61–70 of 168 posts
Not long in the future we'll have "Systemd Linux".
The kernel has a very focused job to do. The hard work of running the show on top of the kernel - and it's a big job - is done by Systemd.
And it's awesome I love Systemd. If you dislike Systemde I can only imagine you haven't really taken the time to learn it and use it properly.
I mainly use Ubuntu, so I know about systemd, but what is OpenRC? Why is there such a split, and why are people arguing about it in the comments? Could someone kindly explain it to me? I only know how to control Linux through systemctl, and I don't know much beyond that. It seems like the components are different, but I'd appreciate it if someone could explain it to me.
why don't you try searching on the internet?
Because OpenRC and systemd don't even seem like comparable things—OpenRC is much smaller. And from what Google shows me, one is written in C and the other is script-based.
So one is a lightweight service manager, and the other is a framework that manages the entire OS. I'm a Windows enviroment developer, so I don't really know, but they seem to have different roles. Yet there's still a debate, and I don't get it. Is this really just an argument about PID 1?
I have a curious question. My local setup has worked for me for ages ever since arch decided to switch to systemd. Same on the servers I deal with, after Debian's switch. At the same time, I can say I'm not involved with inner workings of a Linux system enough, to be affected by init system change and the pain it might bring. In other means consider me an average Joe of the Linux world. Hence this question: If it suc…
It doesn't suck, people are just emotional beings and have some "football team" level takes on technical stuff as well. The very same people that hate systemd for "being a monolith" and limiting choice are usually also love X and hate Wayland where they can manage to explain how being a monolith is suddenly good. Especially that systemd is pretty modular - at least the actual systemd program running as PID 1. It also…
> but that's like KDE having a file manager and complaining that plasma DE is a monolith
On the other hand it would be very rare to use Plasma without the KDE file manger. You lose all sorts of integration. Similarly, once you use systemd init its going to be a lot easier to replace everything else with the systemd equivalent.
I have a curious question. My local setup has worked for me for ages ever since arch decided to switch to systemd. Same on the servers I deal with, after Debian's switch. At the same time, I can say I'm not involved with inner workings of a Linux system enough, to be affected by init system change and the pain it might bring. In other means consider me an average Joe of the Linux world. Hence this question: If it suc…
When red hat switched to it, it was stable enough. Before then people were complaining because they did find bugs and issues (I know I did) and were being told to STFU by inexperienced users who have the most basic and standard use case and weren't encountering the issues (or were but didn't even notice).
Very common is the case of some person who sometimes uses linux on their machine telling a system administrator who has thousands of machines under his responsibility what's what.
The article makes one key mistake, in that it compares systemd to openrc. Aka some monster-system with billion features, to a fairly small system that juts relates to initializing a few things. The whole debate about systemd has always been very dishonest from the systemd devs. If you have 3 million lines of code, for instance, and offer 5000 features, just to give out semi-random numbers, then every alternative with…
What did they debate? What about it was dishonest?
> If you have 3 million lines of code, for instance, and offer 5000 features, just to give out semi-random numbers, then every alternative with, say, 100.000 lines of code and only 50 features, will lose out by definition.
Why? Just because average lines of code per feature are by a factor of 5 or so lower for systemd in your example? What is the definition they will lose out on? Also unclear to me what you are referring to with 5000 feature to generate random numbers...
> It is the same with age sniffing; some still believe it is about protecting kids. Then they were flabbergasted when governments - who suspiciously smell like corporate-controlled governments by the way, in particular in the UK - declare total war against VPNs. The excuse they use is not convincing at all, IF you buy into the assumption that this is about kids (which it is not).
What about it is sniffing if a person voluntarily enters that data to be shared with a service so they can use it? What is it about then if not kids? It sounds like you think all governments who think about enforcing age restrictions online have some shared hidden agenda.
