In reference to: https://lemmy.world/post/23862757
I use Void btw
Image text:
Most people rejected his message.
“Systemd is Satan’s creation! Pure Evil!”
They hated Talking Pig because He told them the truth.
Just the meme/thread I was looking for. As someone that’s been out of the linux game for awhile, what’s the lastest on the controversy here? Do the systemd haters look more or less correct in the year 2025?
Upvoted because it belongs in this community, and should not be silenced, even though it is the wrong opinion
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 not just init.d that exists, alternative init systems such as dinit and OpenRC are a thing. The general complaint about systemd is that it’s too heavy and complicated for something as simple as an init system, and it has already gone way beyond that.
This does not only increase the attack surface of a Linux system drastically, giving way to exploits and potentially backdoors, but it also puts too much power in a piece of software’s hands as more and more things start depending on it.
And systemd is not even needed to create a user-friendly Linux system anyway. Chimera Linux with GNOME would be as smooth an experience as Fedora Linux if only it had more software in its repositories and PackageKit support.
I have the following complaints about systemd:
- 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.
It’s because you now need to do
systemctl restart sshdinstead 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?
I think it’s okay to not 100% know every little detail of how a system works, as long as it’s possible to find out what you need when you need it.
This post was sponsord by the Backdoor Buddies
I prefer the ini files systemd uses to bash scripts
Systemd syntax is not that hard if you read the manual. I think every hardcode Linux user hates systemd because it automatically does the thinkering for you and you can control your processes with simple commands
Hard disagree, I have been using Linux for over two decades and find sysd superior to sysv
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.
I still can’t wrap my head around why SystemD has become the defacto standard & why aren’t devs trying out OTHER init-systems
It’s not evil. It’s merely
- the wrong tool
- built wrong
- on wrong principles
- by a bad team
- who has poor coding and interaction
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?
Are we used to choosing comfy things despite […] concerns
People have been choosing convenience above everything else for a while, personally I find that doing so is even glorified at times.
In practice, what makes it so bad?
Bad usability, binary logs, crummy architecture.
It’s new and different, and the Linux boomers who are still stuck on ALSA and ext2 hate it.
Hueheue i use artix btw
redpill me on artix. Why should I switch from something like gentoo that still enables me to avoid systemd?
I tried gentoo a while ago and couldn’t figure out portage, but that’s on me… The reason i switched to from standard arch was just because my pc took 3 miniutes to boot (from nvme) and changing my init sys to runit solved my issue. I’d love to actually figure out gentoo someday though
There’s a support channel on irc for things like this. Also portage is just a better pacman–it can do more and thusly a time investment is necessary to be in control of your hardware
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 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.
Hexbear user spotted (or at least that’s what my first impression is with the weird image)
Windows isn’t controversial since everyone uses it. That’s a true fact.
Hexbear user spotted (or at least that’s what my first impression is with the weird image)
Heck no, that’s just an ancient meme to indicate it’s just banter/harmless trolling, not an attempt at serious discourse.
I guess we’re old now, if folks don’t know trollface anymore.
