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Why I dislike systemd

steven-mcdonald.id.au

51–60 of 254 posts

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#51

I don't "hate" systemd either, I just think it's a bad approach. It flies in the face of the "open architecture" concept and stifles innovation. It discourages users from learning about how their operating system works, and it unnecessarily puts too much control of a fundamental component of the OS in the hands of a too-small number of people. None of these reflect the Linux I grew up with. Thus, I am not a fan of sy…

ossreality you are [dead]

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#52
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The naysayers are taken seriously, but they're in the decision-making minority. Linux distro maintainers wanted to move on from SysV Init, and systemd looked promising. Just because the naysayers didn't get their way (and on some distros, they did) doesn't mean that their criticisms aren't noted.

Which distros? Slackware is the only near-mainstream Linux distro I know of that is even possibly not moving immediately to systemd, and even then, the Slackware folks have said that once it becomes too difficult to maintain upstream packages, they'll switch too. They're just being pragmatic about it.

Gentoo by default prefers OpenRC over systemd, though you can chose which one you want while installing.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#53

I agree with most of this, especially the fact that complexity has simply been shifted to other places. It's much easier for me to read a systemd unit file than it was for me to read a complex set of init scripts. The problem is that when I have 10 or 20 units with interlocking dependencies, it's an absolute nightmare to try and untangle because I have to jump between so many different files. Having to specify After=…

Have you tried the systemd tooling that graphs depencies for you? I haven't worked on that area yet, but my colleagues made heavy use of that and actually could resolve problems with these quite fast thanks to the diagrams that systemd can create for you.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#54
post #35

This page's horrible readability is a perfect reflection of the kind of folks that dislike systemd. Yeah, newcomers to the Linux land without the expertise you guys acquired through 10 years of using Linux, would apparently appreciate how easy it is to manage a server by invoking some lengthy commands they learned through reading the often overly-dense manual instead of `systemctl start/stop x`. Nowadays some of thos…

Fwiw I like the website. I would have toned down the yellow. And I would probably have had dark on light.

But it's really great to have a page that loads nearly instantly - the ratio of information provided : loading time is very good.

Other pages take an age to load (and Chrome on iOS has an annoying "feature" where the address can't be selected and copied until the page has almost finished loading).

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#56
post #50
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. Ha. FreeBSD here. And so long as you get the right hardware, I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. Ports? Beautifully elegant and simple. Configurable. Magnitudes easier than configuring rpm/debs. Getting a package approved in debian? Alioth? No offense, the wiki, all these pages on the debian website - they have no…

I've occasionally used {Net|Free|Open}BSD over the past few years (in fact, I think my Jornada in the back of the closet still runs NetBSD). I kept sticking to Linux partly because I was using it at $work, partly because it was simple enough and I'm kindda lazy. But yeah: > I find BSD to be far simpler than linux distributions out there. The way OpenBSD handles WiFi configuration is a good example of this. Want to co…

What are some things on OpenBSD that don't work for you?

What sort of hardware are you running?

What about Adobe Flash on OpenBSD?

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#57

The author mentions that he believes the biggest problem of systemd is repeating some mistakes of SysV init, but I think it's actually pretty important that familiarity is preserved to help people upgrade. For example, the author mentions babysitting the users (systemctl edit) and config/daemon reloading as things that could be made automatic, I'm assuming with e.g. inotify change events. But you often want some conf…

You can also add 'crontab -e' and much other examples of commands that wrap an editor call already exising in linux userspace.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#58
post #29

I'm one of the people who jumped ship to OpenBSD in the last year or so. I think I first touched a Linux machine in 1997 or 1998. systemd has been part of the reasons I did that for precisely the same reason. There is a lot of development in the ecosystem dominated by Freedesktop.org, Gnome and (to some degree) large commercial players like RedHat and SUSE. It's more efervescent than it's ever been. Fifteen years ago…

Polkit is a nightmare. And I agree with you on the churn. There was a time when Linux administration changed less frequently than Windows, round about the 95-XP-Vista era.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#59

The author mentions that he believes the biggest problem of systemd is repeating some mistakes of SysV init, but I think it's actually pretty important that familiarity is preserved to help people upgrade. For example, the author mentions babysitting the users (systemctl edit) and config/daemon reloading as things that could be made automatic, I'm assuming with e.g. inotify change events. But you often want some conf…

What I think your getting at is that essentially you need a mechanism to commit your changes before the thing that's reading those changes receives them. In essence, an atomic operation for the change. Completely agree.

I'm hearing "we need to build a version control system or a transactional database into our init daemon" here :)

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#60
post #19

It got the job done by making the 99% majority of use cases more difficult in order to make the 1% minority simpler. This is a design pattern I think is being repeated in systemd. I kinda had the opposite impression. I first encountered systemd when I started messing around with arch for a couple little vps projects. At the time I was doing sysadmin that involved both Ubuntu and CentOS, and I definitely found day-to-…

This is why I suspect that most of the divisions in the sysadmin community regarding systemd are generational. For people (like me!) who have been writing init scripts forever and can do it in their sleep, they'd prefer the flexibility and familiarity of init scripts to a new system that at first glance appears more limited. For people who are less experien^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcrusty :-), init scripts look like a horrifyi…

It's perfectly possible to run scripts with systemd unit files, so there's no real "flexibility" lost anywhere. The primary improvement is that systemd handles by default most of what used to be boiler-plate in every script, on top of calculating dependencies automatically. Then you get integrated process supervisor capabilities so that the init system actually knows whether services are running or not.

Speed was certainly a major motivator as well, considering the increasing popularity of containers and on-demand virtual machines.

To me it seems that "gradual evolution" was exactly what they did, and it wasn't really going anywhere. Lennart came up with systemd and convinced enough people that it's worth the pain of migration to get a clean start.

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