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Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

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Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#121

Post by justin66 »

Sebb767 wrote: post #86
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

I highly disagree. Sure, it contains a lot of buzzwords, but it clearly describes systemd and its philosophy in a single paragraph. It's not the first thing you should throw at someone unprepared (because then it would really be intimidation), but it prevents you from reading 20 pages of documentation and not getting the gist. Sometimes, a concise, high-level overview is what you need.

> it clearly describes systemd

It really doesn’t.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#122

Post by coldtea »

rlonn wrote: post #57
ratorx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a fan of this description. It might not be the easiest to understand or the first one you should read, but I wish more things had this kind of description somewhere (but not necessarily on the introductory materials or front page).

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

That's what you've got from a very clear technical description, in a very detailed history and breakdown?

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#123

Post by coldtea »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

Exactly. “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

Idempotent is a very clear and quite basic term: being able to run something multiple times with no different outcome than running it once. A very valuable property for certain systems (even for simple shell scripts).

And the description of systemd just uses bog standard terms related to what systemd does and the resources it manages.

But I get the feeling that both this and the parent comment it agrees with were more about the putdown and talking bad at someone, than about a technical or other objection.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#124

Post by kinghajj »

b112 wrote: post #98
throwaway984393 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His name is Lennart Poettering, and apparently he was tasked with reinventing the entire operating system

Quite true, and he was coerced! http://systemd-the-porno.com

... I don't get it? Who is "Madeline" supposed to represent?

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#125

Post by arendtio »

Spooky23 wrote: post #67
rlonn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s buzzword bingo with the aim to inflate the writer’s ego and intimidate the reader. This stuff happens all the time when insecure people get to write things.

Exactly. “Idempotent” is one of the key words used as a cudgel in this way. It’s great for the bullshit artist, as to a layman the dictionary definition is completely inscrutable.

Actually, it is just a word to describe the property that if you do something repeatedly, it leads to the same result as doing it just once. So the latter executions don't change anything.

And because it is such a common property when talking about algorithms and APIs the word is pretty common among CS people.

One very popular example are REST APIs because some HTTP verbs are idempotent and others are not [1]. This is also the reason why your browser asks you, if you want to submit a form again when refreshing a page that has been reached by submitting a POST-form.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfe...

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#127

Post by Blikkentrekker »

vanviegen wrote: post #94
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, but I would not like to have to patch it to modify something that on other systems can be modified with either a configuration option, or a shell script. To me, the most poisonous example that contrasts the traditional design with Freedesktop's design is acpid contrasting logind. In the former case, an acpi event is sent, and acpid simply executes a file such as `/etc/acpi/action/lid_down.sh`. That file ca…

Although I like the acpid approach, the logind way is probably safer to abstract behind a user friendly GUI. That's what most people will be using. :-/

And that is probably the motivation for this design philosophy of limiting options that Redhat and Freedesktop champion where more and more, simple, clean, turing complete solutions are replaced by a discrete list of simple options.

But it does not change at all why I dislike it, and why I am annoyed by Freedesktop's pushing and insistence that many keep to these more custoizable solutions supposedly simply because they are “stuck in their ways” and that their philosophy is the future and “modern”, whereas all I see is more hurdles that stop me from effectively being the master of my own machine.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#128

Post by coldtea »

marcodiego wrote: post #3

Systemd pissed off many people. For me and most users, the transition was fully imperceptible. With the difference that systemctl tools seem to work better for what it does than the many sparse different tools it replaced.

I like systemd, but I abhor the arrogance and manouvering with which is was pushed.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#129

Post by jandrese »

Gigachad wrote: post #76
jandrese wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SystemD is kind of like MacOS, if you have a typical use case then it makes everything very easy. If you are doing something weird it can make your life a living hell.

Can you give some examples?

Trying to set up network booting with NFS mounted root with SystemD is a challenge to say the least.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#130

Post by xarthna »

I used systemd for a time, and after looking into all the documentation I found it hard to understand and it's scope overreaching. It doesn't stand by the unix philosophy of mechanism not policy and is prescriptive in it's inplementation. As another comment stated, the politics behind how it was pushed never sat right with me and I believe it is leading the Linux community to vendor lock in.

I have been using s6 on Artix and find it a great init system and service manager with a clear cut design goal of knowing where to stop. It does what it is supposed to do and no more - by design. It doesn't have the user friendly interface of systemctl but that is being currently worked on. If one is looking for an alternative to systemd, I think it is an excellent option to consider.

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