Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.
Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
31–40 of 221 posts
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#32Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?
It was very rough the first few years. It's fine now.
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#33Love/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 parts of systemd/journald.
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#34It 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?
Yep, no "unnecessary entanglements" evidently (their words, not mine).
> Unnecessary entanglements
The problems with systemd are:
* that once it was adopted, every single package started requiring it
* which meant that packages that previously could run everywhere, now could only run on systemd-based systems
* binary logs - a solution that solved nothing but created problems
* which locked out any system that wasn't linux
* which locked out any linux system that didn't want to use it
* which led to abominations like systemd-resolved
* "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else *can* be used.
The systemD developers don't care about any of this, of course. They've got a long history of breaking user space and poor dev practices because they're systemD. I mean, their attitude was so bad they got one of their principal devs kicked from the kernel because they overloaded the use of the kernel boot parameter "debug", which flooded the console, and refused to modify the debug option to something compatible like "systemd.debug", broke literally every other system, and then told everybody else "hey we're not wrong, the rest of the world is wrong." And this has been their attitude since then.
Look, if people want to use systemD, that's just fine. But it is a fact that the entire development process for systemD is predicated on making Linux incompatible with anything else, which is an entire inversion of how Linux and Free Software works.
I actually like unit files. But if systemD was just an init system, it would stop there.
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#35While other UNIX derived OSes have adopted similar systems before systemd was a thing, in Linux continues to be a drama.
It is like the cult of "The UNIX Philosophy" hardly found in any commercial UNIX that spun out of AT&T UNIX System V.
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#36Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#37Why though? Systemd has been a huge success, dragging Linux kicking and screaming into the modern world.
Some people try to run Linux on Apple hardware, don't ask me, some people seem to be "technical masochists" :)
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally am very much happy that Linux is not like the Linux I learned. Slackware was an excellent learning experience and will always hold a dear place in my heart and memories, but not on any of my computers.
same. i still remember how painful it was to setup services without systemd. having to manually deal with daemons was so painful, to the point of being exoteric.
The worst was editing an existing service for the distribution. With systemd you just need an override file, without, you have to patch the file and review it each time it is upgraded to check the differences.
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#39Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?
Because "Stop Job Running For User 1001: (22s / 90s)" with no indication of which @$%^ing stop job it is is incredibly annoying. And the fact that "systemctl start blahd.service" exits successfully even if blahd didn't actually start because a misconfigured blahd not starting is "correct" makes me want to burn the server room down from time to time. And nondeterministic service initialization is absolutely Broken and Wrong.
It's.... fine, mostly. It solved no problems I had and introduced some minor ones I didn't, and offers significantly less visibility, but it's no longer the worst offender in those regards (hello, Wayland!) so I just write it off as another of the many ways the Linux experience has gotten worse over time.
Re: Devuan – Debian Without Systemd
#40Honest question here: why do people hate systemd so much?
Many of us starting using Linux before systemd was a thing, and you get used to what you use, so when something new appears that are trying (well, in this case "tried and succeeded at") to replace a bunch of stuff, there is a natural push-back against it. I think systemd also took a relatively non-unixy approach, where it's a big stack to adopt, rather than individual programs that work together well. Typically, we p…
Initially i hated systemd for the change it bought and lennarts behavior, but today I'm wiser.
Today i hate systemd for its bad debugability (edit unit & daemon-reload loops), the lockups that happen whenever there is a fifo in the wrong place, and the processes that systemd spawns with no apparent related unit and without means to mask them. And the difficult to disable suspends on machines that never had any business suspending.