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Why I dislike systemd
101–110 of 254 posts
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#102Earlier 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 used the crux linux distro ( https://crux.nu ) because it has a similar, BSD-like package manager, it's very clean and has a great community.
I've been playing around with Void Linux recently (http://www.voidlinux.eu/). Unfortunately, even there, it's hard to escape a lot of the baroque nonsense of the Linux userland, and I eventually caved in.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#103Some of the complaints resonate with me. In particular, the limited power of systemd's unit file DSL is why I think it's better to allow services to be written using a general purpose programming language. GNU dmd, while still not developed enough to do cool things like socket activation, gives the user the full power of Scheme to configure their system services as they like. I run it as PID 1 on two of my machines, and I also run it as an unprivileged user to manage my gpg agent, emacs daemon, offlineimap, mpd, development web servers, etc. on all of the computers I use, including at work. I think people that aren't happy with systemd, that are also interested in rolling up their sleeves and hacking on an init system, should give dmd some love.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#104Earlier 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…
> The only thing it won't do out of the box is automatically connect to previously used wifi networks. I suspect none of the OpenBSD developers want that. That's not true. OpenBSD developers want this. There are several ideas floating around about making the kernel cache wifi passwords, scan and re-connect automatically when it lost link to the AP. This topic keeps coming up during hackathons. For various reasons it'…
I hope my reply didn't come pff as a passive-aggressive "those bastards don't care" or anything like that -- I didn't remember seeing anything about this on the mailing lists, so I just figured out no one wants it. I, for one, can't say I do, for several reasons -- ranging from "I'm a control freak so nothing connects automatically to anything on any computer I own" to "I know of no clean way to implement something like this so maybe we should learn to live without it".
Since it's not something I'm interested in, I probably just forgot that I read about it :).
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#105There is something epically beautiful about OpenBSD's consistency over the last 10 years. I swear that a 2004 OpenBSD sysadmin would be close to 100% efficient with a circa 2015 OpenBSD system, despite the absolutely massive number of improvements and changes that have been made with the operating system. Once systemd starts to get traction, it's cognitive overhead is going to become a real problem for sysadmins who…
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,…
> Writing init scripts used to be a real pain, now I can set up a unit file in two minutes and it works...
I've always found init scripts straightforward to read and write, even though I don't develop them often.
I don't care for the upstart/systemd/OSX approaches. I don't want to digest another manual to do what I can do in bash easily.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#106This 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…
Some complexity is essential, and not everything is easy. Pretending otherwise is a great way to end up sorry.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting way to think about it. IMHO systemd is taking much of the hacks and weird glue that has historically held distributions together and replaced it with an active upstream project. Maybe some of the solutions they've come up with could need some improvements, but I have much higher confidence those improvements would happen now compared to how things used to be. Nowadays you can code something up and come to…
Unfortunately, the systemd development team is not that easy to work with, which is part of why a lot of people distrust systemd the way they do. In theory, yes, it should be the way you mention it. In practice, even bug reports end up unacknowledged and labeled as features after a few philosophical debates. No one who has used more than one Linux distro would disagree that a unified system to control init services i…
In practice, even bug reports end up unacknowledged and labeled as
features after a few philosophical debates.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 cer…
The key is the expense vs reward ratio.
I don't know how to write sysvinit scripts any more than I know how to write fizzbuzz. What I do know is how to program and specifically how to write and maintain and debug shell scripts. I NEED that for other automation purposes and cannot get rid of that mandatory requirement so it used to dovetail quite well with init scripts. There are corner cases and security issues and tradition, which means copying a known good init script and editing nothing but the executable names is a great start, but its not really a serious problem. I don't care if its verbose, as long as its simple and understandable and most importantly, predictable.
Now instead of applying a language and tradition I know to a simple task like init, I get to learn a whole new ecosystem and technology to do about the same thing I always did except vastly more complicated, and I can't even shed the old knowledge because its needed elsewhere. That makes overall systems harder to use, slower, buggier, and less reliable. And thats defined as "progress" because its new so it must be better.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
actually, wpa_supplicant isn't that hard to configure as long as you only use the GUI. just scan for APs, double-click on the network, and type in the PSK. no documentation-reading required.
> wpa_supplicant isn't that hard to configure as long as you only use the GUI
Oh, my mistake! I thought I was using a Unix.
Re: Why I dislike systemd
#110One of the more sensible ^rants^ I've read against systemd (it is KISS for some weirdly convoluted definition of KISS). Too bad these naysayers are not/will not be taken seriously.
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.
"Linux distro maintainers wanted to move on from SysV Init"
LOL no. distro maintainers wanted to ship gnome, which was product tied to systemd. No systemd, no gnome, that simple.