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DistroWatch QA: Distributions not adopting systemd

79 points by mariuz 12y ago

Havvy 12y ago
I use VirtualBox on Windows with a shared folder, and when the virtualbox package breaks for whatever reason, the OS decides that's a good enough reason to fail startup and go into emergency debug mode. I also notice it with the systemctl command line tool, which is actually really pleasant to use. I'm not sure what would happen if this happened with other init packages.
- uaygsfdbzf 12y ago
  Or you could just declare this mount non-automatic in fstab. This is not a bug but the sane reaction to a mount you declared essential not being there. Just continuing and hoping that the mount is not important despite you declaring it so would be horribly naive/insane .
josteink 12y ago
That piece seems a bit ... unbalanced. It starts off with confirming that systemd is indeed the very baddest bad thing there is. And then later on mentions that "but, yeah, I don't actually have any troubles with it" at the very end. I'm sure there are people who have their reasons for avoiding systemd, and for them a list like this is probably great. But for those still on the fence, this reeks of scare-tactics. Let's make on thing clear: Systemd does provide a sufficient amount benefits and I can say that without any particular source of my own. Why? Because pretty much all the distros out there are moving towards systemd and you would be out of your mind to think they are putting in this effort to migrate to systemd if they hadn't done a technical consideration and decided it was a worthwhile thing doing.
- empressplay 12y ago
  "Pretty much all the distros out there" except for: (from TFA) "The PCLinuxOS distribution has not adopted systemd and, so far as I know, has no plans to migrate to the new init software. Slackware Linux, CRUX and Gentoo Linux are all Linux distributions which are unlikely to adopt systemd as their default init system for philosophical reasons." The philosophical reasons being the centralisation of control over a key aspect of Linux to a group of developers that aren't universally trusted?
  - nailer 12y ago
    Red Hat/Fedora, Suse, and Debian are massively popular. Gentoo is fairly large, but the others are niche.
    - bigbugbag 12y ago
      I've used debian for 15 years and I'm looking for a replacement because systemd. The turning point was systemd breaking a fully functional system and forcing it into recovery mode which was simply broken and going in an infinite loop of displaying it was about to offer a recovery terminal which never came. Not having log as text and useless info from systemctl and journalctl instead of the useful info I had in traditional logs played a significant part and the attitude and position of the systemd guys too. This debian forums post sums it all: From my (relatively short) experience with systemd as init I find that systemd (at least as packed in debian) is really far from being ready. Even the slightest unexpected (to systemd) configuration will make it break from all sides, and even the so-called emergency shell is painfully broken. Together with both the upstream and downstream (debian maintainer) attitude ("this is not a bug, fix your configuration so that it matches our expectations, which by the way change every day and we don't tell you about it" -- i.e. the exact opposite of Linus/kernel's attitude "we don't break userspace").
      - baldfat 12y ago
        Arch users made the switch a long time back. When switching to systemd it isn't just install and go. Systemd is mature and reliable and is running on so many servers it isn't even funny. I personally like it and it is much better for me to admin my services on servers.
        josteink 12y ago
        > When switching to systemd it isn't just install and go. This I can definitely agree with. Has debian said anything about replacing sysvinit on existing installs or will they just be using systemd as the default on new ones? The latter would from my point of view be a reasonable compromise and shouldn't alienate anyone.
- bradfa 12y ago
  this reeks of scare-tactics Yes, but avoiding risk is a valid argument for avoiding anything new. Avoidance of risk is why many people like Debian, so hearing that some users and developers of Debian are not in favor of systemd, even if only due to the fact that it's something very new and very different, seems quite reasonable. Systemd does provide a sufficient amount benefits you would be out of your mind to think they are putting in this effort to migrate to systemd if they hadn't done a technical consideration and decided it was a worthwhile thing doing To some people and some workloads, very much yes, systemd is a very good thing. To other people and workloads and system configurations, systemd doesn't help and sometimes even hurts. Really, to each their own. But this really is the whole point of FOSS, there are other init systems besides systemd and other OS than Linux where the use of systemd has not been deemed to be worthwhile. If you feel similarly, use one of those distributions/OS and contribute to it so that it doesn't go away. I'm not a fan of systemd. I run Debian stable. I'm not sure what I will do once Jessie becomes the stable release.
