I use plasma, BTW
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.
Yeah, I wish someone released software to my exact requirements out of spite. They can release it out of race hate if they like
The point isn’t just pragmatism. The point is that you’re running closed source software either way. Even ideologically, running out of date closed source software because it’s built into the chip isn’t actually any better than running a current version of the same software from a drive. Maybe that distinction made sense in the 90s when mircocode updates weren’t a thing most people dealt with, although honestly even back then it was a little weird. Now it’s complete garbage. The FSF is an important organization, which makes it all the more important to call them out when they’re wasting time and money on stupid nonsense.
Wtf, I didn’t know that Libreboot wasn’t fully libre any more. I agree with the FSF’s ideology here. The only reason to run Libreboot over Coreboot was 100% FOSS, and if that’s not the case, then there is no point to it anymore.
Thanks for mentioning the other projects, I’ll take a look
I agree with your point on the necessity of FSF and pure free software. Your comment seems to describe pretty well the Overton Window
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I’ve got no clue what systemd is lmao
I am not interested in being preached at unless you have a workable alternative and a good reason why should I switch over.
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.
It’s getting better for sure, but there are still a lot of issues for me (Plasma 5, Nvidia 545). I think I might stick with it for now until I run into some major dealbreaker for me. Right now I can only game without glitches if I limit my monitors refresh rate to 60hz and even then you will run into issues.
Fingers crossed gaming will be better in Wayland by the time Plasma 6 comes out
I wish it worked well on my system
I wish it worked well
on my system
i use swayfx and runit
i don’t like systemd because it has a lot of stuff that i don’t think should be built-in, for example, why have systemd timer when cron already exists?
runit is nice for me because it’s simple and i like activating services by just soft-linking files to /var/service instead of using some fancy tool
While you blissfully ignore it, systemd is planning the downfall of humanity. Don’t fall for its lies.
I, for one, welcome our new systemd overlords…
Now I want to do some PRs for systemD.
Yes, very sad. Anyway.
The only correct take right here
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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.
Agreed. Was just looking at Podman’s documentation the other day, and even though it’ll run on distributions without systemd, for a second I thought cgroups might not even work without systemd. Glad that’s not the case though, but I’m predicting a few problems down the road simply because I plan to use Alpine.
for no good reason
I think the reason is that almost everyone uses systemd
Kind of circular reasoning
Circles are superior geometric forms. Peak design!
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I’m not sure if this counts as reasoning, more like they just feed each other, with all starting from the original lack of documentation
That just sounds like a reason to not bother supporting Linux, when Windows is so much more popular
Yes that’s what lots of companies/people do
Yeah. That was my point. It’s a self fulfilling cycle of people using it because it’s all that’s supported, and it being all that’s supported because people use it. I think that is a problem. That’s the same reason most software is for Windows. I don’t think that’s a good reason.
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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
I assume there’s an advantage to the binary formats though. More efficient in terms of storage size? Easier to quickly search by a particular field even in huge files? Maybe something like that. (I genuinely don’t know)
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I can actually understand what’s going on with other init systems. They’re basically just a list of stuff that gets run before you even log in. I do not understand everything that systemd does. I like understanding what my computer is doing. Most people don’t care about that, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but systemd is not what I want. I feel forced into using it anyway though, because it can be a lot of work to avoid it, and there’s no reason for that beyond the fact that not enough people care.
I get it. I’m in a small niche within a small niche. Nobody owes me an easy alternative to systemd. I’d still like one though.
Exactly. Other systems are clearly doing one thing: init. Systemd wants to do everything
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?
oh, you haven’t seen nothing yet. you know the lisp-y, hackable goodness you get in emacs? what if an init system was that hackable, and configured with a lisp? go give GNU shepherd a try.
I’m an avid GUIX user, is Shepherd already incorporated into it?
yes.
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.
Is boot time that much of an issue besides for arbitrary competitive reasons? I haven’t tried any optimizations and boot time on my headless server is less than two seconds.
It comes in handy for people who wants to run Linux on their notebook without being an engineer and look at Mac users with envy because of their “ready to work” time on their macbooks of 1-2 seconds after they open the lid.
On a server, it solves nothing.
I maybe reboot my computer once a month. Why care?
I’m curious if there’s any quantitative evidence to show this.
There is none. It’s all conjecture or circumstantial.
I think it would be pretty easy to qualitatively test this
But then it wouldn’t fit the “systemd = devil” narrative if it was actually tested and found out to be false lol
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!
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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.
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None of the others are as deeply integrated into everything as systemd, they pretty much just handle starting things up so dropping in a replacement should be fairly straightforward. At least, it was until everything switched to systemd. Which is probably my biggest issue with it: that it integrates to the point you can’t replace it anymore.
