Can someone persuade me to not use systemd without using the word 'bloat?'
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Use systemd if you want. It's not perfect, but nothing is. There are certainly good reasons to use systemd, including, but not limited to, that it's the default on most distros and you don't want to mess with init systems. My only complaint is that too much software and documentation is written with the expectation that you have systemd for no good reason, which makes it harder to leave, which makes more people stick with it, which is an excuse to neglect support for other init systems even more.
for no good reason
I think the reason is that almost everyone uses systemd
My question was just curiosity. If there's a good reason to switch to something else, I'd like to know, you know?
You get a lot more transparency with the other init systems. Systemd is a big system that does lots of things and it's not always possible to see everything it's doing, because it's doing a lot.
It also likes to hide things behind port redirections and binary storage of things that have always been text before so you pretty much have to use their tools to even read them
If you try to switch a distro that's already using Systemd to some other init system, you'll have so many broken things to fix!
So every distro should use Systemd to solve this problem
I was just trying to make fun of how hard it is to replace Systemd. I am still gonna make the switch when I get some free time.
It's not systemd doing all the things completely unrelated to system initialization that it does that I have a problem with. It's systemd doing them worse than the existing tools that do those things that the systemd equivalents replace and Lennart Poettering being completely unable to fathom why anyone would ever want to use any piece of software other than his. systemd talks big game about being modular, but makes breaking changes to how those modules communicate without warning anyone, so if you dare to be a "systemd hater" as he calls them and replace one of those modules with an equivalent he isn't involved with, Heaven help you when he breaks the API of systemd that they hook into and the developers of your equivalent scramble to implement the binary protocol he thought up yesterday so that their alternative continues to work.
I don't want software on my system that is managed like that. It's the same reason I prefer Firefox over anything Chromium based.
If you actually want a reason, then most people experience faster boot up times using runit instead of Systemd. I haven't tried it yet though.
maybe if you ran systemd you wouldn't have to boot up so often that actual boot times mattered that much.
I'm curious if there's any quantitative evidence to show this.
There is none. It's all conjecture or circumstantial.
Fun. You can dick around with your init scripts without having to worry about the right triggers or spawn classes or anything. Your system is hackable with bash. Systemd: here are a list of approved keywords, don't insert that there, why are using cron when you can use me?
"building codes."
It's like the rules systemd breaks except more noticeable when people have fucked around and now find out.
What rules?
I don't care whether you use GNOME, KDE Plasma, Sway or Weston, as long as you use Wayland.
My Nvidia card says no to Wayland+KDE :( incredibly laggy and unresponsive ui
There's a lot of improvements with Plasma 6 and NVIDIA 545 on my RTX 3060 Ti, so that's something to look forward to.
I wish it worked well on my system
systemd isn't perfect, but it's definitely a net plus for me when compared with older init system. In case anyone's interested, this talk summarizes the key points pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo
This was an excellent listen, thank you for the link. I had no idea what was involved in it when I started, nor the roles of initd and launchd before it and what it was trying to replace.
The funny thing is that the guy giving the talk, Benno Rice, is primarily FreeBSD/openRC and not Linux, so he seemed fairly agnostic in presenting the various sides, not just from Unix and then Linux but also from the Apple viewpoint, who have also been playing a kind of parallel but separate role in this.
Very cool. Not a beginner level talk, definitely, but there was nothing I couldn't figure out coming from Windows/Mac tech. Really informative, thank you again.
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While you blissfully ignore it, systemd is planning the downfall of humanity. Don’t fall for its lies.
I don't even know what systemd is ☠️
Oversimplified: It's the serv8ce that handles starting and stopping of other services, including starting them in the right order after boot. Many people hate it because of astrology and supersticion. Allegedly it's "bloated". But still it has become the standard on many (most?) distros, effectively replacing init.
I like init. It's simple. I like systemd as well. It's convenient. Beyond that i don't have very strong feelings on the matter.
Also, see important answer by topinambour-rex.