  - chaosesqueteam 12y ago
    The solution is to fork Wheezy off as an alternative to Debian. Debian is now in the enemy camp. The decision making process has been taken over by the systemd people. New authoritarians. Wheezy is the last of the unix like era of the Linux "software stack". All that is needed is to patch security fixes sometimes, and/or run a grsecurity patched kernel. The software in Wheezy does everything desired. It is the ideal. The ideal is being lost. Make sure you keep your source code DVDs. Debian is now an enemy. Fork wheezy. Dump Jessie
- VLM 12y ago
  "That piece seems a bit ... unbalanced." "for them a list like this is probably great" I wouldn't describe the article as great, because it strayed so horribly off topic and the answer is wrong. By analogy it would be like asking a question along the lines of "please inform me generally about the marketplace for 3rd party iphone cases" and then instead of getting a survey of the iphone case marketplace, the response is a half dozen paragraphs about the relative superiority or inferiority of windows phone, and the philosophical implications of blind love of change vs blind avoidance of change, and the politics of blah blah and then at the end finally an answer like "Otterbox cases have a good reputation, and VLM on hacker news claims regardless of device mfgr, if he can put a device in an Otterbox case he puts it in an otterbox case, and (insert list of inferior competitors to Otterbox)" The other aspect I don't like is the answer in small detail is wrong, there is no uncertainty, Ubuntu is just reskinned and 3rd party support of Debian, so obviously "some time" after Debian goes 100% systemd then Ubuntu will go systemd. Its only a matter of time, Debian being Ubuntu's upstream. I guess theoretically the only way for Ubuntu to avoid it would be Ubuntu switching to Gentoo as upstream (guess it could theoretically happen, however unlikely) or avoid the question entirely by going out of business (again afaik not likely).
  - epdtry 12y ago
    >obviously "some time" after Debian goes 100% systemd then Ubuntu will go systemd. Its only a matter of time, Debian being Ubuntu's upstream. Ubuntu has been using their own init daemon, "upstart", since 2006. After Debian announced their plans to switch to systemd, Ubuntu announced that they would follow suit instead of continuing to use upstart.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Well, the Linux community does have a long history of technical decisions that later ended up biting them in the ass. HALd was retired just as it was enthusiastically adopted, as it was widely deemed an "unmaintainable mess", despite its code size being only a fraction of systemd's. There was controversy around devfsd before udev replaced it. Debian's decision to adopt libav might have made sense initially, what with it speeding up development, but it later became a detriment very quickly. The ffmpeg deprecation disclaimer was also a very ignorant move. Finally, at the end of the day, most OEMs ship Windows. I think you're overestimating the distros a fair bit. Wide consensus doesn't always mean quality.
empressplay 12y ago
I'll just leave this here... http://www.networkworld.com/article/2175826/softwareinus-torvalds-suspends-key-linux-developer/software/linus-torvalds-suspends-key-linux-developer.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2175826/softwareinus-tor...
- uulbiy 12y ago
  You should note the date on that article (April 3rd). Kay Sievers rights have been reinstated by Linus. It's also important to note that the issue was with Sievers specifically and not with systemd. As Linus said "[...] you don't fix problems in the code you write [...]".
  - reidrac 12y ago
    But as Kay is a systemd developer, IMHO it is interesting. Read Linus mail: http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html eg, "[...] But I'm not willing to merge something where the maintainer is known to not care about bugs and regressions and then forces people in other projects to fix their project." I can't talk about systemd, but I had to deal with pulseaudio issues as developer of a third party project and it wasn't a pleasant experience. Kay is not involved with PA in any way, but I remember PA developers blaming Ubuntu because of their PA integration. Yes, it is probably me seeing things here as result of my own frustrations, but I wouldn't like to experience a similar situation with systemd.
turnip1979 12y ago
Systemd adds complexity and functionality. The question is, does the price of complexity outweigh the gain in functionality. I got really annoyed at systemd initially but that was because I knew a bit about upstart and init. My systemd knowledge was zero - it is still pretty low. Now that I've seen it in action, it doesn't seem as offending. In time, there will likely be docs on the Internet. I do hope this isn't a harbinger of bad things in Linux. I think the original commenter in the article alluded to the same philosophical point.
