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Why I dislike systemd

steven-mcdonald.id.au

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Re: Why I dislike systemd

#241

Post by EmanueleAina »

weland wrote: post #238
EmanueleAina wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting read, thanks! However I would not characterize that as "Poettering completely misunderstanding a perfectly valid use of su". It seems a quite complex issue about a workflow that is only half-working even without systemd. A systemd patch has been committed that fixes the most blatant error, but of course it doesn't solve all problems since most of them existed before systemd.

I don't know in what corner of the universe was that "only half-working". It was working absolutely fine. It has been working fine since... I don't know, v7, when it was first introduced.

The few times I tried to run GUI programs through su I always got plenty of warning about DBus and stuff. But I don't do that very often, so that's all I know.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#242

Post by fragmede »

xorcist wrote: post #86
weland wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, another one would be connecting to a VPN, a task that NetworkManager greatly simplifies, assuming that such integration is available of course (e.g. if you think connecting to a Wifi network is problematic, try connecting to a L2TP over IPSec VPN). That's because there is equally no uniform and simple way to connect to use those, either. The problem is that the "simplification" that NetworkManager prov…

Network Manager still has problems. I've had a lucky streak for a few years where it hasn't given me problems, but the other day the GUI decided not to save my settings anymore. It looks like it does, but it doesn't. If I kill the beast and tap in the commands it just works, but if I run the daemon it keeps feeding the backends with old settings. How do I debug this? There's just sockets and layers of GTK. I'll proba…

In case you're actually interested in fixing that particular problem, it's probably polkit that's gone bad. To examine the issue further, nm-connection-editor is a separate binary that you can run from the command line, and it'll print errors on stdout - including what it's unable to do.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#243

Post by digi_owl »

JdeBP wrote: post #205
digi_owl wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, i was wondering how long it would take before we would get something like this.

It was around before the Debian Technical Committee made its decision. It wasn't one of the options to choose from, but it was an existence proof, for those making the decisions, that systemd unit files will not lock them in and that there's a route for Debian packages that have systemd units on Debian kFreeBSD and Debian Hurd.

Too bad it is not the unit files one should worry about, but the continued scope creep of the systemd project.

by the time one want to move from systemd to nosh, or anything more limited in scope, one may have face the rebuilding of Linux user space from the ground up.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#244

Post by digi_owl »

yellowapple wrote: post #173
stephen_g wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a professional sysadmin, but as a developer with a bunch of virtual servers systemd has only made things far easier. Writing init scripts used to be a real pain, now I can set up a unit file in two minutes and it works... Maybe there's something to be said for "sysadmins who want to be able to model the entire boot process and run-state in their head" but with correct information about dependencies and so on,…

Professional sysadmin (and developer) here :) > Writing init scripts used to be a real pain In the GNU/Linux world, yep, this is the case. Lots of copypasted boilerplate that becomes a nightmare to debug. In the BSD world (at least with OpenBSD, where I'm most experienced), this isn't the case at all; OpenBSD ships with /etc/rc.d/rc.subr, which one can (and should) source into one's initscripts to make life much easi…

At this point in time i fear that what RH decides to do, everyone else interested in deploying Linux commercially ends up doing.

And because of that, developers then target RH related choices as a baseline, further exasperating the inbreeding.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#245

Post by digi_owl »

Tiksi wrote: post #111

About a year ago, we started switching over new servers to systemd instead of openrc at work. I knew sysv/openrc/bsdinit and I liked them so for the first month or two I utterly despised systemd. (Plus as a sysadmin it seems like I have to hate it or risk losing my linux card) I just wanted my damn scripts back instead of dealing with the .ini-inspired config file crap. If I had a choice at the time, I would've been…

You either must have gotten in late, or been exceedingly lucky, as failing NFS mounts is one of those things systemd downright hates.

People have had whole boxes fail to come up because of a NFS mount that didn't work, and therefore the unit file didn't come up roses, and so systemd decided to abandon ship and present the admin with a borked minimal console.

One early fix, a brute force 30 second kill timer on every unit file.

Went over well with one Fedora Alpha (lucky for them) where said timer tripped on the post distro upgrade house cleaning unit.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#246

Post by digi_owl »

pjmlp wrote: post #46

I don't care about systemd, as I want to use OSes that embrace modern architectures, unikernels, containers, safer programming languages, improved UI stacks,.... This rant is a good example how luddite users rather stay stuck in a UNIX System V world with their green phosphor VT100 terminals.

Thing is, Linux used to be flexible. This because of some stuff it inherited from Unix about user space being made out of loosely coupled parts with solidified interfaces between them.

Meaning that it could accomodate both the latest and "greatest" coming out of the labs, and the tried and tested stuff that had been sitting in production for a decade.

systemd instead gloops it all into a lightly coupled shoggoth of a project that is chasing the future come hell or high water.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#247

Post by digi_owl »

mm_aa wrote: post #188

It seems that the author completely disregards the modern tendency to treat boxes as commodities. While pondering a "what's going to start on this particular machine" question is interesting in the "old world", it is hardly a question anyone asks when your fleet starts to be measured in tens of thousands of cloud instances.

No, his issue is that because others choose to do so he has to do so because the fad of the year is tramping all over the alternatives.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#248

Post by digi_owl »

cubancigar11 wrote: post #52
thaumaturgy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And gentoo had to jump through hoops (to the point of forking udev) to be able to continue to do so.

The whole systemd vs sysv back and forth is a smokescreen, because while sysv stops at init systemd continues on to cron, networking, sessions, dhcp, dns, /dev, and soon to be ttys etc.

And while the kernel is maintained under the rule that change do not break user space, systemd developers seem to do changes with a permanent "deal with it" meme.

Re: Why I dislike systemd

#249

Post by digi_owl »

vacri wrote: post #38
thaumaturgy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought there were others in addition to Slackware, but that pretty much all the distros are jumping ship shows the naysayers don't have enough political oomph.

Those that has adopted systemd are either precursors for commercial distros, said commercial distros, or based of same.

The really early adopters seems to have been offshots of Fedora. And i do wonder if Debian was a holdout until systemd started sprouting containerization features, and Canonical (Ubuntu) was feeling the heat.

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