15 ms·

Everything I read about SystemD is negative. Negative on the technology, negative on the people who created it. Nothing positive. How is it that SystemD is a

by andyl 12y ago

Everything I read about SystemD is negative. Negative on the technology, negative on the people who created it. Nothing positive. How is it that SystemD is about to dominate the market? Who is driving SystemD adoption, and why?

toolz 12y ago
Why is everything on the news always negative? Is everyone a crime peddling pedophile rapist murderer drug addict? My point is that negative drama sells headlines.
johnny22 12y ago
people like me. I've been waiting for something like systemd to come to linux since i started using it (back in 2000). Tired of having to write init scripts for every distro, writing forking daemons, and dealing with the too simple syslog.
kbuck 12y ago
It hinges upon the fact that people are more likely to be vocal when they don't like something than when they do. Consider online reviews: are you more likely to review a product when it's worked fine as you expected or when it died a month after you got it? systemd has both good aspects (e.g. faster boot times and removal of the nasty nest of shell scripts) as well as bad ones (incredibly monolithic). There are arguments on both sides of the fence. It's just that you're more likely to hear from people who dislike something than you are to hear from people that like it. (And at this point most of the systemd proponents have given up talking about it because of the incredibly vocal and relentless opposition.)
- jqm 12y ago
  "removal of the nasty nest of shell scripts" What one person finds nasty another may find sexy.
  - zanny 12y ago
    Then feel free to use shell based init. Meanwhile, there is a strong concensus in Linux distros that the maintainers thought shell scripts were not sexy, and systemd unit files were, and thus everyone has / is switching.
    - jqm 12y ago
      "Everyone" has not switched nor is "everyone" switching. Most distros are yes. Some are not. Personally I like shell scripts and plan to continue using them as long as feasible. They work, and when/if they don't, I can usually find out why. "Strong consensus" might be good argument for some people. I personally find it a fallacious appeal to popularity.
      - davrosthedalek 12y ago
        Additionally,I would argue that distros are switching because of gnome, not because they like systemd so much.
        Tuna-Fish 12y ago
        I'd like to point out that logind can be used without systemd using systemd-shim. So you can use fully featured GNOME without systemd.
  - pantalaimon 12y ago
    Yea it's called a fetish
- simoncion 12y ago
  > (e.g. faster boot times and removal of the nasty nest of shell scripts) OpenRC does this quite nicely. Gentoo has been using it as the default init since at least 2011.
baldfat 12y ago
Linux and SystemD work and work good. Because the people who use it like it and we don't have many complaints besides logs are no longer text files we have to use journalctl. The strong critics usually go the route of "It remains to be seen if this is a good or bad thing." Systemd has been a replacement for the worst part of Linux, init. It was confusing and was just barely workable. It has been needing replacement for 5 or more years. There were SEVERAL solutions brought out and well more developers like SystemD more then the rest. As a user in Arch Linux, OpenSUSE and Fedora it has been rock solid and I have been able to do things at my knowledge level much more consistent and lower level.
- zobzu 12y ago
  you dont have to use journald. you can send back from journald to syslog (eg rsyslog) and that works well/its easy to do. You can even disable the journald logging itself and just have rsyslog (or the logger of your choice). at my place we kept both journald and have rsyslog to redirect logs to the network. ie our /var/log is relatively empty (rsyslog isnt setup to log to disk) so we look at log on the machine via journald if needed (rarely - since we look at the central log aggregator instead)
  - jude- 12y ago
    > you dont have to use journald. you can send back from journald to syslog That's a contradiction. You're running journald even if it's dead weight.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      And if journald goes belly up, no logs for syslog...
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        As if syslog cannot go belly up as well.
        12y ago
rbanffy 12y ago
> Everything I read about SystemD is negative May be a bias in action. People who like it, or who really don't care much about it (I dislike journalctl, but, apart from that, I'm mostly OK with it) don't waste time writing how not much changed for them and how things continue to work as expected.
- mickt 12y ago
