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Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

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Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#81

Post by cbolton »

blueflow wrote: post #48
embedding-shape wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it someone's else's fault for that systemd has dependencies or that others depend on systemd? If I use and like Firefox, and others depend on Firefox, or Firefox depend on others, then it's Firefox fault for you choosing Firefox? I really don't understand the argument you're trying to make. You had choices before systemd, and you still have choices even though systemd is widespread, what's the problem? It isn'…

With everything depending on systemd interfaces, its an exhausting uphill battle to run anything desktop-like without systemd. Want to run xterm? Requires Xorg. rootless Xorg requires udev, udev turned into a systemd component. want to run xterm without systemd? good luck, you are now the maintainer of your own LFS.

The udev developers decided that it made sense to move udev into systemd. If you disagree and want choice, you can fork udev. Actually some people did that, so you can run xterm with eudev instead of udev and thus avoid systemd (though eudev seems hardly maintained now, with the latest release in 2023).

I think it's true that it's an exhausting battle to keep all those parts independent when 95% of the devs/money agree it's better to integrate them. But it wouldn't be fair either for the 5% to put on the others the burden of keeping things independent because of their own preferences...

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#82

Post by Cu3PO42 »

logicprog wrote: post #62
blell wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat created hard dependencies on systemd in all of the popular software they develop to ensure its adoption.

Which software has hard dependencies on systemd? Also, it's not just RedHat that's depending on systemd, as if its a conspiracy on their part. https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/26/plasma_6_6_systemd_lo...

Gnome, for example. GDM now needs systemd's userdb.

It is indeed becoming harder and harder to avoid and I understand that this isn't great, but systemd tackles some genuinely hard problems that others don't. Which is to say I don't begrudge Gnome devs for this and personally prefer systemd over current alternatives.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#84

Post by bandrami »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #72
bandrami wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because "Stop Job Running For User 1001: (22s / 90s)" with no indication of which @$%^ing stop job it is is incredibly annoying. And the fact that "systemctl start blahd.service" exits successfully even if blahd didn't actually start because a misconfigured blahd not starting is "correct" makes me want to burn the server room down from time to time. And nondeterministic service initialization is absolutely Broken and…

> And the fact that "systemctl start blahd.service" exits successfully even if blahd didn't actually start because a misconfigured blahd not starting is "correct" makes me want to burn the server room down from time to time. we had tens of thousands of init scripts where we fixed that exact problem with init scripts that were delivered with distro. It's not systemd problem and if anything systemd made it better. > An…

I mean, 25 years ago I don't think any shop used the distro-supplied init scripts; those were just a skeleton you used to get the system into a state where you could edit them.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#85

Post by embedding-shape »

account42 wrote: post #78
embedding-shape wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you don't like that, don't you still have the choice not to use software developed by Red Hat?

Embrace extend extinguish tactics, now celebrated in Linux land.

You had choices before, you still have choices, how is that EEE? There never been more distributions available.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#86

Post by rpdillon »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #9

I don't care: I can administer with relatively high confidence any Redhat- or Debian-derivate. Thanks to systems. Most issues regarding systemd I encountered were due to a halfway adoption (Debian). Some things like timers are a bit more cumbersome than "the old way", but I wouldn't want to miss the added robustness. Most things systemd implements lead to _less_ issues. And writing a systemd unit is pretty easy, cont…

Are you worried that you're going to become subject to attestation via systemd?

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#87

Post by e2le »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #69
antonyh wrote: post #27

Love/hate systemd as I might, it's been rock solid everywhere I've used it, and I've used it heavily. It has it's quirks, as does the init-scripts that came before, and launchd on OSX (not sure what the modern equivalent is for MacOS). However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log. All things being equal I'd rather deal with human readable files.

> However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log. All things being equal I'd rather deal with human readable files. It happens to be worse than text logs, worse than just spewing JSON to files, and entirely worse than most binary log formats. Every log line takes several times it would under text, duplicates a ton of info (like writing boot id in every entry) and somehow…

One feature of the Journal format which I don't believe to be a great design choice is that entries can contain non-unique fields. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be something that is handled well by all tools, instead only returning the value for the first field of an entry with the provided name.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#88

Post by ralferoo »

dashzebra wrote: post #25

Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?

For me, I guess several reasons:

* Log files aren't where I expect them. I can't just tail the right log file, I have to figure out a load of options to journalctl instead. Its defaults are annoyingly bad and I usually end up having to type long things to limit the range to something useful.

* The journal grows massively and is unbounded by default. Many times I set up a machine, and then it runs out of disk space. It's now instinctive for me to now check whether it's /var/log/journal that's using it all. In fact, I just double checked on the machine I happened to be using now, and the journal was 2.2GB.

* It's terribly documented, or at least not in the way that's familiar to older UNIX folks. It took me about 30 minutes of googling to figure out how to change the name recorded in the journal, which defaults to the command name in ExecStart (and so was really usefully just unshare in multiple of my services). For anyone that's wondering it's SyslogIdentifier - good luck finding that yourself. It makes sense, but it's woefully under documented anywhere.

* Whenever you change files that used to be the end of it, e.g. /etc/fstab, now you have to remember to `sysctl restart systemd-mount` - why can't whatever needs it just watch the file for changes instead?

* Too many things just happen in the background that never used to. Just now for instance, I manually unmounted a drive to resize2fs it because I wanted to move the underlying data. Between running e2fsck and resize2fs, systemd had already re-mounted it read/write. Luckily, resize2fs is smart enough to tell you. If I'd been doing the actual task using dd to copy the data elsewhere, I'd have ended up with a corrupted copy.

* Just yesterday, I discovered that edits under /etc/network/interfaces.d were just silently ignored, and I had to learn the new systemd way of doing it. I never did figure out how to set the MTU in the configuration either.

* The configuration files feels Windows-like and not UNIX-like

That said, I've reluctantly started creating systemd services instead of rolling my own init scripts, and it's quite nice not having to copy all the boilerplate from elsewhere and just having a handful of lines of config. But most of the time, I feel like I'm fighting systemd rather than working with it.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#89

Post by t43562 »

egorfine wrote: post #19

As a passionate systemd hater I still will not go back to using older bash-based initsystems and thus devuan. I strongly believe that systemd brand is a worst thing that happened to Linux, hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space, but at the same time I have to admit that systemd-as-pid1 is the best init system out there.

The great thing is that there actually ARE options that are far better than init scripts and they don't have to be like systemd.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#90

Post by t43562 »

IshKebab wrote: post #44
egorfine wrote: post #19

As a passionate systemd hater I still will not go back to using older bash-based initsystems and thus devuan. I strongly believe that systemd brand is a worst thing that happened to Linux, hindering the spread and innovation in the Linux space, but at the same time I have to admit that systemd-as-pid1 is the best init system out there.

I remember the time before systemd and there wasn't any innovation happening - everyone was content with hacky bash scripts.

There were other innovative systems - they just weren't adopted by the major distos - other than I think Ubuntu.
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