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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#91

Post by Piezoid »

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…

> 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.

We should standardize on the interfaces, avoiding hard dependencies. There is dbus for that.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#92

Post by telmich »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #52

I mainly use FreeBSD, but I have a number of Linux VMs that I use where appropriate. The big thing, for me, that systemd brings to the table is consistency. Managing services on CentOS is the same as managing them on Debian which is the same as managing them on OpenSUSE. This makes it a lot easier to deal with the various different Linuxes. Also, it seems to make writing a service a lot easier. Instead of the service…

I agree with you on that one. It is certainly an advantage, if the interface to manage aspects of different Linux distributions is the same.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#93

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #85
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…

One of my biggest issues with systemd is that I don't like the idea of not being able to replace pieces of it. If I don't like their logging, dns, or ntp daemons, I can't easily replace them without feeling like a second-class citizen and/or having the overhead you've mentioned. From my understanding, alternatives _could_ be written, but haven't yet and that means we currently having to ignore more battle-hardened so…

The ntp and dns are easy to replace, they're not part of the actual systemd binary. Fedora from what I remember, doesn't even enable systemds ntp service on Workstation.

Logging is a bit different, but you can tell journald to use syslog.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#95

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

When there was a problem with a sysvinit procedure, one could simply fix it. As a result, mostly nobody ever had a problem with it.

When there is a bug with systemd, you have to fix systemd. And your version of systemd is completely different from the head, because head was rewritten last month (in a process that persists bugs) and yours is a year old. You can't just use head either, because every low level system on your computer is tied to systemd, and they work differently on head. You won't fork it either, because it's so large that a single person can't keep up.

Without a doubt, a declarative init is much better than an imperative one. But that relatively small number of commands is no gain if each command is more complex than the entire set it is replacing, and I'll completely disagree on the handling of modern hardware, hotplugging and the like. Besides, there is the entire logging saga against systemd.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#96

Post by vpzom »

sjwright wrote: post #36
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.

How is systemd any more of a monoculture than the Linux kernel itself? In principle they are more alike than you might care to admit.

That's a problem too, but existence of other problems doesn't excuse this one

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#97

Post by marcosdumay »

meddlepal wrote: post #13
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 g…

Well, just excuse my philosophical stance of not liking my computers breaking by a new random cause every couple of months.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#98

Post by tux1968 »

meddlepal wrote: post #13
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 g…

Well systemd service files are great and represent a nice improvement. But I detest journalctl with its arcane query commands and binary storage; much prefer ability to use standard unix tools and my favorite editor for adhoc inspection at least. It's still is an annoyance on a pretty regular basis.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#99

Post by marcosdumay »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #19
lmm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Systemd has a historic of refusing to fill CVEs, even for incredibly bad vulnerabilities.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#100

Post by jasondclinton »

jchw wrote: post #82
masklinn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably do though, openrc defaults to sysvinit as its PID1. I guess it's part of the confusion too, most of the systemd work was replacing the "rc bits" (process startup and management) not replacing PID1 itself.

I mean, before systemd there existed other initds. Upstart was Ubuntu’s for a time.

The creator of Upstart, Scott, explicitly said that he thought that systemd was better and that Debian and Ubuntu adopting it was the right decision: https://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxActionShow/comments/1xzfv0/ups...
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