- astine 12y ago
  One thing to think about is that my adding complexity in the beginning, you can avoid complexity in long run. Imagine a Unix shell without pipes. That would certainly be simpler in a sense, but the ability for programmers to write simple programs that work together would be severely curtailed. Systemd itself might be more complex than initv, but it provides a lot of tools and guarantees to application developers which makes life simpler for them in the long run.
timtadh 12y ago
To add some balance, I found this article "The Biggest Myths" (http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html) to be really helpful in sorting out what is going on with systemd. I was a bit sad that Upstart did not win on the Ubuntu side because I had already invested in learning the technology and I quite like it versus SysV init scripts.
- bigbugbag 12y ago
  This article would need another one to balance it.
- embolalia 12y ago
  > I quite like [Upstart] versus SysV init scripts. Have you tried systemd service files yet? They're quite nice to work with. I haven't written Upstart's equivalent, so I only know what those are like second-hand, but I imagine if ease of creating a service is a major factor you'll be pleasantly surprised by systemd.
  - timtadh 12y ago
    Not yet. I am waiting till I actually need to use it. Right now I administer Ubuntu servers at work so I am still on upstart and at home I am on a combination of (Free|Open)BSD and Ubuntu.
DCKing 12y ago
I've seen this discussion come by many times, and every time I had to get my eyebrows back from the back of my head when reading the responses. I get what the technical differences are between systemd and alternative solutions. That is not the problem. What I don't get is how the init system of anything can evoke such emotions. It all goes way beyond expressing preference. The flamewars and vitriol that have been spread are disgraceful, and people are seriously considering switching to different operating systems because of whatever package runs their daemons and their startup scripts. It's embarrassing. As a frequent user of Linux, it completely mystifies me how changes in this can cause such emotions. I mean, I'm the kind of guy who did not prefer Fedora for such details as font rendering and certain package policies, so I'm not insensitive to distro differences in general. But I guess I'm ignorant about why so many people seem to cherish such very strong opinions about an init system. What is it about init systems that causes this outrage? I really want to know!
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > What is it about init systems that causes this outrage? I really want to know! There are some technical concerns, but a disproportionate amount of criticism is because the lead developer[0] of systemd also developed PulseAudio, which was adopted by distros too early and therefore caused a lot of problems for people. People remember PulseAudio without much fondness, so they are bitter and take it out on systemd. It doesn't help that he has a somewhat direct manner of communicating, which some people find off-putting. So, to answer your question, a lot of it is personal, not technical. That's why you see much more vitriol than you'd otherwise expect for a somewhat technically controversial, low-level piece of software. [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Not as much as you'd think, actually. A large part of concerns are technical, sometimes abstract though still quite valid (Rob Landley's take on it was good). That said, Poettering's character is so distinctive that it's nearly impossible not to do a little jab against him.
keithpeter 12y ago
Of course systemd works, and works well, it is in RHEL7 and the clones (the 'EL' world), it has to work! And be maintained for 10 years. That 10 year support horizon rolls forwards each release. At the philosophical level, does anyone not have mild concerns about the binding together of large parts of the underlying systems and the general loss of modularity? At the coal face do any sysadmins really value the new logging and monitoring tools? One metric might be the speed adoption of EL7 by those currently using EL6 and EL5. A high speed of adoption means general happiness (or just need for newer packages). A low speed of adoption means unhappiness (or just no pressing need to upgrade).
- suprjami 12y ago
  Adoption by large enterprise customers follows different patterns than you seem to expect. Right now (7.0) an "early adopter" will be planning certification with a probable production rollout for 7.2. I expect there will be another rise in usage with 7.4.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Great, so we have a profile to measure expected take up against what actually happens. I didn't mean to suggest that the EL market would upgrade overnight, I was thinking of a profile spread over time and reflecting corporate schedules.
- Sanddancer 12y ago
