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Linux distros without systemd

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Re: Linux distros without systemd

#401

Post by yellowapple »

qxcbr wrote: post #7
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.

They didn't really have an option: the same organisation controls GNOME and systemd, so they introduced systemd as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd. And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME, so... Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly. Even Gentoo struggles with that, as it takes them a long time to release…

> And you can't have a distro out there without GNOME

cough cough Slackware cough cough Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu cough cough Tiny Core Linux cough cough the literal dozens if not hundreds of distros that ship with a desktop environment that's not GNOME or MATE or Cinnamon or some other derivation thereof cough cough cough

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#402

Post by yellowapple »

NikkiA wrote: post #27
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…

sysvinit was at least a thousand times easier than bsd init scripts, and I occasionally see people that are opposed to both systemd and sysvinit and think rc.local was 'it'. shakes head slowly

> sysvinit was at least a thousand times easier than bsd init scripts

¿Qué?

I guess we'll have to beg to differ here, but I prefer OpenBSD's (for example) init system over sysvinit or systemd any day. rc.subr is a godsend for eradicating all the boilerplate that "justified" switching to systemd. Enabling/disabling a daemon is as easy as adding a line to /etc/rc.conf.local (or just running "rcctl enable mydaemond", which does that for me). No fiddling with symlinking scripts to runlevel-specific folders (or, in fact, dealing with runlevels at all; if I need single-user mode, that's what bsd.rd is for).

One of these days I'd love to start ripping out the initscripts on my Slackware machines and replace them with something closer to OpenBSD (or hell, I wonder if I can just port OpenBSD's init to Linux?).

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#403

Post by yellowapple »

JdeBP wrote: post #130
NikkiA wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sysvinit was at least a thousand times easier than bsd init scripts, and I occasionally see people that are opposed to both systemd and sysvinit and think rc.local was 'it'. shakes head slowly

BSD rc scripts haven't worked in the way that you think that they have, for decades. Mewburn rc, which reduced many rc scripts to a couple of shell function calls and a handful of variable declarations, has been used by NetBSD since 2001, and FreeBSD started using it about a year later. OpenBSD, furthermore, reinvented Mewburn rc around 8 years ago. Project Trident (formerly TrueOS formerly PC-BSD) has also since the…

> /etc/rc.local was first declared obsolete in the BSD world and replaced by a system of drop-in files in a directory back in 1995.

OpenBSD still documents it as an implicitly-recommended way to start programs (though if it's possible to start it via e.g. rc.(local.)conf, then that's obviously preferable).

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#404

Post by yellowapple »

dredmorbius wrote: post #334
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High rate? Compared to the Linux kernel, systemd's CVE rate is very low.

Compared to sysvinit, upstart, or procd, say, to remain in the same domain space? (Though the implication that systemd is an OS Kernel is ... interesting.)

Don't you know? systemd is the world's most popular operating system! A shame it has such a terrible init system...

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#405

Post by yellowapple »

eropple wrote: post #398
craigsmansion wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the -d suffix is traditionally for service daemons. SystemD is not a service daemon. Lowercase is a UNIX convention. SystemD does not have a UNIX approach. Since SystemD is not a Unix service daemon it shouldn't be spelled "systemd" to prevent confusion.

This is...bizarre. Should I pejoratively call you "CRaIg" because I think you don't match up to my standards of what a Craig, or even a craig, is? Is that okay? I don't think it's okay. Names have meaning. It is a really minor bit of respect to use them correctly.

I think you replied to the wrong comment.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#406

Post by lamontcg »

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…

> I have a problem with the people being controlling, dismissive, and deceptive.

They're probably just busy.

And calling the "imperialistic" is annoying them, so you've destroyed your political capital with them.

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#407

Post by loeg »

JdeBP wrote: post #277
loeg wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> systemd was not a port of anything. And its immediate inspiration was Upstart Its motivation was perhaps upstart's shortcomings, but systemd was definitely inspired by the design of launchd and that was repeatedly and explicitly mentioned in Lennart's very first blog post introducing it: > But first, let's clear a few things up: is this kind of logic new? No, it certainly is not. The most prominent system that work…

No, that's not explicit. That's a few instances of "like launchd". Where M. Poettering actually is explicit about inspiration, xe writes the words: > we took a lot of inspiration from Upstart's code-base ... which they actually did and continued to do, from observation. There were significant discussions amongst the systemd people involving the way that things worked with Upstart, including (for just three examples o…

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree about what "explicit" means, and possibly also "inspire." (Based on the excerpts quoted verbatim from Lennart's blog post in my previous comment and general understanding of the English language.)

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#408

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

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…

At the end of the day it is the handling and haptics that count. So let me give you some anecdotical experience. A few weeks ago when the new Fedora came out i tried it as a live system from usb keychain, out of curiosity. It was the xfce live respin. Anyways, long story short, clicked around for a while, wasn't impressed much, shut it down. Flicker, flicker, the usual console messages scrolled by, and then it was stuck trying to unmount somesuch yadda yadda yarr yarr... for minutes. I wasn't in a hurry and waited, curious WHAT would happen. Nothing, just finally powering off after 2,5 to 3 minutes. I sat there and wondered: could it really be THAT slow? Was my usb-stick slow? Nope. Tried another stick, another laptop, even some other respins. Always the same. Dumbstruck of the audacity of the so called leader in Linux i just thought to myself that they must be on crack or some other bad stuff. Because when i tried a few other systemd-free live systems on the same sticks and hardware everything just whooshed by. Why is that? Are they living in a parallel universe? Do i have outliers in terms of hardware? At least in one case i don't think so because it is a very well supported Thinkpad which accepts almost anything i can throw at it, and the other a similar HP Elite Book. So there is that. Now what?

bzzzt! https://youtu.be/ulvgWoChvBU?t=9

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#409

Post by trickstra »

dullgiulio wrote: post #209
grumdan wrote: post #197

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. Additionally, this is not likely to stop, since they took an init system that was (mostly) written in a memory-safe language (bash) and rewrote it in a memory-unsafe language (C++), thus enabling a whole class of systemic security issues that will keep popping up in the fut…

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.

Are you saying something in C++ is preventing you from issuing that 'rm -rf' command?

Re: Linux distros without systemd

#410

Post by chme »

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.

Isn't it now much more difficult to figure out if certain components are or are not maintained?

ConsoleKit was used in many commercial linux distributions and still wasn't maintained, now that its part of systemd and systemd is maintained, does that mean that every component of it is as well?

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