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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#241

Post by silversconfused »

telmich wrote: post #51
scurvy wrote: post #47

I don't like it when my process init and logging system also tries to manage my volume mounts. If I unmount a device, I don't want systemd going behind my back and remounting it for me. It's non standard behavior changes like this that drive systemd hate.

From what I observe, the hate from systemd USERS towards non-systemd advocates is higher than the hate of non-systemd advocates to systemd.

This whole comment section certainly supports that observation. Massive amounts of "you're doing it wrong" instead of compassion.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#242

Post by loeg »

amalcon wrote: post #231
sanderjd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not such a lover of Go, but: non-sarcastically, Go may well have been a good choice.

> Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers started the project to develop systemd in 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History > Go was publicly announced in November 2009,[29] and version 1.0 was released in March 2012. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)#Hist... The brand-new language that Google just announced last year was probably not considered a serious option here.

It's 2019 and Go still has a much weaker toolchain and infrastructure story than C (which has a 30 year head start).

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#243

Post by erik_seaberg »

jdefr89 wrote: post #191
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…

This is always the case with any new software. Things may get a bit worse before they get better. Honestly Systemd addresses the complexities of a modern system in the simplest fashion but no simpler, and that is the key. It is in the same spirit as launchd on macOS. It works well overall and end up being more portable and consistent in the long run. Hatred for it seems to come mostly out of dogma, something to be av…

launchd doesn't break nohup. It doesn't have any opinions about processes started from shells. systemd does, which is completely inappropriate scope creep.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#244

Post by mjw1007 »

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.

There's a lot of truth in what you're saying, but I think you have "Motte" and "Bailey" backwards.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#245

Post by loeg »

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.

You probably mean local maxima.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#246

Post by loeg »

api wrote: post #176
dual_basis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Is hg as fast as git?

No. You still have to launch the Python process per command, which is "extremely" slow (relative to C programs). I air-quote extremely because the difference for a single command is small relative to human time, but it matters for automation that invokes many commands.

This post is from 2018, and maybe Hg's frontend is written in C or Rust now (I don't follow its development). But if it is still a Python-driven runtime, the same basic criticisms apply:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-May/153296...

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#247

Post by silversconfused »

ripdog wrote: post #201
yarrel wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why on earth do systemd haters insist on capitalizing the D? It's really amazing how people think mistyping the name is some kind of useful or novel criticism of the software.

It's a classic joke. http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/studlycaps.html

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#248

Post by acdha »

blibble wrote: post #227
acdha wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you already had a problem. It might not have been as obvious because it was enough slower to avoid the race condition under normal circumstances but I’ve hit those problems many times over the years.

Again, I've said that I know there are issues, that I end up discovering one at a time. the problem is not the issues themselves, as once I know they're there I can trivially google for how to fix them, it's the fact they don't show up except sometimes I do not care about boot speed at all, I care that I upgrade the system to a new distro release with systemd, test it, then it continues to work that way until I chang…

> I just want my systems to boot, run my simple applications, then shutdown when I ask them to

Which is what you get out of the box with systemd. The only problems you mentioned either apply equally (e.g. shutdown delays due to blocked processes — having supported NFS clients, let me tell you that was not a new problem in the 90s…) or are due to misunderstandings about how to use other components.

For example, if you have a critical service started in cron with no error handling or recovery, you always had an unstable system and were simply lucky not to have seen it fail before now. Projects like Upstart and systemd were started in large part due to people getting tired of having to kludge around those limitations of the older approaches. Having fixed systems which were configured that way in the past, I much prefer using something which solves it by design than continuing to bet on being lucky.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#249

Post by michaelmrose »

vetinari wrote: post #180
jimktrains2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tog…

It's a very strange argument that I have seen previously that someone could write an alternative to systemd but haven't ergo systemd must be the best alternative.

This is wholly and totally imaginary. Every part of system has an alternative because it is all solving existing problems that people have been solving for decades with a variety of tools.

The only actual challenge is replacing just part of systemd while retailing compatibility with the rest of it.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#250

Post by tetha »

blibble wrote: post #238
dullgiulio wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bash is memory safe until you run 'rm -rf $DIR/' when DIR is unset. Let's just say the language choice went from bad to equally bad.

do beginner bash guides not tell you to "set -u"? all the system scripts on my system have it it causes the script to terminate with an error if it encounters use of an unset variable

Not just -u - always unless you have a good reason. Fail on non-zero exit code outside of some special cases, undefined variables, and non-zero exit codes in a pipeline. And always use shellcheck, shellcheck is too good not to use tbh.
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