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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#71

Post by fabiomaia »

markstos wrote: post #53

I read everything I could find on systemd to form my own opinion. I used FreeBSD for a decade and have many years of Ubuntu/upstart experience after that. Based on my experience and all the anti-systemd posts online, I expected to dislike it. But on it's merits I really like the consistency it brings to the "system layer" of the OS. I find it's shame when developers skip over systemd for consideration, adding extra l…

Interesting. So what use cases is Docker good for? Why is it so popular if systemd suffices?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#72

Post by telmich »

microtonal wrote: post #14

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.

Just added as as-good-as-we-could to the website - do you have any experiences in using it?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#73

Post by h2odragon »

bunderbunder wrote: post #42
enriquto wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> systemd monoculture As someone who really wanted the BSDs to get more credit ~20 years back, and spent a fair amount of time on various commercial Unixes as well, I find that phrase rather amusing. Historically poor standardization of the userland aside, GNU/Linux is the poster child for monoculture in Unix, and has left a whole lot of dead or dying software in its wake.

We lost ownership of our systems. No one wants a BOFH built and maintained IT system no matter how wonderful it is at actually meeting business needs, because BOFHs aint interchangeable and business built on individuals aint a thing anymore.

So open source is full of apparent forced goupthink and all or nothing half solutions, at least in the corporate world.

There's home and hobby and personal business systems that are really slick using the lesser known packages and things like "I forked this BSD kernel years ago and twiddled it since". We hear about them sometimes in news stories about "Airport HVAC system found to have been running on C64 for 19 years." Perhaps it inaccurate to say its 'dead or dying' software, until it's no longer appropriate for those use cases where we never even notice its still running.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#74

Post by aerique »

I have been running Void Linux since Debian switched to SystemD both at work and at home (including playing Skyrim SSE on Steam using Proton, or StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 using Lutris) .

It is a very nice distro although I would not recommend it to beginners since it is a little rough around the edges if you want to do full disk encryption during installation.

Initially I switched to FreeBSD and then OpenBSD but I missed Linux conveniences like native cloud sync clients[1], Steam, Docker, support for the hardware I already had, etc.

[1] this was before I discovered Rclone

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#75

Post by boxfire »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #65
AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

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 p…

Most of the problem I have it is with the imperialistic culture that came with it and with the serious security bugs that they keep sweeping under the rug. It is easier to configure and is convenient to have one holistic system in a lot of ways, but... They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting it be accepted by merits. They have a track…

If systemd were a gstreamer plugin it would be in gstreamer-plugins-bad

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#76

Post by bunderbunder »

bunderbunder wrote: post #42
enriquto wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> systemd monoculture As someone who really wanted the BSDs to get more credit ~20 years back, and spent a fair amount of time on various commercial Unixes as well, I find that phrase rather amusing. Historically poor standardization of the userland aside, GNU/Linux is the poster child for monoculture in Unix, and has left a whole lot of dead or dying software in its wake.

Just to pile it on, I think it's becoming something of a viral force for monoculture, too. 20 years ago, I might occasionally reboot to Windows or fire up a Windows virtual machine in order to open up the occasional recalcitrant Word document in Word itself. Nowadays, if I'm not running Linux on the metal, then I need to keep some sort of a Linux virtual machine running constantly, because so much software has a hard dependency on either the GNU userland or a Linux kernel feature such as LXC.

This is worrisome to me, because, while GNU/Linux is FOSS, "free and open source" doesn't actually mean "unfettered". A small number of large corporations such as IBM and Google have an outsize amount of influence. Doubly so now that IBM owns Red Hat. And, as the whole GNOME/systemd thing demonstrates, even the non-corporate entities have a lot of opportunity and incentive to engage in rent-seeking behavior now that things have been whittled down to such a tight software monoculture. They'd presumably not have even attempted such a thing as taking a hard dependency on systemd if maintaining decent compatibility with FreeBSD (or any other OS) were still a relevant priority.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#77

Post by tyingq »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

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 p…

It's not the init replacement part that bugs me. It's the expansion into audio, kernel logging, resolvers, containers, and so forth that is the issue.

It's a monolith of sorts that breaks the loosely coupled toolbox concept of Unix.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#78

Post by api »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #12

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 p…

My gripe is bad UX. The whole system is needlessly obtuse and esoteric. Git is another popular thing with this problem, but in the case of git it provides so much value it's enough to get me to overcome its obtuseness. For systemd it's not "enough better" to get me to forgive it for being designed with no thought whatsoever to simplicity or ease of use.

Another thing that makes me forgive git more is that its underlying design is rather novel and powerful. There is something to "get" in git (hah!) that justifies the cognitive investment. In the case of systemd the problem of managing services and their dependencies is not novel or really all that interesting. The complexity of the systemd UX is significantly greater than the novelty or sophistication of what it's doing. It's a piece of software built to complexify the simple.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#79

Post by nickik »

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…

> as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd

Or because they like systemd and they think the abstractions it provides are useful and its better to not have that code in GNOME. But sure, lets go with the conspiracy angle.

Also, pure serve distros also adopted systemd.

> Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly.

OpenSource project not implementing the features some users want them to implement. Shocking stuff. Its almost as if that's the bases of Open Source. If you don't like the choices of the project you can take the source and do your own thing.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#80

Post by sjwright »

lmm wrote: post #69
sjwright wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that makes any sense to me. It's all open source. It's laughable to worry about Gnome taking a hard dependency on an API when hundreds of software programs take a hard dependency on Gnome. Hypocrisy, much? Meanwhile if the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or rather than hating it, you could just for…

> If the maintainers of GNOME betray your trust, it sounds like you should hate this hypothetical GNOME for the same reasons you apparently hate systemd. Or just fork it. If enough people agree with you, a disentangled fork will inevitably be maintained. And then they move on to the next project and introduce a hard-dependency on systemd there. RedHat has more programmers than me, they're always going to be able to a…

None of that makes any sense to me.

It's all open source.

Your last paragraph is absurd and internally inconsistent. Linux (the larger operating system environment) exists only because of its monolithic approach to kernel-space development. Far from suffering from it, it made it all possible when the utopia of the GNU kernel flat-lined.

Open source has succeeded because it was easy to improve and replace things piecemeal. But deciding that the individual pieces must begin and end at the process level is blinkered. You can perform "piecemeal improvements" to the scheduling component in systemd just as easily as you can to, say, cron.

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