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Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

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Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#61

Post by pengaru »

bilalmaleq wrote: post #33

The hate towards systemd stems from a fact that it tries to do so many things -- which is clearly against Unix philosophy. Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.

> Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.

You're willfully conflating the systemd project repository with the init system.

I use systemd the init system, but in-tree components like resolved and networkd have never run on any of my machines.

Surely you can understand that a monorepo with code reuse across myriad components has its advantages, and that systemd the init system can be just a subset of that tree.

One can argue the systemd project is simply following in the Linux kernel's footsteps here. It too is a monorepo chock full of all kernel functionality one might ever need, with the expectation that use cases will pick and choose what snowflake suits them best.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#62

Post by zokier »

bilalmaleq wrote: post #33

The hate towards systemd stems from a fact that it tries to do so many things -- which is clearly against Unix philosophy. Also, it has 1.2 million lines of code. It's massive for an init system. It increases the chance of potential bugs which can be exploited.

Systemd is umbrella project for many software components, one of which is pid1 init. Almost all of the components are optional and many of them integrate through well-defined interfaces.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#63

Post by bityard »

sgerenser wrote: post #17
blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

I’ve never heard of one either. While systemd is certainly more complex than old school init scripts, and arguably deviates quite a bit from the “Unix philosophy,” it seems some people just have an irrational hatred towards it. To the point of making up problems with it that I’ve never heard anyone actually having.

There are a few reasons why systemd left a bad taste in the mouths of many Linux enthusiasts:

Systemd replaces (or tries to replace) whole swaths of OS functionality all at once, instead of addressing each piece individually. As a result, all of the systemd pieces are tightly integrated and nigh-inseparable, and critics claim this was intentional so that distributions could not easily pick and choose the parts they wanted. My understanding is that this is better now. In my experience, some pieces are better than others. (Systemd-timesyncd is absolute rubbish compared to chrony, for example.)

Although the goal of writing a better init system is laudable, a lot of people who looked at it early on not impressed with the implementation (a lot of NIH wheel-reinventing) and mediocre code quality.

It was introduced into Fedora rather suddenly with seemingly little warning, community discussion, or press coverage. In the Linux world where big things change slowly if at all, other popular distributions seemed to adopt it fairly quickly, one after the other. This raised a lot of conspiracy-like speculation about how that could have possibly happened.

The developers are famously obstinate about their technical decisions and often argue in, close, or ignore bugs asking them to consider a different direction for specific low-level issues. There have been a few public disagreements over "correct behavior" when integrating with other projects (e.g. the Linux kernel).

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#64

Post by bityard »

midasuni wrote: post #54
sgerenser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never heard of one either. While systemd is certainly more complex than old school init scripts, and arguably deviates quite a bit from the “Unix philosophy,” it seems some people just have an irrational hatred towards it. To the point of making up problems with it that I’ve never heard anyone actually having.

Had a problem with systemd-resolved yet again the other day. Blatted resolv.conf and job done, but between systemd and related things (network manager etc) it just breaks the way things have worked for decades and gives many people no benefit. This isn’t all systemd of course, it’s the distros that choose to use it.

Two systemd things that I disable straight away on every box: systemd-resolved, and systemd-timesyncd. The former tries to be "smart" and therefore tends to mess up DNS in very simple scenarios (such as a box in a datacenter with a static IP) and the latter is just plain rubbish compared to chrony.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#65

Post by cempaka »

alyandon wrote: post #52
agwa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had data loss (assuming that's what "lossage" means), but here's an incomplete list of problems I've experienced on systems running systemd: * System randomly taking 5+ minutes to boot * Daemons sometimes not starting on boot * Logging sometimes just stops (I confirmed this was caused by a systemd bug) * Logging in over SSH starts taking 2 minutes and can only be fixed by reboot (I confirmed this was cause…

Some random observations: * System randomly taking 5+ minutes to boot "systemd-analyze blame" can help identify issues relating to boot time * Daemons sometimes not starting on boot This most often occurs for me when services don't start quickly enough (too much contention on spinning rust and aggressive default timeout settings) so I have to adjust startup timeouts. "systemctl --state=failed" along with "systemctl s…

> I've sometimes had this happen and for me it seems to be related to systemd-resolved deciding to stop responding to queries and the only solution I've found so far that actually works is to restart the system.