  There does appear to be a lot of negativity around systemd, such as people giving out about binary logging. I'm sure there's got to be a way to enable text logging along with binary logging. This lad seems really enthusiastic about systemd logging and systemctl: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/journalctl.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/journalctl.html There are a lot of interesting features, but personally I'd prefer to have both binary and text logging. Text logging is in cases where a system goes tits up and you may only have access to some basic tools such as grep, vi etc.
  - anonbanker 12y ago
    Yes, the author of systemd/systemctl is very enthusiastic about his projects. Why did you point that out?
Mikeb85 12y ago
It's so terrible (literally the devil incarnate, sacrifice your offspring now) that it's already been adopted by: - Arch Linux - Fedora/RHEL - openSUSE/SLES - Mageia - NixOS - CoreOS - Sabayon - Debian and Ubuntu in the near future > Everything I read about SystemD is negative. Negative on the technology, negative on the people who created it. Nothing positive. There's a vocal group that seem to think it's some Red Hat conspiracy to destroy Linux and take over the world. You don't hear the positives because people either don't care about init systems (as long as their distro continues to work) and happy programmers are generally silent on the issue. The fact that the article says that Solaris is the 'best of breed stack right now' and also suggests CoreOS (apparently not knowing they use Systemd) should speak volumes...
- pnathan 12y ago
  Well, in fairness, I did have a RH chap tell me to my face several weeks ago that Linux needs to replicate the Windows registry model and stop using the /etc text file approach. So I have a certain sympathy for the idea of Red Hat conspiracy (what is a company anyway but a conspiracy to produce work & products for hire?).
  - tracker1 12y ago
    ROFLMAO... more and more applications in Windows are moving AWAY from the registry.. other than install/uninstall notations created by the installer, very few recent apps use the registry. Most use the global ProgramData or user's AppData paths for configuration. It simply works. I don't hate the registry... I'm just not in a hurry to see Linux adopt it. What's so bad about /etc/app/config or ~/.config/app/config? It works in pretty much every platform (though the paths may be slightly different). Windows does have both roaming and local data directories, which can be pretty nice (if you don't bloat them).
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    Only "reason" i could think of for going registry is so that it could be wrapped in an ACL. Yep, the Windows registry has its own ACL. Was bitten by that when trying (naively) to move an account's files between Windows installs. Logged in and found myself back at default settings, and changes not applying. I wonder if this shift in mentality has something to do with the M-I contracts.
pnathan 12y ago
My impression is that a very small number of people (core maintainers) actually drive adoption of technologies - persuade them & you have altered the cruise ship. For me, I plan to stay as far away from systemd as I can; it's an abomination of software design.
rodgerd 12y ago
Well, that's not surprising, because you clearly haven't even read the documentation. Or you'd know how to spell it.
mrweasel 12y ago
I didn't really like systemd initially, but know I'm more in the what-ever-its-fine camp. Companies like RedHat clearly drives systemd adoption, because it solve problems for their customers, that would be large enterprise customers. Many of those who dislike systemd has simpler requirements, so systemd becomes some new they need to learn, but it doesn't provide them with any tangible benefits. They didn't see or care about many of the problem or features that systemd address. Of cause you're going to be negative if a new system, one you didn't need is forced upon you. If you're happy with it you're most likely a large company that doesn't blog about systemd, especially if it's something that just works. At least that's my take on it.
lmm 12y ago
> How is it that SystemD is about to dominate the market? Who is driving SystemD adoption, and why? Redhat, Gnome and Pottering. While no-one can know exactly what they're thinking, it's in Redhat (and other commercial linux vendors') interest for more software to be more tightly coupled to linux and not run on other OSes. And Gnome is mostly developed by people who work for these commercial linux vendors (in a notable contrast to KDE, which has a wider spread of contributors, including more hobbyists and a number who are supported by government grants, particularly in Europe. Which leads to a different set of incentives). My impression is that Gnome and associated software is, by and large, the wedge which is driving adoption in other distributions like Debian; previous "faster init" solutions were often available as options but never pushed to default because it wasn't necessary; users who wanted a different init could install one, but all their software would work fine either way.
- the_why_of_y 12y ago
