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origini • today at 10:38 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

I'm using systemd for ages, never had a single issue at all with it.

But do you run systemd and complain or why do you even hate it?

its linux right, if a linux distribution decides to use it, its not systemds fault to be used and if you use it and don't take the time and effort to have it your way, you shouldn't complain either?


Replies

bayindirh • today at 11:07 AM

The definition of my and your ages might differ a little. I have used many things which have came before systemd and did a lot of work on them. As a result, I have seen and experienced a lot of fail-modes of both systemd and others which came before.

One of the most important feature of prior tools were transparency. Since they were single-purpose tools written with UNIX philosophy in mind, they were simpler, more robust and has less fail-modes. Systemd is pretty opaque and non-deterministic in that regard. This is not a "old man yells at cloud" stuff. You can't trust to a piece of code you can't trace and debug. Systemd makes it almost impossible with all the intertwined gears and IPC layers it has.

On the "I didn't have any problems" with it side. It might be working on your system, for your use case. It might not show its bugs on a system with a 90-day average uptime. I don't live on that world. I manage way more systems with way more different, niche, interesting hardware and software than that, and this tends to surface edge cases and where things break.

On the "do you run systemd?" part, yes I run it. On many, many machines 7/24/365.

It's easy to say "Why do you even run it, it's Linux, just distro-hop", when you have a single system. I don't. Projects, software has requirements, compatibility targets, etc. Also, considering the hardware we run, it's not that simple either.

Lastly, I run Debian personally since version 3. We use other distributions alongside Debian in our datacenter. I'm very involved and rooted in these systems, and Debian feels like home after using, contributing, and developing derivatives on top of that.

...and how systemd has been forced into systems is another story. I have been there, watched that, so, errm, it's not all voluntary, peaceful and friendly, to put it kindly.

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kodoman • today at 12:25 PM

Wait till you do have an issue or even just want to disable one of the 'helpful closely coupled' services something works to better fit what ever you doing or for security/reliability reasons (D-Bus is a great example for me).

It's difficult to avoid systemd at this point and it's not because it's the best technical solution for all use cases in the same way that modern windows is a complete shit show but still everywhere.

My question would be what does systemd do that is not possible outside of openrc and launching what ever daemons you want for the tasks you want or combining it with what ever programs you want to do things like sand-boxing or containerization? Not saying openrc is a panacea but systemd is definitely not either and for many systems is just plain annoying, I can consed for people who want a normal desktop (plug and play distro experiences) experience it can provide that.

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