I think the arguments against the "bloat" are not towards systemd as an init system, but rather are because systemd does so many things other than being an init system. I also don't mind systemd, but I absolutely hate systemd-resolved
. I do not want my init system to proxy DNS queries by setting my resolv.conf to 127.0.0.53.
Just write systemd-
and press tab, that's "the bloat". I'm not saying that the systemd devs should not develop any new tools, but why put them all inside one software package? systemd-homed
is cool, but useless for 99% of users. Same with enrolling FIDO2 tokens in a LUKS2 volume with systemd-cryptenroll
. Far from useless or "bad", but still bloat for an init system.
Now that you mention it, I find systemd messing with my DNS settings incredibly annoying as well, so I can't help but agree on that point. At this production system at work, when troubleshooting, I often need to alter DNS between local, local (in chroot), some other server in the same cluster, and a public one. This is done across several service restarts and the occasional reboot. Not being able to trust that resolv.conf remains as I left it is frustrating.
On the newest version of our production image, systemd-resolvd is disabled.
• systemd is an init system commonly used in distros like Linux Mint, Arch, Manjaro, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.
• init systems have a process id of 1 and manage services like a login manager, network, firewall service, etc.
• a process id is assigned to every process in a linux system.
the average user usually doesn't worry about the init system, although more experienced/techy users may care about it.
Thank you, Callyral. I didn't know either. But now I'm trying to learn Linux again after 30 years of not touching it, so this is helpful.
If I may ask an additional possibly stupid question (coming from Windows/Mac): as an init system in Linux, after you get past BIOS and POST at power up, is systemd also responsible for the initial OS software boot process (the "bootstrap" or Boot Manager in DOS/Windows) or is that another process altogether?
Or, asked another way, does systemd load the Linux kernel, and if not, what does?
Just so you know, I have no real skin in this game yet; I'm just trying to figure out where systemd starts and stops so that I can follow the [endless] debate, lol.
I just use systemctl because I know how to use it and know all the ins and outs of any bullshit I might encounter. No way I'm switching. I like not being stumped on issues I can't fix for weeks.
I am not interested in being preached at unless you have a workable alternative and a good reason why should I switch over.
Ok, but listen, though, systemd is the embodiment of evil...
DE wars? Get off my lawn sonny, before I chastise you for using vim.
As an OpenRC user, Systemd is fine. I prefer openRC but I have systemd on my server and all its LXC containers and I have had no issues with it.
If you think the init wars are stupid, take a look at the FSF people's (attempted) war against Libreboot and their absolute humiliation by the project leader..
To be fair, while it's the Libreboot creator's project and they can do whatever they want with it, I can see why people are upset that Libreboot has had the "Libre" in it's name seemingly neglected.
The FSF is an ideological organisation. It's important that they exist. It's also important that pure free software exists. Pragmatism is also important, but without any purity, the "extreme" of software freedom gets watered down, and so the window of an "acceptable" amount of proprietary-ness shifts as a new, less hardline "extreme" takes it's place, if that makes sense. We should be striving for full software freedom, even if it's currently just a dream.
Libreboot was a pure libre software project. Now it isn't. Originally, a fork called osboot was created with the new blob reduction policy. That was fine, because it was a different name that didn't mislead (also because nobody knew osboot as the fully free BIOS replacement). Then that policy became Libreboot policy. Libreboot is no longer fully libre, despite it having been exactly that for it's whole life. It had an established name as the fully free BIOS replacement. It was known for that. Hence the upset.
Also, I see Canoeboot as a success. Rowe seems to be doing it out of spite, but it's achieved what the GNU project wants. It has successfully pushed Rowe to at least provide some sort of fully free release again.
Ubuntu btw
At the level I care about, which is "I want this daemon to start when I boot up the computer", systemd is much better. I can write a ~5 line unit file that will do exactly that, and I'll be done.
With init, I needed to copy-paste a 50-line shell script that I don't really understand except that a lot of it seemed to be concerned with pid files. Honestly, I fail to see how that's better...
I also want to use my computer and not think about init systems. That's a large part of the reason why I don't like systemd.