7 ms·

Lots of people do not seem to understand the criticism of systemd. systemd = init system + a whole lot of other things. When people complain about systemd,the

Lots of people do not seem to understand the criticism of systemd. systemd = init system + a whole lot of other things. When people complain about systemd,they usually do not complain about what it does or how it does it in the init system part.That part is pretty solid as far as functionality is concerned. When people complain about systemd,they usually complain about the "whole lot of other things" part.Lots of people have different complains and my biggest one is on udev. udev is a core component in any modern linux system I see systemd absorbing it as nothing but a political move and a power grab.They could have left udev as an independent project and just create a dependency on it. The "whole lot of other things part" will,by definition,make any other project that is just an init system seem very much deficient in functionality when compared to systemd.

audidude 12y ago
> udev is a core component in any modern linux system I see systemd absorbing it as nothing but a political move and a power grab. I think this is a bit of a stretch. It's not like they did a hostile take over of udev. The maintainers also thought systemd was the right place for that code to live. As for bloat, there certainly have been some new features, but so much of the systemd code (from what I can tell) was existing code that now lives in one place. That means it's free to consolidate the utility code it uses (every project has helpers for what (g)libc does not provide). In the grand scheme of things, less duplicated code is a good thing.
- nisa 12y ago
  > It's not like they did a hostile take over of udev. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May/019657.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May... (via http://redd.it/2a2tz5 http://redd.it/2a2tz5): > Also note that at that point we intend to move udev onto kdbus as transport, and get rid of the userspace-to-userspace netlink-based tranport udev used so far. Unless the systemd-haters prepare another kdbus userspace until then this will effectively also mean that we will not support non-systemd systems with udev anymore starting at that point. Gentoo folks, this is your wakeup call.
  - belovedeagle 12y ago
    This is just disgusting; I hope a lot of people see this. Poettering doesn't even have the shame to hide that he doesn't want anyone using a non-systemd GNU/Linux system.
    - uselessdguy 12y ago
      People already did see it. It was a hot thread on /r/linux and Phoronix. No one really cared. Gentoo's eudev is more relevant now than it ever has been before.
  - smutticus 12y ago
    It's this kind of crap that scares me away from systemd. I have no problems working with current init structures, so I gain nothing from systemd. It basically just removes options from me, and gives me nothing in return that I actually want. What we ultimately lose with systemd is modularity. If we cannot upgrade systemd without also upgrading the kernel, then systemd might as well be considered part of the kernel.
    - rdtsc 12y ago
      Modularity and isolation is at the core of reliability. I think it is worthy discussion if a tradeoff beteween 30 sec and 15 sec boot time is worth that sometimes your boot process might lock up. I think there was already at least one visible problem with systemd stepping on kernel developer's toes (so to speak) by re-using one of the debug flags. Heck kernel is monolithic. But thinkign about it, I trust kernel developers a bit more than systemd guys. Maybe it is just a new project and it will stabilize at some point in the future. Now they are kind of shooting from the hip (adding ntp, udev, network socket pools, logging, ... ). That tells me "hello lockups and freezes" and being back in the mid 90s on Windows restarting every day.
      - dalias 12y ago
        The choice isn't between 30sec or 15sec boot times. It's between 30sec, 15sec, or 1sec boot times, the latter coming from dropping all of the crap and writing a flat linear /etc/rc file.
zobzu 12y ago
I think the main critism is the political grabs from systemd. Every bad technical decision has been made because of political reasons. Its not like if they were stupid and took a bad decision because they didn't know any better. They took the bad decisions conscientiously, for these power, political grabs. That's not how people want Linux distros to be. They want technological innovation to be the driver. And being on the same camp: fuck you systemd for successfully adding to that model where political profit is more important than technological innovation.
navait 12y ago
This init process debate has brought out one of the worst elements of people in the FOSS community: treating some FOSS technology as an extension of their identity. Let's keep some perspective here. We are literally just talking about an init system. There are many others you can use. systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom". Debates should be about the technical merits of system not baseless accusations that they are making a power grab.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  > systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" This is absolutely incorrect. We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. (To which the response from the systemd folks was something along the lines of "You shouldn't be turning it off anyways") (Great, now our software takes philosophical positions...) Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about. Meanwhile, in the real world, populated by end users and sysadmins, the most important people when it comes to a computing environment, the ones that all of this crap is being done for at the end of the day... not so much. sigh I'm annoyed that systemd is taking over for political reasons and not purely on its technical merits, and that there is no way this is not going to lead to a monoculture. There will be others, but they will be relegated to the position of marginalized, niche players that nobody outside of /g/ troll threads care about. I'm annoyed that the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to this software, rather than the other way around. I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.
  - navait 12y ago
    If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before. If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself. Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product. Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious. I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.
rodgerd 12y ago
> udev is a core component in any modern linux system I see systemd absorbing it as nothing but a political move and a power grab. So you're complaining about politics, while your only substantive criticism is a purely political one?