  The logging and monitoring tools are /worse/ than in a BSD or SysV init situation. Journald, as opposed to rsyslog and syslog-ng, can't talk to other systems in anywhere near a sane manner, can't connect to databases, has no ability to filter and direct messages, etc. On top of that, it makes core dumps require root privileges to analyze them, making user level development and debugging more difficult. Systemd has a heavy, heavy stink of someone from the desktop realm coming in with no knowledge of what tools sysadmins already use, and screwing everything up in the process.
  - kiyoto 12y ago
dsr_ 12y ago
Let's suppose that you don't want to use systemd, but you do want to use Debian. No, let's back up a step. Let's say you don't want to use GNOME3, but you do want to use Debian as a desktop system. In that case, you would simply install KDE or XFCE or LXDE, or just have a display manager of your choice start the window manager of your choice. There are lots of choices and Debian considers them all first-class citizens. Nobody gets upset when you say "I don't like running KDE, what are the alternatives?" If you say "It looks like xterm has a new dependency on gtklib, what's up with that?" your bug report will be addressed. But if you say "I don't want to run systemd, it seems to have been installed by mistake" what you get is: systemd is the future, you should run it. why are you so rude? systemd is the default init. Get used to it. it's not that there are lots of people who object to systemd, it's all the same people being loud and repetitive. and it's all settled now, so any attempt to object is a flame. And that's why systemd is causing such a ruckus in the Debian community: they don't play well with others.
- icebraining 12y ago
  What if I wanted to use Debian but with yum/rpm instead of apt/dpkg? I don't care for systemd (I've never even used it), but it doesn't shock me that some components are just core to the distro.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Init systems and process managers are meant to be generic, even systemd has that as a goal. The biggest problem is always converting your scripts to a new scheme, unless a compatibility layer exists. On the other hand, package managers are far more opinionated. Each distro has their own particular package format, guidelines and development practices that are made to form a coherent as possible experience. File system layout is important here, among many other things. However, you certainly can. apt-get install yum is a thing. I'm not sure how reliable it is, though.
  - dsr_ 12y ago
    That would be asking for a new feature, not asking for the preservation of existing functionality. Even so, the answer is that yum and apt have already been packaged for Debian, so can install those, install alien, and then convert deb packages to rpm packages, build a repo, and work from that. Ask around, maybe other people are interested in doing that too.
thwarted 12y ago
This closes with the line The only time I interact with systemd is when I'm running it on a server, something the majority of people don't do. And there's the crux of the issue, from my perspective. I'm sure this year will be The Year of the Linux Desktop™ (are we still saying that?) but the fact is that there are way more Linux machines in a server role than in a desktop role and the people who run those machines are doing so because they are in the critical financial path of a company. This is a change that doesn't directly cater to the people who are running servers (despite the message that systemd has features that are valuable on servers). Relatively few people are running Linux at home compared to the number of server installations. So while more individual people may be impacted by systemd, it's designed and targeted for the desktop which has a lot fewer actual installs. I've had to interact with systemd on my desktop system rarely (but enough that it's frustrating for things that should be easy and obvious and just work) so what's on the desktop doesn't impact me that much. But I run way more server installations where things like boot-time and NetworkManager and multi-seat (I question how many people actually need this on the desktop anyway) and name-systemd-feature-of-week doesn't offer much advantage over the old system which seemed to be working fine, was mature, and everyone was sufficiently familiar with it (not to say it doesn't have warts, as everything does).
chaosesqueteam 12y ago
It's over. Linus is fine with systemd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIPPKReeGg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIPPKReeGg 1:11:00 A fork of linux is needed, both userspace and kernel.
- techdragon 12y ago
  We have this thing you may be interested... its called BSD ... in fact we have several of them, any one of which may be exactly to your tastes. If your not sure, check out PCBSD. I like using FreeBSD and Solaris, and all sorts of other OSes. SystemD makes it harder to do. For every system service, now were maintaining a systemd and a non systemd version of its init files.

