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Linux distros without systemd

ungleich.ch

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#361

Post by boomlinde »

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 like git's UX. Anything outside the typical flow is like walking into a garage filled with old stuff you thought you might need again some day, sifting through boxes of gadgets looking for that one thing you actually do need this time. Productive? Maybe not, but the experience is a much broader subject.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#362

Post by the_why_of_y »

craigsmansion wrote: post #349
the_why_of_y wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's Debian violating their social contract that was the problem for me. Which clause of the social contract did Debian violate? https://www.debian.org/social_contract

"Our priorities are our users and free software" Debian ranked SystemD adoption over their users, since it broke users' computers, even though there were viable alternatives available that would have not broken these systems. I still like Debian, but I'm not letting them (directly) near my systems again.

"Breaking user's computers" sounds like a bug of severity "critical", which would block the release. Can you point me to your bug report?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#363

Post by bagol »

sprash wrote: post #154
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…

I watched the video a few moths ago. I disagree with almost everything this guy said.

I'm interested in which points you disagree, because I, in the opposite, agree with almost everything the guy said.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#364

Post by cracauer »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #326
cracauer wrote: post #279

I have way too many cases of systemd startup items hanging with their timeout for no good reason. Worse, my most complicated high-uptime machine usually does not shut down in a reasonable time. Systemd says "waiting for session user cracauer" (something like it) for whatever reason. It also hung on undoing swapspace, when that swapspace was a custom stack of block layers. I don't need swapspace to be "shut down". It…

systemd errs on the safe side and thus it tries really hard to shut things down safely vs just yanking the plug. The timeouts are easily configurable if that's a problem for you, but I'd argue that if services hang too often for you, there's an underlying problem with your system somewhere, (i.e. your mounts or such, I'd consult journald for dependency cycles).

There might be some way in which I had run a system that caused those endless slowdowns.

But the point is, and that's why I think systemd is garbage, that there is nothing there that helps me debug what is going on. If the shutdown is hanging there is nothing to do except the reset button or waiting for an eventual reboot. In neither case will there be any forensics about what exactly systemd had tried to do and how it thought that it failed.

That is the part that is not acceptable.

P.S. I shouldn't have to manually adjust a timeout on disabling swapspace on shutdown to prevent a need for a reboot by reset button. The kind of thinking that got big timeouts into those things is precisely why I say that systemd people just think differently than I do.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#365

Post by m4rtink »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #317
chme wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not in any camp. I do think that systemd is very useful but have concerns that they simply don't have the man power to maintain that broad feature set and scope they have set themselves. What previously would be done in multiple different competing projects by different people with different ideas in different companies, is now done in a single code-base. I can imagine that innovation will be hindered that way,…

That's a valid concern, but it's worth noting that not every component systemd replaced, (ie consolekit), was actually being maintained, so arguably we're in a better situation now from that standpoint.

Not to mention systemd being used in all current enterprise Linux distros with people being paid for maintaining it in missing critical usecases.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#366

Post by cracauer »

webstrand wrote: post #319
cracauer wrote: post #279

I have way too many cases of systemd startup items hanging with their timeout for no good reason. Worse, my most complicated high-uptime machine usually does not shut down in a reasonable time. Systemd says "waiting for session user cracauer" (something like it) for whatever reason. It also hung on undoing swapspace, when that swapspace was a custom stack of block layers. I don't need swapspace to be "shut down". It…

I've struggled with, and am still struggling with, units hanging on shutdown. It's my biggest complaint with systemD aside from journald eating its own logs. I've been using magic SysRq to force hanging units to quit. SysRq + e sends SIGINT to all processes, and SysRq + i sends SIGKILL.

Sending SIGINT to all processes isn't what is needed here. It needs to go to the "processes" that are currently going on. With systemd's parallel execution that can still be narrowed down in a useful way, especially is some tail of some hanging command is running alone by now.

Obviously what the BSDs are doing, sending SIGQUIT to just the currently blocking-the-shutdown processes, is far superior. Now the coredumps are floating around the filesystem and they'll be there after reboot, and you can see who did what and was hanging in what backtrace.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#367

Post by massysett »

systemd is pervasive in the GNU/Linux world and I think it’s futile to stay on GNU/Linux and try to avoid systemd. Just look at the list of distros in the article: a bunch of obscure forks of prominent systemd distros like Debian and Arch, a distro (Gentoo) whose main claim to fame is compile it yourself, one where they say a leading Google search is whether the distro is dead, and one where they say “oh gee, we haven’t heard of it, let us know if it works.”

Seems to me that if you hate systemd, it’s time to try a BSD. GNU/Linux has been going down this path of complexity for years. These same arguments spawned with udev years ago, and Slackware held out then just as it is with systemd. OpenBSD on the other hand embraces simplicity and the old UNIX way. Of course it also lacks niceties like Bluetooth, but that’s the price you pay. Maybe systemd is needed to manage complex systems that support ugly things like Bluetooth.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#368

Post by zapzupnz »

effie wrote: post #253
eropple wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking for clarification isn't a strawman, sorry. And it sure seemed like you were correcting me, which is why I asked. But I said that journald was the only mandatory component of systemd outside of PID1. You said this was wrong. I'm waiting for you to extrapolate? Does systemd only work with the "canonical" dbus-broker? Or does it want ("want" as I'm reading stuff that suggests it isn't absolutely required, but I'm…

This is out of the line. You were given civil arguments for why systemd requires Dbus but in your response, you accuse the other person of being a jerk and "big-timeing". Please use the strongest interpretation of other people's claims on the topic, before using them as a means to accuse them of wrongdoing.

That person is big-timing. Their tone ("you should read more" and so on) is in violation of the HN guidelines, filled with needless snark and condescension. The offending comment has been flagged by multiple users who agree that the comment doesn't meet community standards.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#369

Post by ajross »

viraptor wrote: post #352
ajross wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 part…

For the CVEs, it's the comments like this: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/5998#issuecomment-30... (Just in case, this is an security issue because it enables constant dosing, as well as clears the resolver cache making spoofing easier)

I think that's valid enough. Not sure it rises to the level of "OMG they ignore bugs" implied by the original comment though. I mean... they took the patch and fixed the bug, right? Poettering was just being a jerk about whether it deserved a CVE.

(Also... gotta be honest that's sort of a vanity CVE. Note the complete lack of details in the report itself, it never saw an eyeball after it was filed. It's valid enough, but frankly I'm with Poettering on the specifics here: if we filed a CVE for every theoretically-exploitable-but-unexploited-until-fix-released crash bug the system would be beyond useless.)

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#370

Post by int_19h »

effie wrote: post #228
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.

If you run or write that command into script without checking what DIR variable contains, the problem is in your lack of experience with shell, not the language choice. Also nowadays, rm itself has --preserve-root as default, so this won't delete your root fs.

By the same logic, if an app written in C has a security issue due to a null pointer or buffer overflow, the problem is clearly the coder's lack of experience with C.
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