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Boycott Systemd (2014)

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Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#61

Post by 112233 »

quicklime wrote: post #34
dale_glass wrote: post #26

I don't care about a single one of those. Computers exist to solve problems, not to be compliant with a particular philosophy. The appeals to Unix philosophy, dogma about how logs should be stored, etc, are all completely irrelevant to me. I don't run Linux because it fulfills an ideology but because it does a job. Also, journald is actually extremely nice. Of all the complaints, I don't really get some people's love…

The “Unix philosophy” is a core part of the user interface to Unix systems. You might not care about this yourself, but I’d bet that most people do care about UI consistency.

For almost any arguments against systemd, you can replace "systemd" with "linux kernel" and it still will be a valid argument, yet I have not seen many opponents of linux kernel on these grounds.

As an example: monolith, single project, includes a lot of functionality that should be separate, invents conventions, crash takes down all system...

Yet nobody in my memory has gone "kernel includes JIT compiler, let us boycott"

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#62

Post by gettodachoppa »

lynguist wrote: post #47

Summary of the points: and what they mean. 1. Systemd's Complexity and Scope: The increased complexity allows for better integration and coordination of system components. 2. Journal Files in Binary Format: The binary format improves performance and allows for richer metadata storage. 3. Systemd's Team Being Anti-Unix: The tight integration with the Linux kernel API optimizes the use of Linux-specific features. 4. Fo…

I'm not a systemd hater by any means, but I think you're presenting some of these in bad faith.

> Systemd as a Single Point of Failure: Proper maintenance and security practices can mitigate the risks associated with any critical software component.

"Proper" meaning very expensive and very complex that only a limited number of sysadmins can do? Likely involving expensive virtualization and/or redundnacy technologies? Going down a never-ending rabbit hole that pays a lot of consultants or corporations trapping you with vendor lock-in?

> Systemd's Viral Nature: The adoption of systemd by major projects like GNOME can be seen as the natural evolution of the ecosystem around a dominant technology.

This is naive take. It should be seen as what it is: systemd and Gnome are both Red Hat products (no matter what anyone says, Gnome is Red Hat's desktop), and RH leaders mandating that Gnome depend on systemd in order to ram through systemd's adoption in the same way Microsoft did IE.

There's also a small chance it was a typical Lennart Poettering "fuck you, what are you gonna do about it?" act of pure contempt for what anyone else thinks. That guy has got to be the most hated German since Adolf.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#63

Post by jraph »

gavinhoward wrote: post #58
jraph wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the Luddites designation. That said, what problems do you see with the systemd monoculture? Well, I'm not sure it's a mono-culture neither, we still have different init systems, both in Linux distributions and in other operating systems, so let's say its widespread usage?

A monoculture means the same thing as a monopoly if that monoculture is in the hands of few people. And it's obvious why a monopoly is bad. The systemd monoculture is the same kind of bad as a Google Chrome monoculture.

> And it's obvious why a monopoly is bad.

No, it's not obvious.

- The Linux kernel is strictly more widespread as systemd, do you see this as a bad monopoly the same way?

- In Switzerland, trains are operated by one (public) company. That's a monopoly. The service is, however, fantastic. The same cannot be said as French trains, open to competition, operated by several entities. There are failures incurring delays all the time, making you miss connections. We were better off when they weren't and when it was a public monopoly.

Sometimes, monopolies are bad. I have a lot of arguments against the Chrome monopoly. I don't have any against systemd.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#64

Post by midasuni »

vidarh wrote: post #24
kmeisthax wrote: post #9

>systemd's team is noticeably chauvinistic and anti-Unix ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER, ONE OF THESE THINGS IS a serious allegation against the values of systemd's maintainers that is not backed up by anything in the text. Unless the writer just doesn't understand what "chauvinism" is beyond being a malword. >systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy: "do one thing and do it well," representing a c…

I think the biggest flaw of systemd was "political" in grouping too many different tools under the single project name.

Quite. Systemd-resolved breaks dns a lot by default, leaves a pasty taste in my mouth.

The systemd-timesyncd also causes undesirable behaviour

This shouldn’t affect systemd-initd except it does because of the name.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#65

Post by Tommstein »

gettodachoppa wrote: post #62
lynguist wrote: post #47

Summary of the points: and what they mean. 1. Systemd's Complexity and Scope: The increased complexity allows for better integration and coordination of system components. 2. Journal Files in Binary Format: The binary format improves performance and allows for richer metadata storage. 3. Systemd's Team Being Anti-Unix: The tight integration with the Linux kernel API optimizes the use of Linux-specific features. 4. Fo…

I'm not a systemd hater by any means, but I think you're presenting some of these in bad faith. > Systemd as a Single Point of Failure: Proper maintenance and security practices can mitigate the risks associated with any critical software component. "Proper" meaning very expensive and very complex that only a limited number of sysadmins can do? Likely involving expensive virtualization and/or redundnacy technologies?…

> There's also a small chance it was a typical Lennart Poettering "fuck you, what are you gonna do about it?" act of pure contempt for what anyone else thinks. That guy has got to be the most hated German since Adolf.