> On the other hand, when systemd decided to support age sniffing (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954), I guess they went a step too far. People who weren't against systemd, look at it differently now. After all why is Poettering so defensive about systemd supporting age sniffing? All that tasty data that is to be amassed. Some private entities love that data. You have become the product.
It's linux, you can disable it or not enter your date. Alternative would have been that you are not able to use certain online services in those strict jurisdictions or that any tool that wants to support these services comes with their own implementation.
> As for "alternatives" to systemd, which is a misnomer IMO
Why? It's a daemon (and more) managing your system.
> Systemd's unit files are also a failure; and the lack of transparency too.
Why are they a failure? Which lack of transparency?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
why don't you try searching on the internet?
I gooogled it, but I still don't really understand why there's a debate. Because OpenRC and systemd don't even seem like comparable things—OpenRC is much smaller. And from what Google shows me, one is written in C and the other is script-based. So one is a lightweight service manager, and the other is a framework that manages the entire OS. I'm a Windows enviroment developer, so I don't really know, but they seem to…
If they were comparable (i.e. if systemd was just an init system) there would be no debate.
it does not help that the systemd devs are obnoxious and dismissive of concerns about compatibility. Lots of "its your problem" in their bug tracker on github.
To this day I have not found a single modern argument against systemd that is a technical one (I tried systemd but it does not support x which openrc does), instead it's these vague bike shed arguments (Unix philosophy, anti-centralization and "bloat" ). I can't wrap my head around it, since those 3 are a "you" problem, systemd is just a service manager it's you who decide to use other systemd parts.
cough
> To this day I have not found a single modern argument against systemd that is a technical one...
Good for you. [0] The project is great until, very, very suddenly it is not. May you continue to have many happy and trouble-free decades with it.
But when you do hit a bug whose cause is dreadfully complex [1], or get some useful, documented behavior you depend on altered so that it's unusable for you for no better reason than "it was inconvenient to keep permitting people to do that", you'll understand why some folks strongly dislike the project.
[0] Genuinely!
[1] ...so much so that the maintainers refuse to work on it...
You do not have to use all resources that are under the systemd umbrella. That's just BS, sorry. And prod deployments breaking... Well I guess that never happened with those best-managed sysv init scripts? Guys, pick your fights reasonably.
I've never *ever* broken a production system by reconfiguring a sysvinit service, at all, no no no, not me...
Even then, the init scripts system of FreeBSD was much better than the traditional sysvinit. I have never ever had the slightest problem with it, since then until today, when I still run a mixture of Linux and FreeBSD servers.
In the following years, many features of the FreeBSD software package system and of its init scripts system have become available in some Linux distributions, especially in Gentoo.
I have never used in production any variant of the traditional sysvinit, while with the improved versions from FreeBSD, Gentoo and a few others I have never seen any difficulty and no feature that could have been improved by the use of systemd.
In my opinion, the way to an optimal init scripts system has been shown by Daniel J. Bernstein with his "daemontools", which I have also been using continuously 24/7 for more than a quarter of a century, for some essential services, on many servers.
Today, there are a few new init scripts systems that have been inspired by the DJB daemontools, and I think that one of them could become the best choice in the future.
But I wonder how good Alpine is for desktop computing and development stuff. I know they have recently started shipping full DEs for desktop IIRC.
Anyone with any experiences?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gooogled it, but I still don't really understand why there's a debate. Because OpenRC and systemd don't even seem like comparable things—OpenRC is much smaller. And from what Google shows me, one is written in C and the other is script-based. So one is a lightweight service manager, and the other is a framework that manages the entire OS. I'm a Windows enviroment developer, so I don't really know, but they seem to…
Its an argument about whether you want an init that is just an init, or an init that is designed as an extra layer of the OS. If they were comparable (i.e. if systemd was just an init system) there would be no debate. it does not help that the systemd devs are obnoxious and dismissive of concerns about compatibility. Lots of "its your problem" in their bug tracker on github.
Thank you. I didn't know why there was a debate since the size difference between them is quite significant. so I don't know much about the Linux side. Have a good day.