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Linux distros without systemd

ungleich.ch

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#161

Post by yarrel »

russellbeattie wrote: post #135
sjwright wrote: post #10

One of the better videos on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AeWu1fZ7bY BSDCan 2018—Benno Rice: The Tragedy of systemd "systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. Depending on who you ask it's either a complete violation of the UNIX philosophy, a bloated pile of bugs, a complete violation of the elegant simplicity it replaced or, it most cases, some or all of the above. So why have so many Linux distr…

Basically, people don't like systemd because they don't like change, and groups like shitting on other groups of people? I'm not sure the presenter is condescending enough. Maybe he should have given an abbreviated history of Unix as well, oh wait, he did that.

Change is good. Let's change away from systemd.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#162

Post by JohnFen »

Klathmon wrote: post #57

This list is missing a linux-ey system which doesn't use Systemd that is growing in popularity! WSL! WSL somewhat annoyingly has a custom/proprietary init system. Partially due to it's "interesting" integration with windows, and partially because it's not even really a full linux system yet. I'm curious if with the switch to WSL2 where they will begin shipping a full linux kernel if systemd will be included or will t…

I don't think WSL counts at all.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#163

Post by eropple »

tux1968 wrote: post #98
meddlepal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can tell journald to forward everything to rsyslogd and grep to your heart's content. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rsyslog#journald's_sysl...

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#164

Post by rocqua »

haolez wrote: post #102
brobdingnagians wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But I think that the author of systemd himself wrote a patch for Gnome to keep it working without systemd. Am I correct?

That would invalidate a lot of the criticism I saw.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#165

Post by mar77i »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #31

Most arguments about systemd will devolve into a Motte and Bailey argument. The problems with systemd are all the stuff tacked on that are mandatory, but if you criticize them you'll get people switching to try to put words into your mouth about how the init replacement is good/bad. The Motte is all the shovelware attached to systemd that is nearly impossible to detatch and the Bailey is the init replacement.

Welcome to 21st century arguments.

Humans used to be able to disagree and still get along, but that was boring for drama-preventing reasons.

More on topic, though, I wonder: What exaclty is the relationship between Alpine Linux and ungleich.ch?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#167

Post by eropple »

yarrel wrote: post #158
eropple wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemd is a bunch of loosely coupled tools, though; it's not a monolith at all. PulseAudio was written by Lennart but isn't part of systemd. You don't have to use systemd's resolver. systemd-nspawn is a completely separate process and isn't required for systemd as a whole. It's worth watching Benno Rice (a BSD developer, actually) discuss systemd and some of the misconceptions, some of which you're expressing, there…

It's good that systemd apologists have moved on from arguing that it isn't a single binary. But it is not a bunch of loosely coupled tools any more than it is "just" an init replacement.

Hmm. "Apologists." Couldn't be that it's been a lot better for me where I regularly interact with it and has been no worse where I don't. It's gotta be apologism. We have to be out to getcha.

I think you owe me an apology for that one, dude.

More productively: what parts of systemd's ecosystem--aside, apparently, from journald, but the above no-harm-no-foul reply to the sibling still applies as far as I'm concerned--have you had trouble pulling out when you wanted to, out of curiosity?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#168

Post by acdha »

blibble wrote: post #38
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.

yes it's still that bad, my previously reliable systems are now non-deterministic and break randomly every few days I discover some new bit of non-determinism: - systems getting stuck for long periods at startup or reboot with with some useless text like "Waiting for user session to shutdown" - reboots never completing at all (getting completely wedged shutting down) - jobs starting in weird orders, like crond starti…

All of those issues happened with SysV init, as well — there are literally decades of history of people working around things like unmounting failed filesystems, watchdogs to kill -9 hung daemons, etc.

For example, you mentioned crond startup before the network but that's hardly new with systemd — checking the oldest system I have access to shows that it's configured with two dependencies: “# Required-Start: $local_fs $syslog”. To the extent that systemd changed anything it was exposing that an assumption was wrong — and the nice thing is that you can use a systemd service to replace that cron task with something which _does_ behave the way you thought with precise service dependencies and all of the other benefits to using systemd (e.g. resource management): https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.tim...

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#169

Post by yarrel »

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…

I don't hate it, but it has wasted more of my time as a sysadmin than anything else over the last few years.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#170

Post by yarrel »

eropple wrote: post #163
tux1968 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can tell journald to forward everything to rsyslogd and grep to your heart's content. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Rsyslog#journald's_sysl...

How do I remove this buggy attack surface from that workflow and why should I have to?
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