I go crazy over boot times, systems is faster on every machine I’ve tried it on. The biggest difference I’ve seen is replacing grub, both systems-boot and car-boot seem to shave off a decent amount.
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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I think it is one of those situations where everyone complains about what they use.
The reality is that system startup is insanely complicated due to the nature of software dependencies, and there will never be a perfect solution across multiple distros.
Lot's of things in computing should be simplified. Especially bios firmware / boot process. It has become overly complicated mess offering zero value for anybody. In 10 years the bios chip size has increased from 8 mbit to 256 mbit and no features added. Only TPM 2.0 has been added, but it is another chip than bios.
no
I'm honestly a big fan. Systemd-init has tons of options like run targets, sandbox options, users you want things to run as, etc. System-oomd has tons of qol stuff for desktop users to help with stutter and responsiveness. I am also kind of excited for UKI that systemd-boot is set to support.
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- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
No it's almost always been derived from people's behinds.
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
Yes.
Systemd is spectacular in many ways. Every modern OS has a process management system that can handle dependencies, schedule, manage restarts via policy and a lot more. Systemd is pretty sophisticated on that front. I've been able to get it to manage countless services in many environments with great success and few lines of code.
I make plymouth do the verbose mode because it's cool and hacker-y. Also I like when it says "failed" and I know what failed. For a few weeks I kept having to manually start firewalld and I never would have known otherwise, update seems to have fixed that though.
Tbf, I really only have experience with fedora and thus systemd, so, I like it but I "don't know what I'm missing" in a sense.
I am for most part quite happy with it. For all the complexity it brings, it also allows you to do a lot of stuff easily and reliable that would have been a nightmare with previous systems.
My biggest nitpick is that some commands are needlessly obtuse, e.g. trying to find an error message in journalctl is a mess when you aren't already deeply familiar with the tool. It will show you messages that are months old by default, will give exactly the same output for typos in the unit name as it will for no error messages and other little things like that.
SystemD is blamed for long boot times
That is and always was nonsense. Systemd shortens boot times by starting things in parallel. That's one of its key features.
There are some things to note about that:
Systemd only starts services in parallel when it isn't told otherwise by Before and/or After settings in the service files. This makes it pretty easy to make systemd slow by misconfiguring it. You can use the systemd-analyze program to see which services held up your boot.
Systemd has a very long default timeout (90 seconds) for starting or stopping a service. It's appropriate for the big, lumbering servers that systemd was probably designed for, but it might be wise to shorten the timeout on desktops, where a service taking more than 5 seconds to start is almost certainly broken. It's a setting in /etc/systemd/system.conf.
Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
I'm an early adopter of systemd. I installed it on my Debian desktops pretty much as soon as it was available in Debian, and I later started moving servers to it as well. I had long been jealous of Windows NT's service manager, and systemd is exactly what I had hoped would come to Linux one day.
Yes, the rant you're talking about is old, and yes, systemd is better now than it was then, but not in the sense of what the rant was complaining about. The rant was already patent nonsense when it was written, which has given me a very dim view of the anti-systemd crowd.
Besides systemd proper, they also spent a lot of time ranting about the journal system, which redirects syslog entries into a set of binary log files. They complained that this would make logs impossible to read in emergencies. This isn't even close to being true—any emergency bootable Linux image worth its salt has a copy of journalctl on it—and the binary nature of systemd's logs has caused me serious problems on exactly zero occasions.
Yes. Yes it is. systemd isn't bad for boot times, but more for tying so many goddamn things to init, PID1, creating just about the best attack point one could ever ask for. Wayland not being ready can be solved by not using it for the time being. Just use X. Also, it's still called plymouth.