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Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

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Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#111

Post by account42 »

IshKebab wrote: post #31

Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.

Most people don't like it when you drag them where they don't want to go and like it even less when you ignore that they "scream" about it. If system was universally positive no one would have to be dragged. This patronizing attitude of its developers and proponents is one of the main reasons why I avoid SystemD like the plague.

Oh and "modern" is becoming more and more a pejorative for tech as far as I'm concerned.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#112

Post by antonyh »

e2le wrote: post #59
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.

Personally I would much rather they had simply used an existing database file format. For example, sqlite3 which is robust and already present in the default installation of most Linux distributions. Querying system logs with SQL would be cool and make things a bit easier unlike the sd_journal API with it's strange/bizarre quirks.

Wow what an idea, that would work so well and give me a trivial way to build apps to do alerts, monitoring, shipping to remotes, and whatnot in virtually any language.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#113

Post by antonyh »

embedding-shape wrote: post #33
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 Yeah, I also wish that at least was an option, would make some things easier. Also wished the remote log sending was easier, not sure if it's just me but was a huge hassle to setup properly, and really hard to properly validate it works as expected in all cases. Finally got it working, but it isn't as easy as the other par…

It should have been an option, even dumb old CSV if it needed structured data. I didn't bother trying to natively ship and used promtail instead, to get it into Loki, so I could query via Grafana.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#114

Post by Bender »

dashzebra wrote: post #25

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

Those that love it will fight for it. Those that hate it will simply avoid using it. There may be some commercial incentives for IBM/Redhat to push for it. Either way it will always be divisive for a myriad of reasons listed below. Some sysadmins will begrudgingly support it at work and some absolutely love to support it. I have supported it in the enterprise and I use it on gaming machines at home. (CachyOS / Bazzite). My daily drivers, servers both physical and VM will always be without it. (MX Linux / Void Linux / Alpine Linux).

I only use mini-PC's these days and all the games I play work great on CachyOS. All the other daily stuff works great on MX/Void and of course running firewalls, NAS and servers on Alpine is about as simple as it gets for me anyway. Bazzite on my laptop found my Brother laserjet instantly and without adding drivers.

- Some discussion on the matter [1a][1b][1c].

- Operating systems without systemd [2]

[1a] - https://unixdigest.com/articles/the-real-motivation-behind-s...

[1b] - https://nosystemd.org/

[1c] - https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Arguments_against...

[2] - https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Main_Page/

P.S. - One Windows machine left and I think it can sense what is coming...

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#116

Post by Calzifer »

_flux wrote: post #4

It seems though not having systemd in it would be against "init freedom": https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom . Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

> Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

Reading the first sentence on that page was to much?

"Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice."

systemd fails on the portability criteria.

Apart from that, why should they invest there limited time to include systemd? Devuan is Debian without systemd. If you want systemd install Debian.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#117

Post by remix2000 »

account42 wrote: post #99
remix2000 wrote: post #7

"Tricycle – Car Without Engine" Honestly though, the argument against systemd is that it moves too much stuff into init, but I don't think it does enough of that, it's still extremely conservative, like, SD-DBus should be using binder x-port IMO.

No, one complaint (out of many) against SystemD is that it moves too much complexity into PID 0 which is a very special process on Linux that must not crash ever or the whole system goes down with it. The init system is one thing that SystemD insists on running under PID 0 even though it could be designed otherwise.

But PID 0 on Linux is the idle task…? Init is (usually) PID 1, PID 0 kinda just means that nothing is running on a given CPU (with caveats), also killing 0 has special meaning because well it's not a real process…

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#118

Post by belorn »

blell wrote: post #47
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'…

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

I don't get it. If you install openbsd, you get dependencies that openbsd developers has chosen. You can try to remove every aspect of those choices but at some point it won't be openbsd anymore.

Is the claim here that Red Hat is unnecessary coupling their critical parts of the distribution in ways that other distributions would not do? A few examples here would be nice.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#119

Post by eth0up »

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...

Dependencies may be becoming less properties of software, and more so properties of the distro's systemd wiring.

More and more software will assimilate systemd features. Free distros will patch, shim, emulate, flounder. Or in GPT parlance "Dependencies are no longer intrinsic properties of software; they are emergent properties of a distribution's systemd orchestration layer"

Meanwhile, gripes, fears etc,

'Linux' becomes interpreted vs inspectable.

Requires superfluous new literacy

Convolutes logs, tools Obscures causality

Centralized control above Unix process model

Fair well ps aux, hello systemctl, cgtop, gls

KILL (less lethalized) superceded, replaced by service stop and mask

Surrender chains for events, ie buggy debugging or complexity accretion

General obfuscation beneath the hood

Centralized ... indexed, logs vs text streams

And....

Upstream assumes systemd

Some resist

Costs rise

Optional becomes expected

Accidental incompatibility

And... systemd ingurgitates one by one, policy, supervision, logging, identity, dependency management and the rest of the world... digests it, and from the aether emerges a sweet smiley face, disgorging forth a monolithic mutant avatar, with Linux features.

I'll be quiet happy to be wrong about everything. Feel free to slaughter everything I've written. I don't even oppose systemd - I simply perceive it as a singularity that's drawing everything around me towards it. Wrong would definitely be good, so please don't hold back. I won't seek pardon for the rant though, because true or false, it's honest.

Edit: I was reading through my threads and thought the parent was asking me, though wasn't. I've unintentionally barged in here, but I'll leave the comment anyway, as it references a very big concern of mine.

Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd

#120

Post by tremon »

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.

Your memory is very selective. These service management tools are all older than systemd (and I'm sure there are plenty more):

  - daemontools
  - openrc
  - runit
  - upstart
  - insserv
  - start-stop-daemon
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