  Of course the good people of KDE will take a stand against the evil corporations and would never ever consider using that vile systemd-logind abomination! http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/10/libinput-integration-in-kwinwayland/ http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/10/libinput-integ...
  - lmm 12y ago
    Will KDE support systemd on platforms where it makes sense? Of course. Will KDE drop support for non-systemd systems the way Gnome has? I find that virtually unimaginable.
general_failure 12y ago
Its the same way Dropbox was trivial, iPad is useless and so on. Once the non devs adopt it, you will see the positively side.
imanaccount247 12y ago
Redhat has more influence than people believed. Systemd is entirely driven by redhat, who controls a bunch of other software and said "we're breaking all the software we have so it only works with systemd". Distro maintainers would have immense amount of work on their hands forking everything to try to avoid systemd.
felixgallo 12y ago
It's necessary to understand that desktop linux has been total shit always, and this has caused incredible pain over the years to people who, against all reason, continue to try to use it. It turns out the bazaar can't create a polished user-friendly product, period. Nevertheless, Red Hat and Canonical and others continue to try to foster desktop linux, on the now-obvious misguided theory that (a) the desktop matters and (b) they can take share from windows and osx installations. As a result, there's hundreds of terrible paid desktop programmers, and thousands of their users, who are dying every day because, e.g., the last several iterations of wireless networking scripts were written by morons, their graphics libraries are comically bad, etc., etc. Into this charged mix of total incompetence and frustration comes a small group of mediocre coders with hubris, backing, and political nous. And what they are promising to the long-abused desktop users sounds amazing to them, like wizardly magic, and literally, and almost entirely, boils down to this: freedom from having to deal with the shitty wireless networking script system. No joke. That is the fundamental issue at play, and the driver behind "faster boot times", "socket activation", and all of the other marketing points. If that idiot who wrote the wireless provisioning scripts had been competent, this entire mess would never have happened. So the desktop linux users and desktop linux developers, who again have been living in a tiny cage being pooped on every day by their own regrettable choices, reach for this solution with the religious fervor of a drowning victim. And since desktop linux developers tend to be the C team, they don't care about good architecture, they just want things to work for them and their very specific desktop linux use case, which objectively and axiomatically, again, has not worked for decades and will never work. So they band together in unison, following the exciting, energetic, charismatic and opinionated lead developer. And obviously, Red Hat is delighted, because that's their employee, and maybe they get more market share. And they pack Debian with developers, because there's a ton of horrible little desktop linux apps that grant them votes, and shout down the opposition. And they set up an IRC channel, and they brigade every forum with the same nonsensical attacks on the very architecture that made it possible for the internet to happen in the first place. Including, obviously, this very thread. In actuality, this group of users is vanishingly tiny compared with the linux installed base, which is mostly phones and servers, where the real action is, and which don't need this halfassed dbus nonsense or the accreting blob of carelessly rewritten known-good-daemons. The desktop linux people are chasing a dead target with a terrible design and religious fervor substituted for technical ability. It will be intriguing to watch it play out. FreeBSD is about to get a big positive jolt of people that know what 'good' is.
peterwwillis 12y ago
> How is it that SystemD is about to dominate the market? Religiously passionate salesmen, selling an upgrade to your car stereo, who conveniently forget to mention that you also have to replace your whole car. > Who is driving SystemD adoption, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen, David Herrmann, and its creator, Lennart Poettering [1]. > and why? One guy wanted to make booting his desktop faster. [2] -- Later it was decided that systemd would be "a big opportunity for Linux standardization. Since it standardizes many interfaces of the system that previously have been differing on every distribution, on every implementation, adopting it helps to work against the balkanization of the Linux interfaces. Choosing systemd means redefining more closely what the Linux platform is about." [3] Basically, they want to change "how we put together Linux systems." [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering [2] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html [3] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html [4] http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...