I laughed, but Adolf was Austrian.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#66

Post by gavinhoward »

jraph wrote: post #63
gavinhoward wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A monoculture means the same thing as a monopoly if that monoculture is in the hands of few people. And it's obvious why a monopoly is bad. The systemd monoculture is the same kind of bad as a Google Chrome monoculture.

> And it's obvious why a monopoly is bad. No, it's not obvious. - The Linux kernel is strictly more widespread as systemd, do you see this as a bad monopoly the same way? - In Switzerland, trains are operated by one (public) company. That's a monopoly. The service is, however, fantastic. The same cannot be said as French trains, open to competition, operated by several entities. There are failures incurring delays al…

Since systemd has used its monopoly position to change the Linux kernel, and to force other things on distros, yes, their monopoly is bad.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#67

Post by jraph »

gavinhoward wrote: post #66
jraph wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's obvious why a monopoly is bad. No, it's not obvious. - The Linux kernel is strictly more widespread as systemd, do you see this as a bad monopoly the same way? - In Switzerland, trains are operated by one (public) company. That's a monopoly. The service is, however, fantastic. The same cannot be said as French trains, open to competition, operated by several entities. There are failures incurring delays al…

Since systemd has used its monopoly position to change the Linux kernel, and to force other things on distros, yes, their monopoly is bad.

Distros choose what they adopt. They willingly migrated to systemd. Ubuntu, of all distros with its in-house init system, upstart, followed Debian in this migration. They are not forced onto anything. Distro maintainers decided that systemd made their lives easier and switched to it. Or which actual, concrete things they were to do do you have in mind?

And yes, the Linux kernel has implemented features for systemd. It's obvious that in an healthy ecosystem, the init system and the kernel cooperate and both have influences between each over. What negative change did the Linux kernel have to implement because of systemd?

I'm quite sure systemd is not perfect, but I personally think it has dramatically improved my life as a Linux user. It has made my boot faster. It brought very convenient tools to instrument this boot to know what exactly takes time, or fails. It has made the logs incredibly easier to find and read. It has made writing services way easier. starting, stopping, disabling, enabling services is incredibly simple. It has replaced a mess with something clean and easy to user. I'm personally quite happy about some standardization over a solid software stack happening.

Upstart was already on this path and systemd further improved things.

I'm quite sure systemd has its flaws. I want to believe you on the fact it has bad aspects and even about the monoculture being bad but I can't because you haven't listed anything actually, concretely bad about systemd. What would you change in systemd?

The only concrete criticisms I've ever read about systemd are:

- it stores the log in binary format. Now, in almost 10 years I've dealt with it, on no occasion I've found it to be an issue.

- Projects like gnome depend on it. But it's a decision taken by those project, and if you want your OS to be coherent, of course the session manager or the desktop environment are going to need some kind of integration to the init system. If your system doesn't provide feature the DE needs, you'll have to provide it and build a shim, that seems actually fair enough. If your shim actually provides systemd compatibility, it could even be adopted upstream! See seatd/libseat [1].

- It is a monolith that wants to do everything. But I'm not sure it's actually true. Systemd actually provides many binaries, each with one, separate, purpose. I think that on the contrary, it is nothing like a monolith and it's more like the GNU tools, all under the same umbrella but each doing its own thing

[1] https://git.sr.ht/~kennylevinsen/seatd

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#68

Post by gavinhoward »

jraph wrote: post #67
gavinhoward wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since systemd has used its monopoly position to change the Linux kernel, and to force other things on distros, yes, their monopoly is bad.

Distros choose what they adopt. They willingly migrated to systemd. Ubuntu, of all distros with its in-house init system, upstart, followed Debian in this migration. They are not forced onto anything. Distro maintainers decided that systemd made their lives easier and switched to it. Or which actual, concrete things they were to do do you have in mind? And yes, the Linux kernel has implemented features for systemd. I…

They forced things after adoption.

Re: Boycott Systemd (2014)

#69

Post by jraph »

gavinhoward wrote: post #68
jraph wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distros choose what they adopt. They willingly migrated to systemd. Ubuntu, of all distros with its in-house init system, upstart, followed Debian in this migration. They are not forced onto anything. Distro maintainers decided that systemd made their lives easier and switched to it. Or which actual, concrete things they were to do do you have in mind? And yes, the Linux kernel has implemented features for systemd. I…

They forced things after adoption.

What things? You never ever reply. It's like you don't like systemd without any actual, real reason. You just dislike it because.
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