79 points by mariuz 12y ago

Havvy 12y ago

I use VirtualBox on Windows with a shared folder, and when the virtualbox package breaks for whatever reason, the OS decides that's a good enough reason to fail startup and go into emergency debug mode. I also notice it with the systemctl command line tool, which is actually really pleasant to use. I'm not sure what would happen if this happened with other init packages.

uaygsfdbzf 12y ago
Or you could just declare this mount non-automatic in fstab. This is not a bug but the sane reaction to a mount you declared essential not being there. Just continuing and hoping that the mount is not important despite you declaring it so would be horribly naive/insane .

josteink 12y ago

That piece seems a bit ... unbalanced. It starts off with confirming that systemd is indeed the very baddest bad thing there is. And then later on mentions that "but, yeah, I don't actually have any troubles with it" at the very end. I'm sure there are people who have their reasons for avoiding systemd, and for them a list like this is probably great. But for those still on the fence, this reeks of scare-tactics. Let's make on thing clear: Systemd does provide a sufficient amount benefits and I can say that without any particular source of my own. Why? Because pretty much all the distros out there are moving towards systemd and you would be out of your mind to think they are putting in this effort to migrate to systemd if they hadn't done a technical consideration and decided it was a worthwhile thing doing.

empressplay 12y ago
"Pretty much all the distros out there" except for: (from TFA) "The PCLinuxOS distribution has not adopted systemd and, so far as I know, has no plans to migrate to the new init software. Slackware Linux, CRUX and Gentoo Linux are all Linux distributions which are unlikely to adopt systemd as their default init system for philosophical reasons." The philosophical reasons being the centralisation of control over a key aspect of Linux to a group of developers that aren't universally trusted?
- nailer 12y ago
  Red Hat/Fedora, Suse, and Debian are massively popular. Gentoo is fairly large, but the others are niche.
  - bigbugbag 12y ago
    I've used debian for 15 years and I'm looking for a replacement because systemd. The turning point was systemd breaking a fully functional system and forcing it into recovery mode which was simply broken and going in an infinite loop of displaying it was about to offer a recovery terminal which never came. Not having log as text and useless info from systemctl and journalctl instead of the useful info I had in traditional logs played a significant part and the attitude and position of the systemd guys too. This debian forums post sums it all: From my (relatively short) experience with systemd as init I find that systemd (at least as packed in debian) is really far from being ready. Even the slightest unexpected (to systemd) configuration will make it break from all sides, and even the so-called emergency shell is painfully broken. Together with both the upstream and downstream (debian maintainer) attitude ("this is not a bug, fix your configuration so that it matches our expectations, which by the way change every day and we don't tell you about it" -- i.e. the exact opposite of Linus/kernel's attitude "we don't break userspace").
    - baldfat 12y ago
      Arch users made the switch a long time back. When switching to systemd it isn't just install and go. Systemd is mature and reliable and is running on so many servers it isn't even funny. I personally like it and it is much better for me to admin my services on servers.
      - josteink 12y ago
        > When switching to systemd it isn't just install and go. This I can definitely agree with. Has debian said anything about replacing sysvinit on existing installs or will they just be using systemd as the default on new ones? The latter would from my point of view be a reasonable compromise and shouldn't alienate anyone.
bradfa 12y ago
this reeks of scare-tactics Yes, but avoiding risk is a valid argument for avoiding anything new. Avoidance of risk is why many people like Debian, so hearing that some users and developers of Debian are not in favor of systemd, even if only due to the fact that it's something very new and very different, seems quite reasonable. Systemd does provide a sufficient amount benefits you would be out of your mind to think they are putting in this effort to migrate to systemd if they hadn't done a technical consideration and decided it was a worthwhile thing doing To some people and some workloads, very much yes, systemd is a very good thing. To other people and workloads and system configurations, systemd doesn't help and sometimes even hurts. Really, to each their own. But this really is the whole point of FOSS, there are other init systems besides systemd and other OS than Linux where the use of systemd has not been deemed to be worthwhile. If you feel similarly, use one of those distributions/OS and contribute to it so that it doesn't go away. I'm not a fan of systemd. I run Debian stable. I'm not sure what I will do once Jessie becomes the stable release.