by andyl 12y ago

toolz 12y ago

Why is everything on the news always negative? Is everyone a crime peddling pedophile rapist murderer drug addict? My point is that negative drama sells headlines.

johnny22 12y ago

people like me. I've been waiting for something like systemd to come to linux since i started using it (back in 2000). Tired of having to write init scripts for every distro, writing forking daemons, and dealing with the too simple syslog.

kbuck 12y ago

It hinges upon the fact that people are more likely to be vocal when they don't like something than when they do. Consider online reviews: are you more likely to review a product when it's worked fine as you expected or when it died a month after you got it? systemd has both good aspects (e.g. faster boot times and removal of the nasty nest of shell scripts) as well as bad ones (incredibly monolithic). There are arguments on both sides of the fence. It's just that you're more likely to hear from people who dislike something than you are to hear from people that like it. (And at this point most of the systemd proponents have given up talking about it because of the incredibly vocal and relentless opposition.)

jqm 12y ago
"removal of the nasty nest of shell scripts" What one person finds nasty another may find sexy.
- zanny 12y ago
  Then feel free to use shell based init. Meanwhile, there is a strong concensus in Linux distros that the maintainers thought shell scripts were not sexy, and systemd unit files were, and thus everyone has / is switching.
  - jqm 12y ago
    "Everyone" has not switched nor is "everyone" switching. Most distros are yes. Some are not. Personally I like shell scripts and plan to continue using them as long as feasible. They work, and when/if they don't, I can usually find out why. "Strong consensus" might be good argument for some people. I personally find it a fallacious appeal to popularity.
    - davrosthedalek 12y ago
      Additionally,I would argue that distros are switching because of gnome, not because they like systemd so much.
      - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
        I'd like to point out that logind can be used without systemd using systemd-shim. So you can use fully featured GNOME without systemd.
- pantalaimon 12y ago
  Yea it's called a fetish
simoncion 12y ago
> (e.g. faster boot times and removal of the nasty nest of shell scripts) OpenRC does this quite nicely. Gentoo has been using it as the default init since at least 2011.

baldfat 12y ago

Linux and SystemD work and work good. Because the people who use it like it and we don't have many complaints besides logs are no longer text files we have to use journalctl. The strong critics usually go the route of "It remains to be seen if this is a good or bad thing." Systemd has been a replacement for the worst part of Linux, init. It was confusing and was just barely workable. It has been needing replacement for 5 or more years. There were SEVERAL solutions brought out and well more developers like SystemD more then the rest. As a user in Arch Linux, OpenSUSE and Fedora it has been rock solid and I have been able to do things at my knowledge level much more consistent and lower level.

zobzu 12y ago
you dont have to use journald. you can send back from journald to syslog (eg rsyslog) and that works well/its easy to do. You can even disable the journald logging itself and just have rsyslog (or the logger of your choice). at my place we kept both journald and have rsyslog to redirect logs to the network. ie our /var/log is relatively empty (rsyslog isnt setup to log to disk) so we look at log on the machine via journald if needed (rarely - since we look at the central log aggregator instead)
- jude- 12y ago
  > you dont have to use journald. you can send back from journald to syslog That's a contradiction. You're running journald even if it's dead weight.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    And if journald goes belly up, no logs for syslog...
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      As if syslog cannot go belly up as well.
      - 12y ago

rbanffy 12y ago

> Everything I read about SystemD is negative May be a bias in action. People who like it, or who really don't care much about it (I dislike journalctl, but, apart from that, I'm mostly OK with it) don't waste time writing how not much changed for them and how things continue to work as expected.

mickt 12y ago
There does appear to be a lot of negativity around systemd, such as people giving out about binary logging. I'm sure there's got to be a way to enable text logging along with binary logging. This lad seems really enthusiastic about systemd logging and systemctl: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/journalctl.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/journalctl.html There are a lot of interesting features, but personally I'd prefer to have both binary and text logging. Text logging is in cases where a system goes tits up and you may only have access to some basic tools such as grep, vi etc.
- anonbanker 12y ago
  Yes, the author of systemd/systemctl is very enthusiastic about his projects. Why did you point that out?