Honestly I don’t know. I just know that desktop environments and a lot of other packages have hard dependencies on Systemd, at least on Arch and Debian based systems. Those packages include: base, flatpak, polkit, xdg-desktop-portals, and vulkan-intel. So yeah, it’s nearly impossible to not break anything.
Debian lets you switch and AFAIK it mostly works fine. They provide both sysvinit and runit as alternatives. Packages are only required to provide systemd units now, however a lot of core packages still provide sysvinit scripts, and Debian provides a package
orphan-sysvinit-scriptsthat contains all the legacy sysvinit scripts that package maintianers have chosen to remove from their packages.That’s just in the official repository, of course. Third-party repos can do whatever they want.
Easy:
Less Code in Kernelspace means safer OS
I want a Mikrokernel Linux. Maybe RedoxOS will be suitable.
Systemd, as a replacement init system, is fine-ish. It’s sometimes slow and when it decides a service is lost there’s not much to do aside from killing the thing and restarting it.
Systemd, the full blown ecosystem that wants to replace literally everything by
systemd-thesamethingasbeforebutfromscratchhowever, invites scepticism, especially when there are no particular flaws in the existing versions of things. DNS resolution, DHCP clients, NTP sync, etc. worked perfectly well.deleted by creator
Yeah! So it’s… uhh… overloaded…? There! Didn’t use bloat!
Perhaps the most asinine reason I can give, I really like the color scheme and log design used in OpenRC, makes for a very nice init scroll of text
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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.
Is it difficult to replace systemd?
Borderline impossible if you aren’t using a distro designed with that in mind. Pretty much everything that isn’t a program you directly start (e.g. sound system, desktop environment, bluetooth daemon etc.) either only provide a systemd unit to start them (which you’ll have to manually translate into e.g. a shell script if you want it to work with your new init system) or is entirely reliant on systemd to function.
Your choices of distro if you don’t want systemd are Debian, Void, Artix, and Gentoo, and afaik that’s about it.
Replacing components of the systemd suite (e.g. using connman or networkmanager instead of systemd-networkd) isn’t actually that bad as long as your DE has support for them, but replacing systemd itself is something you are building your entire system around.
Your choices of distro if you don’t want systemd are Debian, Void, Artix, and Gentoo, and afaik that’s about it.
IIRC Debian was one of the first distros implementing systemd.
It still leaves sysvinit as an option. Debian doesn’t lock you into systemd. Heck, it doesn’t even lock you into Linux – you can use Debian on top of the FreeBSD kernel if you so desire
Extremely. When things like your DE starts being dependent on systemd, you don’t want to replace it.
I had posted about the monopoly that systemd has, and was down voted to oblivion.
Lennart Poettering being completely unable to fathom why anyone would ever want to use any piece of software other than his
What’s behind this? I’m sure it’s definitely not 100 % a single guy working on systemd, and tbh hating software because of the person who wrote it seems rather silly.
And what about those API changes you mentioned? Genuinely curious, I thought it always at least mentions them in release notes during betas.
You can look up Lennart Poettering yourself, but he was also involved in PulseAudio which if you learned Linux in the 00’s might give you pause, and has had some minor beef with Linus Torvalds before. His Wikipedia page has something like 5 paragraphs for controversies and 2 for his actual career.
I think focusing on him is a mistake, but I also understand people who were still mad about PulseAudio latching on to him if they also had issues with Systemd. This article goes into some of it, but I can’t vouch fully for its accuracy. I will say that the dates of 2008 for PulseAudio’s release and 2012ish for when it became actually fairly functional lines up pretty roughly with my own memory, and systemd was released in 2010 and adopted by Arch and Debian in early 2012, so PulseAudio was barely fixed before the same developer started pushing Systemd, and succeeded in getting the normally very conservative Debian developers on board.
that is such a great article. I can practically taste the edit warring.
It appears I was mistaken – systemd does announce changes to internal interfaces on their mailing list although I can’t be bothered to find out how much warning they give – but I believe my point stands. Regardless of whether he gives adequate warning, he’s still very much a dick about it (“gentoo users, this is your wakeup call”) and he still seems to be doing the embrace-extend-extinguish thing. It used to be possible to run systemd-logind without systemd – it no longer is – and that mail I just linked is about making udev hard dependent as well.
Of course Poettering does not do all the development himself, but he does lead the project and it is his hubris and inability to accept that one size does not fit all that is responsible for the project being as hostile to outside implementations as it is.