- chaosesqueteam 12y ago
  The solution is to fork Wheezy off as an alternative to Debian. Debian is now in the enemy camp. The decision making process has been taken over by the systemd people. New authoritarians. Wheezy is the last of the unix like era of the Linux "software stack". All that is needed is to patch security fixes sometimes, and/or run a grsecurity patched kernel. The software in Wheezy does everything desired. It is the ideal. The ideal is being lost. Make sure you keep your source code DVDs. Debian is now an enemy. Fork wheezy. Dump Jessie
VLM 12y ago
"That piece seems a bit ... unbalanced." "for them a list like this is probably great" I wouldn't describe the article as great, because it strayed so horribly off topic and the answer is wrong. By analogy it would be like asking a question along the lines of "please inform me generally about the marketplace for 3rd party iphone cases" and then instead of getting a survey of the iphone case marketplace, the response is a half dozen paragraphs about the relative superiority or inferiority of windows phone, and the philosophical implications of blind love of change vs blind avoidance of change, and the politics of blah blah and then at the end finally an answer like "Otterbox cases have a good reputation, and VLM on hacker news claims regardless of device mfgr, if he can put a device in an Otterbox case he puts it in an otterbox case, and (insert list of inferior competitors to Otterbox)" The other aspect I don't like is the answer in small detail is wrong, there is no uncertainty, Ubuntu is just reskinned and 3rd party support of Debian, so obviously "some time" after Debian goes 100% systemd then Ubuntu will go systemd. Its only a matter of time, Debian being Ubuntu's upstream. I guess theoretically the only way for Ubuntu to avoid it would be Ubuntu switching to Gentoo as upstream (guess it could theoretically happen, however unlikely) or avoid the question entirely by going out of business (again afaik not likely).
- epdtry 12y ago
  >obviously "some time" after Debian goes 100% systemd then Ubuntu will go systemd. Its only a matter of time, Debian being Ubuntu's upstream. Ubuntu has been using their own init daemon, "upstart", since 2006. After Debian announced their plans to switch to systemd, Ubuntu announced that they would follow suit instead of continuing to use upstart.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Well, the Linux community does have a long history of technical decisions that later ended up biting them in the ass. HALd was retired just as it was enthusiastically adopted, as it was widely deemed an "unmaintainable mess", despite its code size being only a fraction of systemd's. There was controversy around devfsd before udev replaced it. Debian's decision to adopt libav might have made sense initially, what with it speeding up development, but it later became a detriment very quickly. The ffmpeg deprecation disclaimer was also a very ignorant move. Finally, at the end of the day, most OEMs ship Windows. I think you're overestimating the distros a fair bit. Wide consensus doesn't always mean quality.

empressplay 12y ago

I'll just leave this here... http://www.networkworld.com/article/2175826/softwareinus-torvalds-suspends-key-linux-developer/software/linus-torvalds-suspends-key-linux-developer.html http://www.networkworld.com/article/2175826/softwareinus-tor...

uulbiy 12y ago
You should note the date on that article (April 3rd). Kay Sievers rights have been reinstated by Linus. It's also important to note that the issue was with Sievers specifically and not with systemd. As Linus said "[...] you don't fix problems in the code you write [...]".
- reidrac 12y ago
  But as Kay is a systemd developer, IMHO it is interesting. Read Linus mail: http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html http://lkml.iu.edu//hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html eg, "[...] But I'm not willing to merge something where the maintainer is known to not care about bugs and regressions and then forces people in other projects to fix their project." I can't talk about systemd, but I had to deal with pulseaudio issues as developer of a third party project and it wasn't a pleasant experience. Kay is not involved with PA in any way, but I remember PA developers blaming Ubuntu because of their PA integration. Yes, it is probably me seeing things here as result of my own frustrations, but I wouldn't like to experience a similar situation with systemd.