I hit this all the time on my Arch laptop and was a major impetus to switch to Void.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#66

Post by alyandon »

cempaka wrote: post #65
alyandon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some random observations: * System randomly taking 5+ minutes to boot "systemd-analyze blame" can help identify issues relating to boot time * Daemons sometimes not starting on boot This most often occurs for me when services don't start quickly enough (too much contention on spinning rust and aggressive default timeout settings) so I have to adjust startup timeouts. "systemctl --state=failed" along with "systemctl s…

> I've sometimes had this happen and for me it seems to be related to systemd-resolved deciding to stop responding to queries and the only solution I've found so far that actually works is to restart the system. I hit this all the time on my Arch laptop and was a major impetus to switch to Void.

I really wish I could reproduce the thing on demand. I'd file a bug report but it has happened only a handful of times to me in the past 2 years and only on a single server. :-/

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#67

Post by pengaru »

deckard1 wrote: post #60
blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

I was finally coming around to systemd. Then they broke my laptop. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/25269 I'm still livid at this Luca guy gaslighting people on the "correct" behavior of a feature people were using for years already. They re-purposed an existing sleep mode and changed it entirely to mean something else. Originally you would set a timeout that your laptop would suspend and then hibernate. The…

> I'm still livid at this Luca guy gaslighting people on the "correct" behavior of a feature people were using for years already.

As a fellow (though not lately very active there) systemd maintainer, reading his comments in that issue is a real bummer.

I'm not sure I'd call it "gaslighting", I don't think he was even bothering to grok what people were asking for. Not until it became a pile-on of additional systemd members @yuwata and @DaanDeMeyer.

Maybe he's checked out a bit with all the drama going on over at BlueHat?

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#68

Post by daneel_w »

andrewaylett wrote: post #18
daneel_w wrote: post #6

Devuan ( https://www.devuan.org/ ) is a fork of Debian with the specific aim of removing systemd, as an alternative.

It is unfortunately trivial to argue that Devuan is without point, as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd. As, indeed, they said they allow for would when they decided to adopt it. If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an enti…

>"as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd"

There's obviously more to this (and to Devuan) than just uninstalling systemd and installing sysvinit. Devuan's package repo (for which Debian is the upstream) contains a lot of customizations to allow certain packages to function with a sysvinit foundation.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#69

Post by lovelyviking »

JohnFen wrote: post #59
lovelyviking wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are a number of things that I just can't accomplish with systemd that I can accomplish without it. can you name those? I am eager to try them in system with minimum resources.

Sure. My most recent headache is with using a USB wifi dongle. During system startup, I want to attach some remote drives over wifi, so I need to be able to do that after the wifi connection is established. Systemd does not appear to be able to tell when that happens. It thinks the network is established before it actually is, and then the mount calls cause the startup process to pause for 3 minutes for those mount c…

Thank you. I wish to add bluetooth dongle and expecting some headaches there. It seems setting up a full bluetooth stack would be challenging to say the least and I wander if systemd would contribute more to the challenge or to the solution.

Re: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

#70

Post by bitwize »

agwa wrote: post #30
blakesterz wrote: post #15

This finishes with: "Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug." How common is a systemd-induced loss? I've never had one, and I've never seen or heard of any. Is this a larger problem that I've somehow missed? (This is an honest question, I was just surprised to read this)

I've never had data loss (assuming that's what "lossage" means), but here's an incomplete list of problems I've experienced on systems running systemd: * System randomly taking 5+ minutes to boot * Daemons sometimes not starting on boot * Logging sometimes just stops (I confirmed this was caused by a systemd bug) * Logging in over SSH starts taking 2 minutes and can only be fixed by reboot (I confirmed this was cause…

Hackers used to say "win" to mean succeeding at some technical task, particularly if you gain some desired advantage, and "lose" to mean failure or being put at a disadvantage. Windows 11 is a losing operating system. Tree-sitter is a huge win for code editors. Etc.

"Lossage" means "the consequences of a lose" even if no data loss occurs. Some people consider systemd with its complexity and tightly coupled components to be a lose.

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