all it’s consistent.
- Joker_vD 27d ago
  Yeah, like what Upstart did! Why did we switch away from that, again?
  - c-hendricks 27d ago
    Didn't have timers for one, or the same level of support around sockets.
  - the_why_of_y 26d ago
    Because firstly, it had a broken architecture. https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397/comments/21 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397/comments/21 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654/comments/6 https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654/comments/6 Secondly, Canonical required copyright assignment for any contribution to Upstart, and Lennart/Kay decided that if they basically have to substantially rewrite it to fix the broken architecture, they better do it in a new project with no copyright assignment barriers. See the comments in this thread by Upstart author and former Canonical employee Scott James Remnant: https://web.archive.org/web/20140928104327/https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq https://web.archive.org/web/20140928104327/https://plus.goog... Had the CLA not been in place, the result of the LF Collab discussions would have almost certainly been contributions of patches from +Kay Sievers and Lennart (after all, we'd all worked together on things like udev, and got along) that would have fixed all those design issues, etc. But the CLA prevented them from doing that (I won't sign the CLA myself, which is one reason I don't contribute since leaving Canonical - so I hold no grudges here), so history happened differently. After our April 2010 meeting, Lennart went away and wrote systemd, which was released in July 2010 if memory serves.

seany 27d ago

We had reasonable building blocks before systemd...

IshKebab 27d ago
A bunch of barely working duck-taped Bash scripts? Hardly reasonable.
- hnlmorg 27d ago
  You’d be surprised just how often systemd calls bash scripts.
- kjs3 27d ago
  You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.
  - IshKebab 27d ago
    All Bash scripts are duck-taped by definition. It's a shitty duck-tape language. > thousands of servers running just fine Err yeah well you might have noticed these things called "laptops" and "desktops". SysVinit was... fine.. on servers. It worked badly on desktops and not really at all on laptops. I'm pretty sure the post introducing SystemD explained it all in detail if you want to learn something.
    - hnlmorg 26d ago
      Bash doesn’t just stop working because the x86 CPU is inside a different form factor. And actually Linux (and BSD too) did used to run on commodity desktop for local ISPs, newsgroups and so on and so forth. That was part of the reason for their success story: Linux and FreeBSD meant smaller Internet-facing business in the late 90s didn’t have to buy expensive mainframe hardware to run Unix software. The issue with Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, in the pre-systemd days wasn’t the init system. It was the lack of quality drivers. Now I’m not saying that systemd hasn’t brought improvements over sysv. But to say bash worked badly on laptops but fine on servers is just silly. That’s simply not how the technology works at all. And I don’t need to read some promotional piece from Redhat to know this. I’ve been running Linux on desktops and laptops longer than many adults have been alive. So I’ve lived through these massive ecosystem changes and have a first hand account of life before systemd.

badatnames 27d ago

Where "basic" follows a highly nuanced alternate definition, where if you step out of line without realising it, you lose 3 days debugging a complex undocumented interaction between 4 enterprise crapware daemons only to find out the answer is "you're wrong and won't fix" buried in a 6 year old bug report, when all you did was plug in a USB mouse or try to set the default audio output device, or something else. Total and utter propaganda, it's underdeveloped steaming garbage

ux266478 27d ago
I think the problem is that it's overdeveloped rather than underdeveloped.
- badatnames 27d ago
  You know it's underdeveloped because everything is described as "basic" or "simple". There's no such thing in any complex design, yet somehow for all his purported seniority, he keeps pumping out designs using the same description.
- 9dev 27d ago
  The reason for seeing overcomplexity in systemd components is usually that you never considered the use cases of other people or proper server management - mostly because in the days of olde, everyone cobbled together their shell script Jenga towers in seclusion.
  - kqgnkqgn 27d ago
    If they don't have the problems that other people are having...maybe they don't need that complexity. Different use cases can use different solutions. An Army unit crossing rocky and muddy terrain might want tracked vehicles and tanks. I don't need that in a vehicle I drive 10 minutes to the office in the city.
    - fragmede 27d ago
      Analogies only go so far. Driving an actual tank with a cannon to the grocery store 10 minutes away is ludicrous, but my smartphone has gigabytes of both ram and storage and a CPU that runs at gigahertz frequency, but weighs about the same as a dumb phone that does far less. It's not the 1970's anymore. We can be inefficient and stop counting every single little bit where it doesn't count. Yes, where it counts, we still want to be efficient and mean and lean, like in transcoding, but for starting up services on a laptop with gobs of ram and CPU cycles to spare, the added expense of the tracked vehicle to the grocery store is what, an extra 100 milliseconds of loading data from nvme storage to RAM? Yeah, don't port kubernetes to a microcontroller. Focus on the interface you have with it and let the complexity just sit there, being harmless.

tosti 27d ago

I can recommend the book "Savaged by Systemd" It's on AA

blipvert 27d ago
> It’s on AA Administrators Anonymous? Is that where the alt.sysadmin.recovery crowd go now?
- tosti 27d ago
  https://annas-archive.gd/ https://annas-archive.gd/
cyberpunk 27d ago
I keep meaning to leave a copy of this around the office somewhere however i suspect it would trigger HR

cyberax 27d ago

Yeah, and these LEGO blocks are strewn around the room by a 3-year-old just waiting for you to step on them. It's the worst thing, there is no organization in systemd. No rhyme or reason to it. The basic core service supervision in systemd is great. And nearly everything else around it is bad as a result: command-line utilities, filesystem mount handling, virtualization integration, network configuration, etc. Just look at systemctl's `--help` if you don't believe me. Why does it have `service-log-level` to set the log level for the target, but not a way to actually _view_ the logs? Or why does it have a top-level `--firmware-setup` flag?

k310 26d ago

> systemd is a suite of basic building blocks So was linux before systemd. Choice is good. https://linuxstans.com/best-linux-distros-without-systemd/ https://linuxstans.com/best-linux-distros-without-systemd/ https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page/ https://www.without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page/ https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Linux_distributions_without_systemd/ https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Linux_distributio...