turnip1979 12y ago

Systemd adds complexity and functionality. The question is, does the price of complexity outweigh the gain in functionality. I got really annoyed at systemd initially but that was because I knew a bit about upstart and init. My systemd knowledge was zero - it is still pretty low. Now that I've seen it in action, it doesn't seem as offending. In time, there will likely be docs on the Internet. I do hope this isn't a harbinger of bad things in Linux. I think the original commenter in the article alluded to the same philosophical point.

astine 12y ago
One thing to think about is that my adding complexity in the beginning, you can avoid complexity in long run. Imagine a Unix shell without pipes. That would certainly be simpler in a sense, but the ability for programmers to write simple programs that work together would be severely curtailed. Systemd itself might be more complex than initv, but it provides a lot of tools and guarantees to application developers which makes life simpler for them in the long run.

timtadh 12y ago

To add some balance, I found this article "The Biggest Myths" (http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html) to be really helpful in sorting out what is going on with systemd. I was a bit sad that Upstart did not win on the Ubuntu side because I had already invested in learning the technology and I quite like it versus SysV init scripts.

bigbugbag 12y ago
This article would need another one to balance it.
embolalia 12y ago
> I quite like [Upstart] versus SysV init scripts. Have you tried systemd service files yet? They're quite nice to work with. I haven't written Upstart's equivalent, so I only know what those are like second-hand, but I imagine if ease of creating a service is a major factor you'll be pleasantly surprised by systemd.
- timtadh 12y ago
  Not yet. I am waiting till I actually need to use it. Right now I administer Ubuntu servers at work so I am still on upstart and at home I am on a combination of (Free|Open)BSD and Ubuntu.

DCKing 12y ago

I've seen this discussion come by many times, and every time I had to get my eyebrows back from the back of my head when reading the responses. I get what the technical differences are between systemd and alternative solutions. That is not the problem. What I don't get is how the init system of anything can evoke such emotions. It all goes way beyond expressing preference. The flamewars and vitriol that have been spread are disgraceful, and people are seriously considering switching to different operating systems because of whatever package runs their daemons and their startup scripts. It's embarrassing. As a frequent user of Linux, it completely mystifies me how changes in this can cause such emotions. I mean, I'm the kind of guy who did not prefer Fedora for such details as font rendering and certain package policies, so I'm not insensitive to distro differences in general. But I guess I'm ignorant about why so many people seem to cherish such very strong opinions about an init system. What is it about init systems that causes this outrage? I really want to know!

chimeracoder 12y ago
> What is it about init systems that causes this outrage? I really want to know! There are some technical concerns, but a disproportionate amount of criticism is because the lead developer[0] of systemd also developed PulseAudio, which was adopted by distros too early and therefore caused a lot of problems for people. People remember PulseAudio without much fondness, so they are bitter and take it out on systemd. It doesn't help that he has a somewhat direct manner of communicating, which some people find off-putting. So, to answer your question, a lot of it is personal, not technical. That's why you see much more vitriol than you'd otherwise expect for a somewhat technically controversial, low-level piece of software. [0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Not as much as you'd think, actually. A large part of concerns are technical, sometimes abstract though still quite valid (Rob Landley's take on it was good). That said, Poettering's character is so distinctive that it's nearly impossible not to do a little jab against him.

keithpeter 12y ago

Of course systemd works, and works well, it is in RHEL7 and the clones (the 'EL' world), it has to work! And be maintained for 10 years. That 10 year support horizon rolls forwards each release. At the philosophical level, does anyone not have mild concerns about the binding together of large parts of the underlying systems and the general loss of modularity? At the coal face do any sysadmins really value the new logging and monitoring tools? One metric might be the speed adoption of EL7 by those currently using EL6 and EL5. A high speed of adoption means general happiness (or just need for newer packages). A low speed of adoption means unhappiness (or just no pressing need to upgrade).

