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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#381

Post by sprash »

bagol wrote: post #363
sprash wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> there is a tragedy

Systemd was criticizes right from the start for the same things that it is criticized now. No misunderstanding. No bad timing. No tragedy present.

> People don't like change

Wrong! People love change if it is an improvement. People don't like change if things get worse.

> Services, System configuration, daemons, etc are separate distinct things and need distinct C code to be managed

Nope. They are essentially the same thing and should be dealt with by small scripts.

> It does not really violate the Unix philosophy

Nobody really knows what "Unix philosophy" actually is. Therefore it does not matter if it gets "violated". However systemd definitely violates my and many others taste for good software. It is bad taste.

> It's not bloated and monolithic because it's not one binary

The stupidest argument ever. If you have a lot of tightly interdependent binaries that don't make any sense to exist outside of systemd you have a monolithic system were simple nuclear parts are not replaceable with alternatives. Besides from that: Its f*in bloated as hell.

> It's not as buggy as people claim

It is. Besides, the real problem is not the number of bugs, the prolem is getting rid of bugs. Recompiling C code just to get your init working is really a world of nightmares.

> People don't like systemd because they don't like Lennard Poettering

Most only care about technology and systemd is bad technology. Nobody cares about Poettering.

> UNIX is dead

Hearing that coming from a FreeBSD developer? Do his BSD buddy's agree? Why doesn't he switch to Windows? Sounds like conman to me. Remind me to never install FreeBSD. A big part of what made Linux great are the things that were borrowed from Unix and Plan9.

To make it short: The dude loves change and he wants FreeBSD to go in the direction of what Windows is today. I love change and I want Linux to go into the direction of Plan9.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#382

Post by mediocrejoker »

boomlinde wrote: post #358
natermer wrote: post #229

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. The 'Imperialistic Culture' you speak of is one of those made-up things that systemd haters keep repeating, but has no basis in reality. > They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting…

> Many of the bugs that make it onto Reddit/Hacker news are going to be ones that are largely changes in configuration defaults or behaviors that break things and are meant to be configured by the operating system designers that use it, not end users. Maybe it's not for systemd to decide what I'm meant to do. If changes to behavior that they only meant for operating system maintainers to rely on results in angry end-…

Are your init scripts available for viewing anywhere?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#383

Post by JdeBP »

krzyk wrote: post #306
mruts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone thinks that sysvinit is better than systemd, but RC definitely is.

Actually I do. systemd is too complicated for my needs, maybe it is usefull in some complicated system setups but for me (and probably others) it is too big, too complex and completely unneeded. What was the problem with sysvinit that they tried to fix? I don't see any.

systemd was aimed at the problems with Upstart rather than the problems with van Smoorenburg rc. van Smooreburg rc had already been superseded for its creators. Fedora was using Upstart.

The problems with van Smoorenburg rc are widely acknowledged, however, and motivated the creation of Upstart, finit, init-ng, and many other softwares; indeed, the problems of System 3/5 init/rc, which van Smoorenburg rc began as a clone of, similarly motivated the creation of the SAF in AT&T Unix System 5 release 4, the Solaris SMF, and the AIX SRC. There is a history of superseding them that goes back for decades. It is clearly wrong to claim that they are without problem. They've been recognized as problematic and people have been replacing them since before Linux was invented.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/system-5-rc-problems.html

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/unix-service-access-facility.html

* https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#384

Post by hyperdunc »

cracauer wrote: post #291

So, how are any of you systemd apologists defending this little gem? https://twitter.com/MartinCracauer/status/109470986305220199...

