Linux distros without systemd • Hacker News Board

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#11

Post by dantondwa » Mon, May 20, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

telmich wrote: post #3

zamadatix wrote: post #2

Alpine is great. I have nothing against systemd but Alpine stands on it's own for containers and VMs. I haven't given it a try on baremetal but I imagine it does just as well there. Not really desktop focused but if you want to run it with a GUI on a laptop it's technically possible.

I've actually tried it on my new notebook a few days ago, it runs quite nice: https://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/alpine-linux-on-the-hp...

In the benefits of Alpine, you have put that the sound is great. Out of curiosity, what makes it better than other Linux distros?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#12

Post by AsyncAwait » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

I get that not everybody likes systemd, but a lot of the criticisms seem misguided and looking at sysvinit with role-colored glasses.

For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. Yes, there's parts to systemd that not everyone will use, like container support, but in that case you can pretty safely ignore that use case.

For me, systemd has provided a much more consistent way of managing services. There's a tightly defined service definition format that allows one to comfortably modify any 3rd party service as well, (unlike random, variable-quality shell scripts), relatively small amount of commands to learn that work consistently across services, mounts, timers etc. There's also much better handling of modern hardware, hotplugging & the like.

I can't say I miss sysvinit. Also, stuff like [1] from the anti-systemd camp doesn't inspire confidence.

1 - https://lwn.net/Articles/786593

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#13

Post by meddlepal » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

Whatitat90 wrote: post #4

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

It seems the systemd hate mostly comes from a philosophical position these days than anything grounded in real user impact. You either agree or disagree with what systemd does, or do not care because you are not aware of it (which I would argue is a good thing).

Personally I think it is great. Sysvinit scripts were terrible to write and frequently had bugs because the scripts were usually afterthoughts "Oh yea... I guess we need one of those things". The nice integrations between systemd and journald is well worth it in my mind as well.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#14

Post by microtonal » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

Guix is missing, which uses GNU Sheperd, which is in Scheme:

https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/

That said, to me systemd has been a large improvement. Maybe it has its problems, but at least there is consistency in handling services and logs between Linux distributions, which is a big improvement over a bunch of homegrown sysvinit derivatives, Upstart, and homegrown non-sysvinit scripts.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#15

Post by lmm » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

Whatitat90 wrote: post #4

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

The objections to systemd are still as valid as ever. We still see a pretty high rate of security vulnerabilities in it.

However, as projects adopt systemd-proprietary APIs, distros are forced to choose between maintaining ongoing forks of those projects, dropping those projects, or adopting systemd. E.g. I suspect Slackware only avoided being forced to adopt it because they'd already decided to not support gnome.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#16

Post by enriquto » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #8

I get no end of bemusement from open source advocates that think it makes any kind of rational sense to campaign against an open source project. THIS IS ALL OPEN SOURCE. Freedom and choice is the whole point, isn't it? If you prefer an alternative or forebear to systemd, that is great. Use it. Advocate for the system you prefer. Convince people that the choice you have made is better. Meanwhile the vast majority of d…

Notice that nobody complains about the existence of systemd, but about the enormous and shady pressures that distros had (particulary debian) to adopt it as standard. Nowadays, the complain is mostly about the systemd monoculture.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#17

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

Whatitat90 wrote: post #4

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

Earlier versions of systemd were fairly buggy, but then it was still in its infancy and its in a much better state now.

systemd (not SystemD) changes a core part of the OS, we go from a userspace being bootstrapped by a bunch of different shell scripts calling a dozen individual binaries, to an actual system and service manager configured with unit files.

It's a large change, although one other operating systems went through a decade earlier, and some people don't like change.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#18

Post by AdmiralAsshat » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

qxcbr wrote: post #7

Whatitat90 wrote: post #4

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

They didn't really have an option: the same organisation controls GNOME and systemd, so they introduced systemd as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd. And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so... Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly. Even Gentoo struggles with that, as it takes them a long time to release…

>And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so...

LxQt and any KDE-powered distro would beg to differ.

But I agree, in general, that KDE-default distros are few and far between. And the KDE team probably has better things to do with their time than try to maintain a systemd-less fork.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#19

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:04 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #15

Whatitat90 wrote: post #4

SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? All major distros adopted it and even some that are listed there as "no systemd" in reality just give you choice (e.g. Gentoo). I'd gladly hear the opinion of distro maintainers why did they switch to SystemD if it's as bad as it looks like in people's perception.

The objections to systemd are still as valid as ever. We still see a pretty high rate of security vulnerabilities in it. However, as projects adopt systemd-proprietary APIs, distros are forced to choose between maintaining ongoing forks of those projects, dropping those projects, or adopting systemd. E.g. I suspect Slackware only avoided being forced to adopt it because they'd already decided to not support gnome.

High rate?

Compared to the Linux kernel, systemd's CVE rate is very low.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#20

Post by kissgyorgy » Mon, May 20, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

If you are still arguing about systemd, you don't know enough about it, so you should learn about it and you don't understand the big picture. Users crying about Linux desktop all the time, but systemd has a huge part making the situation way better.