suprjami 12y ago
Adoption by large enterprise customers follows different patterns than you seem to expect. Right now (7.0) an "early adopter" will be planning certification with a probable production rollout for 7.2. I expect there will be another rise in usage with 7.4.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Great, so we have a profile to measure expected take up against what actually happens. I didn't mean to suggest that the EL market would upgrade overnight, I was thinking of a profile spread over time and reflecting corporate schedules.
Sanddancer 12y ago
The logging and monitoring tools are /worse/ than in a BSD or SysV init situation. Journald, as opposed to rsyslog and syslog-ng, can't talk to other systems in anywhere near a sane manner, can't connect to databases, has no ability to filter and direct messages, etc. On top of that, it makes core dumps require root privileges to analyze them, making user level development and debugging more difficult. Systemd has a heavy, heavy stink of someone from the desktop realm coming in with no knowledge of what tools sysadmins already use, and screwing everything up in the process.
- kiyoto 12y ago

dsr_ 12y ago

Let's suppose that you don't want to use systemd, but you do want to use Debian. No, let's back up a step. Let's say you don't want to use GNOME3, but you do want to use Debian as a desktop system. In that case, you would simply install KDE or XFCE or LXDE, or just have a display manager of your choice start the window manager of your choice. There are lots of choices and Debian considers them all first-class citizens. Nobody gets upset when you say "I don't like running KDE, what are the alternatives?" If you say "It looks like xterm has a new dependency on gtklib, what's up with that?" your bug report will be addressed. But if you say "I don't want to run systemd, it seems to have been installed by mistake" what you get is: systemd is the future, you should run it. why are you so rude? systemd is the default init. Get used to it. it's not that there are lots of people who object to systemd, it's all the same people being loud and repetitive. and it's all settled now, so any attempt to object is a flame. And that's why systemd is causing such a ruckus in the Debian community: they don't play well with others.

icebraining 12y ago
What if I wanted to use Debian but with yum/rpm instead of apt/dpkg? I don't care for systemd (I've never even used it), but it doesn't shock me that some components are just core to the distro.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Init systems and process managers are meant to be generic, even systemd has that as a goal. The biggest problem is always converting your scripts to a new scheme, unless a compatibility layer exists. On the other hand, package managers are far more opinionated. Each distro has their own particular package format, guidelines and development practices that are made to form a coherent as possible experience. File system layout is important here, among many other things. However, you certainly can. apt-get install yum is a thing. I'm not sure how reliable it is, though.
- dsr_ 12y ago
  That would be asking for a new feature, not asking for the preservation of existing functionality. Even so, the answer is that yum and apt have already been packaged for Debian, so can install those, install alien, and then convert deb packages to rpm packages, build a repo, and work from that. Ask around, maybe other people are interested in doing that too.

thwarted 12y ago

This closes with the line The only time I interact with systemd is when I'm running it on a server, something the majority of people don't do. And there's the crux of the issue, from my perspective. I'm sure this year will be The Year of the Linux Desktop™ (are we still saying that?) but the fact is that there are way more Linux machines in a server role than in a desktop role and the people who run those machines are doing so because they are in the critical financial path of a company. This is a change that doesn't directly cater to the people who are running servers (despite the message that systemd has features that are valuable on servers). Relatively few people are running Linux at home compared to the number of server installations. So while more individual people may be impacted by systemd, it's designed and targeted for the desktop which has a lot fewer actual installs. I've had to interact with systemd on my desktop system rarely (but enough that it's frustrating for things that should be easy and obvious and just work) so what's on the desktop doesn't impact me that much. But I run way more server installations where things like boot-time and NetworkManager and multi-seat (I question how many people actually need this on the desktop anyway) and name-systemd-feature-of-week doesn't offer much advantage over the old system which seemed to be working fine, was mature, and everyone was sufficiently familiar with it (not to say it doesn't have warts, as everything does).

chaosesqueteam 12y ago

It's over. Linus is fine with systemd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIPPKReeGg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mIPPKReeGg 1:11:00 A fork of linux is needed, both userspace and kernel.

techdragon 12y ago
We have this thing you may be interested... its called BSD ... in fact we have several of them, any one of which may be exactly to your tastes. If your not sure, check out PCBSD. I like using FreeBSD and Solaris, and all sorts of other OSes. SystemD makes it harder to do. For every system service, now were maintaining a systemd and a non systemd version of its init files.