Mikeb85 12y ago

It's so terrible (literally the devil incarnate, sacrifice your offspring now) that it's already been adopted by: - Arch Linux - Fedora/RHEL - openSUSE/SLES - Mageia - NixOS - CoreOS - Sabayon - Debian and Ubuntu in the near future > Everything I read about SystemD is negative. Negative on the technology, negative on the people who created it. Nothing positive. There's a vocal group that seem to think it's some Red Hat conspiracy to destroy Linux and take over the world. You don't hear the positives because people either don't care about init systems (as long as their distro continues to work) and happy programmers are generally silent on the issue. The fact that the article says that Solaris is the 'best of breed stack right now' and also suggests CoreOS (apparently not knowing they use Systemd) should speak volumes...

pnathan 12y ago
Well, in fairness, I did have a RH chap tell me to my face several weeks ago that Linux needs to replicate the Windows registry model and stop using the /etc text file approach. So I have a certain sympathy for the idea of Red Hat conspiracy (what is a company anyway but a conspiracy to produce work & products for hire?).
- tracker1 12y ago
  ROFLMAO... more and more applications in Windows are moving AWAY from the registry.. other than install/uninstall notations created by the installer, very few recent apps use the registry. Most use the global ProgramData or user's AppData paths for configuration. It simply works. I don't hate the registry... I'm just not in a hurry to see Linux adopt it. What's so bad about /etc/app/config or ~/.config/app/config? It works in pretty much every platform (though the paths may be slightly different). Windows does have both roaming and local data directories, which can be pretty nice (if you don't bloat them).
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Only "reason" i could think of for going registry is so that it could be wrapped in an ACL. Yep, the Windows registry has its own ACL. Was bitten by that when trying (naively) to move an account's files between Windows installs. Logged in and found myself back at default settings, and changes not applying. I wonder if this shift in mentality has something to do with the M-I contracts.

pnathan 12y ago

My impression is that a very small number of people (core maintainers) actually drive adoption of technologies - persuade them & you have altered the cruise ship. For me, I plan to stay as far away from systemd as I can; it's an abomination of software design.

rodgerd 12y ago

Well, that's not surprising, because you clearly haven't even read the documentation. Or you'd know how to spell it.

mrweasel 12y ago

I didn't really like systemd initially, but know I'm more in the what-ever-its-fine camp. Companies like RedHat clearly drives systemd adoption, because it solve problems for their customers, that would be large enterprise customers. Many of those who dislike systemd has simpler requirements, so systemd becomes some new they need to learn, but it doesn't provide them with any tangible benefits. They didn't see or care about many of the problem or features that systemd address. Of cause you're going to be negative if a new system, one you didn't need is forced upon you. If you're happy with it you're most likely a large company that doesn't blog about systemd, especially if it's something that just works. At least that's my take on it.

lmm 12y ago

> How is it that SystemD is about to dominate the market? Who is driving SystemD adoption, and why? Redhat, Gnome and Pottering. While no-one can know exactly what they're thinking, it's in Redhat (and other commercial linux vendors') interest for more software to be more tightly coupled to linux and not run on other OSes. And Gnome is mostly developed by people who work for these commercial linux vendors (in a notable contrast to KDE, which has a wider spread of contributors, including more hobbyists and a number who are supported by government grants, particularly in Europe. Which leads to a different set of incentives). My impression is that Gnome and associated software is, by and large, the wedge which is driving adoption in other distributions like Debian; previous "faster init" solutions were often available as options but never pushed to default because it wasn't necessary; users who wanted a different init could install one, but all their software would work fine either way.

