I don't really get the hate for systemd. At least for someone who started really using Linux after it was introduced, it always seemed easier to control and manage than the init.d stuff.
Obviously it's a hassle to migrate if you have a ton of legacy services, but it's pretty nice.
It's because you now need to do systemctl restart sshd instead of /etc/init.d/sshd restart, I see no other reason than having to learn new syntax.
Arguably, init.d scripts were easier to understand, and systemd is a bit of a black box, it somehow works, but who knows where it writes logs or saves the process pid (it's all in the documentation somewhere), with init.d script you can just open the script itself and look.
Don’t minimize those strengths. Init.d scripts are something you can figure out just knowing a bit of shell script, or historical knowledge from before there was an internet. For something I rarely use, why do I need to learn something more complex to do the same thing - I either haven’t been sold on all the new functionality they piled in or do not need it. After all these years crowing about the Unix/linux way being many independent flexible tools that can work together, why do we now have this all-in-one monstrosity that might as well have come directly from Microsoft?
It was created basically by lennart because after RHEL 6 did pretty much the worst implementation ever of upstart he got NIH syndrome about it
Red Hat played a lot of dirty politics early on to get systemd everywhere (my tinfoil hat theory is that Red Hat let Lennart's NIH syndrome run away with it because they thought having more control over the init system would be beneficial)
It's subsuming everything, often with no real benefit over what it replaces.
The first two aren't actually issues with systemd, but rather are political issues I have around the way Red Hat bullies the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I'm not going to let that become a stopping point for my using what is actually a fairly good piece of tech. The third is actually an ongoing issue, but it's not enough for me to try throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is, however, IMO a continuation of Red Hat's sketchy political play.
What kind of dirty politics are we talking about here? I remember when Arch switched, the stated reasons from the devs was that their old init system was bad and nobody wanted to maintain it, for example.
You don't have to use systemd. However, the rest of the world left you behind. Systemd isn't controversial since everyone has adopted it. No one is making you use it but keep in mind you are a very small minority. The rest if the community moved on after systemd was release 10 years ago.
This is fine for the memes but outside of that it is silly.
Windows has about 80% market share (decreasing) in a very specific and shrinking niche (desktop PC's).
All other computing devices used by most people daily on the client and server side are dominated by some form of Linux or BSD.
I'm about 2 decades in too, really not here to argue since everything has already been said multiple times. I do see systemd in a somewhat similar light as Pulseaudio. Yes, some good ideas there and it's a useful tool, but it wasn't the be-all end-all solution.
Everything else aside, my biggest gripes are with service control. Instead of just "service" they had to invent a new name that was super close to an existing function (systemctl vs sysctl) and reverse the switch order. (service sshd stop vs systemctl stop sshd.service)
Besides that, I absolutely hate that all the service configs are not in a standard location. Well, you get things like sshd.conf which are still in etc, but the systemctl configs are who knows where.
There are more important things to hate on with systemd, but I went for the superficial this time and I absolutely hate service management with systemd now.
wrt conf file location, they're only generally in /usr/lib/systemd, /etc/systemd, or /run/systemd. You can always find out what's getting read with systemctl cat <service-name>. Way easier to find stuff than with some other random programs imo, I've seen crap have default conf files in dumb places like /usr/share/<service-name>/lib/etc.
Poettering worked for Red Hat from 2008 to 2022.[2][3] He then joined Microsoft.
In 2017, Poettering received the Pwnie Award for Lamest Vendor Response to vulnerabilities reported in systemd.
This Mastodon stream from Lennart Poettering describes a sudo replacement — called run0 — that will be part of the upcoming systemd 256 release. It takes a rather different approach to the execution of privileged commands, avoiding the use of setuid (which he calls "SUID") permissions entirely.
Basically Microsoft bloat confirmed, everyone switch back to OpenRC lol
and now RedHat's wunderkinder has moved onto Microsoft where he's a better fit.
Ideally, we can go back to Linux again.
Simple.
As someone who ran security for an enterprise OS company, I can't see why there's any debate on this. Are we used to choosing comfy things despite the safety concerns, now, or just when Lennart shits them out?
Yeah, I'm planning to switch from Arch to Gentoo. Systemd isn't the only reason, but it's a big one.
(Yes, I know about Artix, but it's... kindof a Frankenstein's monster, still mostly depending on the Arch repos and still with certain relics of Systemd. Or at least it was when I last tried it.)
Imagine trying to get new, young developers to adopt C or Pascal when the likes of Rust and Python exist. You can make arguments for a thing's superiority based on moral standards (which are always subjective), but morality is a poor metric. If everything was done based on that, the Linux ecosystem would be in the same state as the GNU Hurd kernel.
The choice of init system is up to the distro maintainers because init scripts are usually created and maintained by the packager of a given application. Debian for example chose its init system via a democratic vote. Distros that focus on different init systems exist, like the Debian fork Devuan.
I want a system that does what I need when I need it without selling out my information, showing me ads or bloated for no reason. I have used distros with systemd and without systemd that do that so I have no strong opinion one way or another. Software philosophy and ideals are important to me but not the most important thing.
Hence, I have upvoted both sides of this and will continue to do so because when the infighting is hilarious I can get behind it.