Why I dislike systemd

So I have not yet had to use systemd in any serious way, so I may be misinterpreting here, but I think this:

> ... and config/daemon reloading as things that could be made automatic, I'm assuming with e.g. inotify change events.

is a misinterpretation of the author's complaint. It sounds like with systemd, if you tell it to restart a service it will continue to use the old definition until you run a separate command to 'reload' it (and, presumably, all other configurations). On top of that, it indicates its knowledge that you've changed the file by telling you to run the aforementioned reload command.

No inotify seems to be involved in what he wants, which is that the reload command use the new configuration. Hell, be clever and use the old configuration's stop mechanism and the new one's start mechanism or complain if the restart mechanism differs or something, but a message telling you you didn't do something you almost always want to do is a pretty obvious smell for a UI problem.

I deeply dislike the similar behaviour of upstart, fwiw. In order to reload an upstart init script you have to stop and start it, restart uses the old one. I have spent annoying amounts of time wondering why it was doing it wrong.

> This page's horrible readability

It might not look fancy, but the readability is way better then on most sites these days. It loads fast, it has enough contrast, there are no distracting elements like images or animations that make it hard to focus on the content, scroll works as expected, the content is not split into useless pages, it does not make my fan spin up because some elements use insane amounts of computation power, content is not squeezed into some tiny box as it often is on other websites...

If the average website would let me read as comfortably as this one, that would be a huge step forward.

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.

Because systemd is event-driven, you can't actually be sure the service file won't be re-used in the running configuration - or that it won't trigger other service reloads/starts/stops due to its dependency specifications. Ergo systemd requires an explicit reload to commit the state of the unit files once you're satisfied they are as intended.

This is very important when you consider that unit files can kill other units on their conditions - I've used this feature in particular to make sure nginx goes down if a mountpoint becomes unavailable or the servicing process dies (and systemd can't restart it). This is extremely useful because it means a load balancer won't send requests to a webserver in an improper state. But it also means that while editing those config files, I wouldn't want systemd auto-reloading everytime I saved.

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 connect to a wifi network? ifconfig . If you need some other fancy flags for those 0.1% of hotspots in the world, you can do those, too (also through ifconfig) but it's that simple.

In contrast, after everyone agreed that wpa_supplicant is probably what happened after Stalin's ethereal spirit had mad sex with Hitler's ethereal spirit and their ethereal baby was incarnated, what did we do to alleviate things in Linux land? Why, we wrote NetworkManager, of course! Conservatively, 90% of today's deployments of NetworkManager exist because no one can figure out how to set up wireless without it, and we put up with its crap because wicd is waiting for us at the other end.

Better yet, this is all nicely documented in the manpage. If you search for "wireless" in ifconfig's manpage, you find out all you need to know. Just for fun, compare that to man networkmanager.

> On FreeBSD 10.1, chromium crashing easily, settings doesn't work. Firefox just clogs up and stops working. No skype (CURRENT will be in a better position to since epoll support has been added). No Dropbox (as of now, we don't have inotify, and kqueue may not be able to handle it, don't quote me on that).

I haven't had crashing things on OpenBSD, but yeah, a bunch of things don't work. Fortunately, they're things I don't use. If I ever need them -- OH THE HORROR AND THE BLASPHEMY -- I have a Windows laptop, which for all intents and purposes is by now about as closed and as hard to wrestle with as Fedora, but at least it doesn't hopelessly break every six months. There are Linux-only things that I sometimes need because at some point between 2003 and 2013, "portable" ended up meaning "we can probably work if you have bash in a non-standard location but that's about it" (eh, Yocto?) for which a cheap VPS is more than enough. When it breaks, I don't have to spend days trying to find out exactly what part of PolicyKit broke or where my devices are mounted this week -- I just wipe everything and reinstall.