I would also like to know what the rationale is for this behavior. Showing immediate and useful feedback on the screen seems an obvious thing to do, especially when running a command at an interactive terminal.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#385

Post by JdeBP »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #350
nwallin wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that systemd works for you, and I'm not telling you (or others) that you shouldn't use it. The problem is the systemd monoculture. Wayland, Gnome etc are non-starters because they have hard dependencies on systemd, which is ridiculous. > For example, people are complaining about logind being included, but forget that consolekit was unmaintained before that. I use neither logind nor consolekit. These are solutio…

> The problem is the systemd monoculture. And sysvinit wasn't pretty much a monocultur?. I mean even OpenRC is basically sysvinit with a lipstick. > These are solutions for problems I don't have. Good for you . But event handling is something that many systems today do need and I think we should try to optimize for the common use case. As for you not needing logind/consolekit, sure, if security is not a concern on a…

systemd-logind does require systemd. That was one of the root causes of the Debian Hoo-Hah.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#386

Post by JdeBP »

vetinari wrote: post #266
michaelmrose wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> 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. Alternative doesn't mean 100% substitute both ways. The pre-systemd didn't go in their abstraction in the way, that systemd does - it is basically system-level, event handling machine. The events could be not only boot, but also…

> The pre-systemd didn't go in their abstraction

On the contrary, that's exactly what systemd's predecessor, Upstart, did. systemd, in contrast, did not. Basing the system around the concept of events triggering things turned out to cause problems, as discussed by Lennart Poettering and by Debian Technical Committee members during the Debian Hoo-Hah as their reason for not choosing Upstart.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#387

Post by acdha »

dijit wrote: post #356
masklinn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? The reasons for the controversies have not really changed (lennart, the idea that it's not "unixy", a takeover of many subsystems by various systemd components, …) so people who didn't like systemd years ago probably still don't. As somebody who's not really involved, I found Benno Rice's The Tragedy of Systemd[0] interesting and en…

I found that talk incredibly condescending. He speaks about launchd as if it’s a good thing but it’s quite universally accepted as a bad thing and apples attempts to upstream the problem to the bsd developers has been met with open hostility. It’s also to the point where Benno states that people don’t like change, but that’s really not true. Everyone jumped on virtualisation (except Theo De Raat), everyone jumped on…

> He speaks about launchd as if it’s a good thing but it’s quite universally accepted as a bad thing

This is your personal opinion being presented as fact. Speaking from some experience in the Mac admin world, I’d really want to see the survey you did to support that claim.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#388

Post by JdeBP »

natermer wrote: post #229
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…

> 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. The 'Imperialistic Culture' you speak of is one of those made-up things that systemd haters keep repeating, but has no basis in reality. > They pushed for Gnome to have a hard dependency on it so that everyone would be _forced_ to use it instead of just letting…

> On the other side you have a even driven OS configuration and management engine

You are repeating the there-is-only-sysvinit-and-systemd fallacy, pointed out years ago by the Uselessd Guy and decried by many others since but (alas!) still going strong today in this very discussion, and ironically you are doing it whilst erroneously ascribing things to systemd that it was intentionally designed not to be. systemd was explicitly designed not to be an event-driven system. The wholly event-driven system was Upstart, and in practice it turned out to be a problem. Lennart Poettering xyrself discussed the problem, as did some of the Debian Technical Committee members during the Debian Hoo-Hah.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20190306213420/https://uselessd....

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#389

Post by JdeBP »

dijit wrote: post #356
masklinn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? The reasons for the controversies have not really changed (lennart, the idea that it's not "unixy", a takeover of many subsystems by various systemd components, …) so people who didn't like systemd years ago probably still don't. As somebody who's not really involved, I found Benno Rice's The Tragedy of Systemd[0] interesting and en…

I found that talk incredibly condescending. He speaks about launchd as if it’s a good thing but it’s quite universally accepted as a bad thing and apples attempts to upstream the problem to the bsd developers has been met with open hostility. It’s also to the point where Benno states that people don’t like change, but that’s really not true. Everyone jumped on virtualisation (except Theo De Raat), everyone jumped on…

systemd is not written in C++.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#390

Post by yellowapple »

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…

> looking at sysvinit

That's the thing: there are lots of alternatives besides sysvinit specifically (OpenRC, Upstart, BSD-style RC, launchd, SMF, runit, etc.) on varying scales from "simpler than even sysvinit" to "more feature-rich than systemd". And yet, the best the systemd advocates could ever muster up is/was criticizing specific flaws with just sysvinit.

Of course sysvinit sucks, but you'll notice that (Devuan being the notable exception) most of the article's listed distros use something that's very much not sysvinit.

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