Again, it’s not the systemd project making alternatives to widely used applications and daemons (or even bringing development of those applications under the systemd umbrella) that I mind. It’s Poettering’s “my way or the highway” attitude and apparent belief that if your system is not either 0% systemd or 100% systemd then you do not deserve to have a system that works.
“gentoo users, this is your wakeup call”
that was from 2014.
As a gentoo user, he can go eat some dicks, my system today runs just fine.
“building codes.”
It’s like the rules systemd breaks except more noticeable when people have fucked around and now find out.
What rules?
Ok, but listen, though, systemd is the embodiment of evil…
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.
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…
Yeah, that does sound better. What are the arguments for init?
The only arguments against I have seen so for is systemd does a lot more than just handing system startup (
systemd-resolvedis one such example) and files that was previously stored as text now require systemd’s own tool to read (journalctl?).So not the actual startup function, just everything else.
Mmm I have a general dislike of systemd because it doesn’t adhere to the “do one thing and do it well” approach of traditional Unix systems.
It’s a big old opaque blob of software components that work nicely together but don’t play well with others, basically.
Edit: but it solved a particular set of problems in serverspace and it’s bled over to the consumer Linux side of things and generally I’m ok with it if it simplifies things for people. I just don’t want a monoculture to spring up and take root across all of Linux as monocultures aren’t great for innovation or security.
Based on the video someone posted, it’s not very portable either.
I feel that little part of my brain that wants to add yet another standard itching. Easily starting something at boot is good, but I don’t see why that has to come with loss of modularity.
Afaik they don’t care about being portable to instead focus as much as possible on being fast and whatever
I see way more posts that are pro-systemd than anti these days, so I think you might be tilting at windmills a bit.
I would love to think about systemd less, but I’ve worked with it professionally since a year or so before Debian switched while I was an intern working in embedded. I got to see the flame wars and shaped my opinion of systemd by wrestling with its growing pains. Writing your own service files and working with DBus was ass back then, and while it has gotten better, my patience with it has diminished. In the end the frustration was enough that after I ditched windows, systemd was the next to go.
That would be the end of it, but other programs keep growing annoying systemd dependencies or their projects get swallowed up by the systemd ecosystem entirely. I was so excited at the start to work with the parallel execution and dependency management, but the number of times systemd broke something, swallowed up the output, and then corrupted its own journal and lost the logs really turned me against it.
I don’t know, I’m not a power-user so systemd is just a thing in the background, I don’t have much opinions over it.
I think you might be tilting at windmills a bit.
No systemd love or hate for me, as for the meme, I respect both opinions (I’m still learning btw) but don’t particularly like proselitjzers. Sharing an opinion and experiences (like you did) is fine and often informative, what I don’t like are people (expecially on lower-quality places like 4chan) spamming stuff like “systemd is the devil and killed my child” or “systemd weights more than the Linux kernel” I guess I need to make up my mind, haven’t interacted with the OS at a low enough level yet.
I understand what you mean. If you are on the fence and not super interested in init systems, you can pretty easily get by with systemd without thinking about it. Most desktop environments have tools to manage user services in easy GUI’s, and you can find guides for anything more advanced you want to accomplish with them usually.
If you want to dive in though, systemd is a great init system to learn. Nowadays learning systemd is a lot less of a moving target, and it’s in use virtually everywhere so the knowledge is valuable. It’s also fairly well documented at this point, which is great for learning how it works.
My personal advice if you want to go that path is to just open up some service files. There are lots of interesting examples in
/lib/systemd/systemSystemd service files are just plain text, and pretty straightforward to read. Its divided into nice sections, and naming is pretty straightforward (Or the systemd brainworms are really in deep). Look for names you recognize or programs you use. Especially ones you are familiar with on the command line. I don’t recommend changing them to start, especially in the system directory, just open a couple and you should quickly start seeing the connections between what they are trying to accomplish and whats in each file. Then if you see anything you don’t understand or peaks your curiousity check the documentation. Once you’re ready try writing one of your own for something in the usr service directory. No pressure though, its not necessarily essential knowledge
DE wars? Get off my lawn sonny, before I chastise you for using vim.
No need for a DE on Emacs OS.
Just a shame about the crappy text editor that comes with it :(
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 systemd 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.
You’re welcome, glad you liked it!
That’s like saying “I drive drunk but it’s worked out really well for me”.
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I’m from the era of untangling hacky init scripts from every flavour of Linux to get something to work or add something new. Systemd was like coming up for air.
I use Gnome.
Heresy!
Let me tell you for the next six hours why XMonad is the only way to go.
… And if you want Wayland you can write it yourself
Whatever makes you happy, mate; we don’t judge 😁
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.
