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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#171

Post by sprash »

aerique wrote: post #74

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 mis…

I use void now on everything, work, home even my Raspberry PIs. Can confirm that installation is a PITA. If you want something more fancy than the standard installation like an encrypted boot disk you won't get anything running without touching chroot a few times.

But once it runs it runs! The most "stable" rolling release distro I have tried so far. Something that can not be said about Gentoo.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#172

Post by eropple »

yarrel wrote: post #170
eropple wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"How do I remove" - I dunno, because I don't care to remove it. Somebody's probably done it. Search on Google? It's open source, so look at the code, submit a patch, fork if you gotta?

"Buggy attack surface" - I am unaware of attacks that target journald; can you point me to a practicable PoC attack?

"Why should I have to" - because other people are building your distros, expending their effort on open source projects, and as part of doing that they made decisions on your behalf. Feel free to not use those distros for ones that make decisions you prefer; the choice is yours.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#173

Post by JdeBP »

eropple wrote: post #140
tyingq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> Journald is also not part of systemd core--at least, I think so; this one I've never really looked at myself.

You really should. journald is not optional.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#174

Post by mixmastamyk »

tssva wrote: post #62

The biggest complaint I regularly see about systemd from those that don't like it is that it violates the UNIX philosophy by combining too many functionalities into one project. Based upon this I found the following quote from the article in regards to Alpine Linux, a distribution based upon BusyBox which implements the functionality of over 100 usually separate executables into one, quite amusing. > It is small and…

It does one thing, everything.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#175

Post by ajross »

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 have a track record of labeling serious bugs as non-issues, ignoring them, or just not filing them as CVEs. Serious issues keep coming up.

This seems like it needs some citation. There certainly have been bugs. I think it's legitimate to talk (with specifics!) about cultural issues with systemd's development and its impact on security. But I don't see that this statement is particularly well supported. In particular I genuinely don't know what you're referring to with respect to ignored/suppressed bugs and CVEs.

I mean, systemd is a lot of code and makes up a big chunk of the system plumbing these days. Obviously it's going to make up a big chunk of the bug budget. People don't get upset about flaws in someone's random cgroup launcher or encrypted block device manager or daemon wrapper not because those projects don't have bugs, but because basically no one uses them. Because basically everyone is using systemd!

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#176

Post by api »

dual_basis wrote: post #134
api wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underly…

I strongly agree that git has a UX issue, and the widespread adoption of it over mercurial is a perfect example of inertia leading us to get stuck in a local minima.

I haven't tried hg but from what I've seen one major advantage of git that gets under-acknowledged is its speed. Git is fast and fast really does matter for a version control system you use constantly. Is hg as fast as git?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#177

Post by eropple »

JdeBP wrote: post #173
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…

> Journald is also not part of systemd core--at least, I think so; this one I've never really looked at myself. You really should. journald is not optional.

Yup, seems you're right - journald appears to be the only mandatory non-PID1 process for systemd. Good to know. It also will forward happily to rsyslogd if that's your bag and then you never have to look at it, so I'm gonna just give a big ol' emoji shrug on this one.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#178

Post by yarrel »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #17
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…

By that standard SystemD proponents' fetishization of ineptly implemented change for change's sake clearly makes their position invalid.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#179

Post by ajross »

fabiomaia wrote: post #71
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?

Docker is about deployment. The isolation model is built on the same tooling that systemd uses, but the usage model is all about how to come up with an easily isolated runtime environment that can be published and extended in a big development community.

Basically systemd has nothing like a dockerfile, that's not what it's for.

I think there's a good argument though that Docker should be retargetting its encapsulation work to a lower level OS primitive where possible (which would be systemd on linux) instead of rolling its own.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#180

Post by vetinari »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #120
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't mean in terms of the binary, but in terms of the whole system.

You would have to write quite a bit of code...

The success of systemd is in that it solves problems for distros that none other was solving (or even looking other way). If you want to successfully replace it, you have to solve the same problems, and do it better, so it would be worth replacing systemd.

And because none other was doing it, you would have to write solution that does that. Slapping some bash scripts together won't do it.

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