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Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

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Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#131

Post by hedora »

Gigachad wrote: post #82
tarkin2 wrote: post #46

The hatred for Systemd seems to come from those who see the unix philosophy of small, single use programs being thrown away in favour of a monolith. Back when I had linux as a desktop (around the day of slackware 10) there were plenty of problems with simple stuff like mounting usbs, connecting to wifi etc--possible but a pain. I've hardly looked at systemd or linux in such a way for a long time, however.

Linux users tend to come up with whatever "philosophy" suits their agenda of complaining about all change. The unix philosophy gets thrown out the window as soon as it comes to Wayland which took a huge, bloated, and buggy Xorg and broke it down to something more sane and manageable.

Doesn’t wayland force window managers to be integrated into some behemoth bloated monolith?

My preferred WM is evilwm. I read the entire source to it in a few hours, and occasionally edit the source when I want to customize it for my odd workflows. I don’t think that’s possible with wayland.

Also, wayland forced a bunch of questionable security policies around screen capture and keyboard handling, and didn’t provide escape hatches required for basic functionality. Is that fixed yet?

I stopped paying attention years ago, to be honest.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#132

Post by ray__ »

diegocg wrote: post #81
Spooky23 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perfectly fine word. There is absolutely no reason why CS shouldn't have it's own jargon. I found the description very descriptive.

"I found the description very descriptive" - an idempotent system in action.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#133

Post by throwaway2331 »

jasonjayr wrote: post #107
imoverclocked wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network configuration (on say, Debian) is still a pain and has a lot of different ways of accomplishing similar tasks. Anything beyond the plain vanilla singular network device that is either dhcp/static is often painful. Systemd has some sauce, there is legacy /etc/network* stuff, there are daemons which can be configured graphically… it’s still a mess. In this arena, I think systemd has failed for the last decade.…

Networking on linux is wildly powerful. Most desktop/SOHO installations would just be Wifi + DHCP. Maybe some VPN in the mix. But on the other side of the scale, there are routers with complex netfiltering, vlans, crazy GRE Tunnels, Tun/Tap, Wireguard, macvlans split between namespaces, bridges, etc, you name it. Defining a straightforward configuration structure for that complexity is going to be insane. NetworkMana…

My main gripe hasn't been that I want something done an exact way. It's that I want to achieve some semblance of what I'm trying to do in a reasonable amount of time.

NetworkManager is god awful in this regard. Even for simple desktop uses, if I want something more advanced than simply connecting to the Wi-Fi (even this requires finagling), then I'm fucked.

For example, I've been trying to find what it is that keeps overwriting /etc/resolv.conf.

After reading through various man pages and online forums, I still don't know. Instead, I just stick to one access point, and manually write to /etc/resolv.conf everytime I boot.

Compare this to OpenBSD: nothing fucking touches my /etc/resolv.conf. That file is mine. I write to it and other daemons read from it.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#134

Post by bonzini »

hedora wrote: post #110
Gigachad wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some examples?

Not the person you’re responding to, but try getting it to mount home directories over NFS. I’m sure there are many other examples. Honestly, even after 10 years, I still have’t had a single positive interaction with it vs. traditional init. From what I’ve seen, old-school init handled (and continues to handle) the problems systemd “solved” more robustly and elegantly. I don’t get it.

I'm not sure what's hard about mounting home directories over NFS?

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#135

Post by ADSSDA »

justin66 wrote: post #121
Sebb767 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree to disagree.

Maybe because I've worked in embedded Linux for so long (including on inits of various forms), but that description clearly articulates exactly what systemd is and does and I appreciate the direct, crystal clear technical language rather than some long form essay written assuming a clueless reader with 0 technical background.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#136

Post by arendtio »

throwawayboise wrote: post #48
an_d_rew wrote: post #23

This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…

It reads like an over-eager developer read Design Patterns and then was tasked with writing a new init system for Linux.

I think the whole problem with systemd wasn't just about technology. The results were spectacular. Before systemd normal Linux boot times were well over a minute. After switching you could get below 10 seconds on the same hardware. And that is just one aspect.

I think the core of the problem was somewhere between the style of introducing changes and the way how people communicated. After all, it speaks for itself that pulseaudio and systemd shared a lot of common criticism. Both are technically sound systems today, but in a way, systemd was just the escalation of the pulseaudio debacle.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#137

Post by mihcsab »

akagusu wrote: post #26

I am old enough to remember that problems with systemd were less technical and more political. People didn't like the way systemd developers pushed the community to adopt systemd, specially when they asked for 3rd party developers to make systemd a hard dependency. Unfortunately,people don't remember this today, and think users resisted to systemd adoption only because they didn't like systemd.

My problem is that things start to depend on it, like snapd... I was looking into running anbox on wsl today, but I realized I need to compile stuff, because they distribute anbox in snap form only, so I kind of gave up...

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#138

Post by johnny22 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #106
hedora wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My devuan linux desktop says something like this on each boot: INIT: version 2.88 booting Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.

I've tried Devuan once then it some roadblock because Docker wouldn't run easily on it, but that was a long time ago. I may try it again one of these days now that the latest Devuan stable is based on Debian Bullseye. The "why" is simple: to restore some balance in the force. I do prefer my Linux world to be one where I still have a choice as to which init system and PID 1 my system is running.

you could at least give openrc a go.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#139

Post by johnny22 »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #71
dharmab wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the init system, the most common predecessor was a combination of sysvnit and "initscripts" (a shell script for each daemon on your system). Writing the init scripts was simple for the most basic cases but quite complex for complete, bug free case coverage. A big appeal of systemd for packagers and sysadmins was the relative simplicity of unit files. Now we just have to fill out a simple boilerplate INI style fil…

It was not. There is strange false history that systemd replaced sysvinit, which occurred only on Debian, because Debian was the last major system to discard sysvinit. Gentoo had replaced sysvinit with OpenRC in 2006; Fedora and Ubuntu were using Upstart in 2005. systemd primarily replaced Upstart and systems that used Runit or OpenRC tended to have stayed with them. Frankness be, this false history seems to be craft…

is that 2006 number correct re: gentoo? Although i wouldn't start by comparing against openrc, but rather the previous uhmm "baselayout" init system. (sorry, i haven't used gentoo in a long time).

The previous gentoo init system was already better than sysvinit and initscripts.

I still prefer and use systemd though.

Re: Systemd, 10 years later (2020)

#140

Post by [deleted] »

an_d_rew wrote: post #23

This was an amazing review, and love systemd or hate it, this article gives a fantastic history and exposition of what systemd actually is . My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think): systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit.…

[deleted]
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