audidude 12y ago

> udev is a core component in any modern linux system I see systemd absorbing it as nothing but a political move and a power grab. I think this is a bit of a stretch. It's not like they did a hostile take over of udev. The maintainers also thought systemd was the right place for that code to live. As for bloat, there certainly have been some new features, but so much of the systemd code (from what I can tell) was existing code that now lives in one place. That means it's free to consolidate the utility code it uses (every project has helpers for what (g)libc does not provide). In the grand scheme of things, less duplicated code is a good thing.

nisa 12y ago
> It's not like they did a hostile take over of udev. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May/019657.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May... (via http://redd.it/2a2tz5 http://redd.it/2a2tz5): > Also note that at that point we intend to move udev onto kdbus as transport, and get rid of the userspace-to-userspace netlink-based tranport udev used so far. Unless the systemd-haters prepare another kdbus userspace until then this will effectively also mean that we will not support non-systemd systems with udev anymore starting at that point. Gentoo folks, this is your wakeup call.
- belovedeagle 12y ago
  This is just disgusting; I hope a lot of people see this. Poettering doesn't even have the shame to hide that he doesn't want anyone using a non-systemd GNU/Linux system.
  - uselessdguy 12y ago
    People already did see it. It was a hot thread on /r/linux and Phoronix. No one really cared. Gentoo's eudev is more relevant now than it ever has been before.
- smutticus 12y ago
  It's this kind of crap that scares me away from systemd. I have no problems working with current init structures, so I gain nothing from systemd. It basically just removes options from me, and gives me nothing in return that I actually want. What we ultimately lose with systemd is modularity. If we cannot upgrade systemd without also upgrading the kernel, then systemd might as well be considered part of the kernel.
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    Modularity and isolation is at the core of reliability. I think it is worthy discussion if a tradeoff beteween 30 sec and 15 sec boot time is worth that sometimes your boot process might lock up. I think there was already at least one visible problem with systemd stepping on kernel developer's toes (so to speak) by re-using one of the debug flags. Heck kernel is monolithic. But thinkign about it, I trust kernel developers a bit more than systemd guys. Maybe it is just a new project and it will stabilize at some point in the future. Now they are kind of shooting from the hip (adding ntp, udev, network socket pools, logging, ... ). That tells me "hello lockups and freezes" and being back in the mid 90s on Windows restarting every day.
    - dalias 12y ago
      The choice isn't between 30sec or 15sec boot times. It's between 30sec, 15sec, or 1sec boot times, the latter coming from dropping all of the crap and writing a flat linear /etc/rc file.

zobzu 12y ago

I think the main critism is the political grabs from systemd. Every bad technical decision has been made because of political reasons. Its not like if they were stupid and took a bad decision because they didn't know any better. They took the bad decisions conscientiously, for these power, political grabs. That's not how people want Linux distros to be. They want technological innovation to be the driver. And being on the same camp: fuck you systemd for successfully adding to that model where political profit is more important than technological innovation.

navait 12y ago

This init process debate has brought out one of the worst elements of people in the FOSS community: treating some FOSS technology as an extension of their identity. Let's keep some perspective here. We are literally just talking about an init system. There are many others you can use. systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom". Debates should be about the technical merits of system not baseless accusations that they are making a power grab.

Karunamon 12y ago
> systemd is not taking away your freedom in any meaningful sense of the word "freedom" This is absolutely incorrect. We're to the point where certain software packages (GNOME comes to mind) are requiring hard dependencies on it. I was just today reading about some incompatibility that arises if your kernel is set up with no IPv6 support which is explicitly caused by systemd. (To which the response from the systemd folks was something along the lines of "You shouldn't be turning it off anyways") (Great, now our software takes philosophical positions...) Sure, you're "free" to use something else, in the same way that you're "free" to patch and recompile every program that touches it to stop touching it. So "free" in the FOSS sense that nobody but developers care about. Meanwhile, in the real world, populated by end users and sysadmins, the most important people when it comes to a computing environment, the ones that all of this crap is being done for at the end of the day... not so much. sigh I'm annoyed that systemd is taking over for political reasons and not purely on its technical merits, and that there is no way this is not going to lead to a monoculture. There will be others, but they will be relegated to the position of marginalized, niche players that nobody outside of /g/ troll threads care about. I'm annoyed that the rest of the world is going to have to adapt to this software, rather than the other way around. I'm annoyed that this software is doing 5000 things where one would do.
- navait 12y ago
  If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before. If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself. Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product. Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious. I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.

rodgerd 12y ago

> udev is a core component in any modern linux system I see systemd absorbing it as nothing but a political move and a power grab. So you're complaining about politics, while your only substantive criticism is a purely political one?