the_why_of_y 12y ago
Of course the good people of KDE will take a stand against the evil corporations and would never ever consider using that vile systemd-logind abomination! http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/10/libinput-integration-in-kwinwayland/ http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/10/libinput-integ...
- lmm 12y ago
  Will KDE support systemd on platforms where it makes sense? Of course. Will KDE drop support for non-systemd systems the way Gnome has? I find that virtually unimaginable.

general_failure 12y ago

Its the same way Dropbox was trivial, iPad is useless and so on. Once the non devs adopt it, you will see the positively side.

imanaccount247 12y ago

Redhat has more influence than people believed. Systemd is entirely driven by redhat, who controls a bunch of other software and said "we're breaking all the software we have so it only works with systemd". Distro maintainers would have immense amount of work on their hands forking everything to try to avoid systemd.

felixgallo 12y ago

It's necessary to understand that desktop linux has been total shit always, and this has caused incredible pain over the years to people who, against all reason, continue to try to use it. It turns out the bazaar can't create a polished user-friendly product, period. Nevertheless, Red Hat and Canonical and others continue to try to foster desktop linux, on the now-obvious misguided theory that (a) the desktop matters and (b) they can take share from windows and osx installations. As a result, there's hundreds of terrible paid desktop programmers, and thousands of their users, who are dying every day because, e.g., the last several iterations of wireless networking scripts were written by morons, their graphics libraries are comically bad, etc., etc. Into this charged mix of total incompetence and frustration comes a small group of mediocre coders with hubris, backing, and political nous. And what they are promising to the long-abused desktop users sounds amazing to them, like wizardly magic, and literally, and almost entirely, boils down to this: freedom from having to deal with the shitty wireless networking script system. No joke. That is the fundamental issue at play, and the driver behind "faster boot times", "socket activation", and all of the other marketing points. If that idiot who wrote the wireless provisioning scripts had been competent, this entire mess would never have happened. So the desktop linux users and desktop linux developers, who again have been living in a tiny cage being pooped on every day by their own regrettable choices, reach for this solution with the religious fervor of a drowning victim. And since desktop linux developers tend to be the C team, they don't care about good architecture, they just want things to work for them and their very specific desktop linux use case, which objectively and axiomatically, again, has not worked for decades and will never work. So they band together in unison, following the exciting, energetic, charismatic and opinionated lead developer. And obviously, Red Hat is delighted, because that's their employee, and maybe they get more market share. And they pack Debian with developers, because there's a ton of horrible little desktop linux apps that grant them votes, and shout down the opposition. And they set up an IRC channel, and they brigade every forum with the same nonsensical attacks on the very architecture that made it possible for the internet to happen in the first place. Including, obviously, this very thread. In actuality, this group of users is vanishingly tiny compared with the linux installed base, which is mostly phones and servers, where the real action is, and which don't need this halfassed dbus nonsense or the accreting blob of carelessly rewritten known-good-daemons. The desktop linux people are chasing a dead target with a terrible design and religious fervor substituted for technical ability. It will be intriguing to watch it play out. FreeBSD is about to get a big positive jolt of people that know what 'good' is.

peterwwillis 12y ago

> How is it that SystemD is about to dominate the market? Religiously passionate salesmen, selling an upgrade to your car stereo, who conveniently forget to mention that you also have to replace your whole car. > Who is driving SystemD adoption, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Daniel Mack, Tom Gundersen, David Herrmann, and its creator, Lennart Poettering [1]. > and why? One guy wanted to make booting his desktop faster. [2] -- Later it was decided that systemd would be "a big opportunity for Linux standardization. Since it standardizes many interfaces of the system that previously have been differing on every distribution, on every implementation, adopting it helps to work against the balkanization of the Linux interfaces. Choosing systemd means redefining more closely what the Linux platform is about." [3] Basically, they want to change "how we put together Linux systems." [4] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering [2] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html [3] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html [4] http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...