My biggest problem with systemd is that Red Hat has basically used it to push their-way-or-the-highway on many Linux distros. That said, in many situations systemd is better than what came before. Except systemd-networkd. It’s a PITA as far as I’m concerned.

The Nazis will overtake us, one red hat at a time

Anything that lets me avoid the aberration that is Grub is great.

Those are the features I’m most interested in. Do you have a tutorial / resource you can recommend?

The man pages are, as with most Linux, technically sufficient. Just very hard to digest if I don’t have four hours of interrupted time.

some other init systems just use scripts for config, meaning you can just do whatever

It’s one of the init systems of all time.

it makes my computer start. that’s pretty neat I think

Hell yea +1 for shepherd.

Declarativity on steroids.

The only advantage I see is that it actually seems to keep a better handle on the status of the process/service. The old-style init scripts would often get out of sync and not realize that a process had died, or if they did they would repeatedly respawn a service that would just die again. Maybe that was less of a problem in later years than I experienced earlier, but it was there.

The whole init.d system felt very ad-hoc with every script working a little bit differently, giving different output styles, etc.

I feel that. I’ve used Linux before systemd but when I went into the “nitty gritty” by using arch systemd had just been implemented and everything I learned about startup services init etc. was systemd based. When I started my career working in servers they were redhat/CentOS so still systemd and when I switched jobs Debian already had made the switch so (most of) the systems at my new job were also systemd based. Of course I learned the basics of init files and even some rc.d but systemd still makes the most sense to me and like you say it’s “comfy”.

Would you elaborate? Is systemd config not declarative?

IBM is heavily focused on IoT

Oh no, IBM wants to put a System/390 in every lightbulb!

I’m pretty sure IBM hasn’t focussed on IoT in a long time

(In the sense that I used to work there and know they’ve both reduced investment in, and fully removed, some parts of their portfolio regarding IoT)

Hell, pass init=/bin/yes and you’ll see even more greatly reduced RAM usage!

❯ ps aux | grep /usr/lib/sys | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/$/+/' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/+$/\n/' | bc
266516

So that’s 260 MiB of RSS (assuming no shared libs which is certainly false) for:

• Daemon manager
• Syslog daemon
• DNS daemon (which I need and would have to replace with dnsmasq if it did not exist)
• udev daemon
• network daemon
• login daemon
• VM daemon (ever hear of the principle of least privilege?)
• user daemon manager (I STG anyone who writes a user daemon by doing nohup & needs to be fired into the sun. pkill is not the tool I should have to use to manage my user’s daemons)

For comparison the web page I’m writing this on uses 117 MiB, about half. I’ll very gladly make the tradeoff of two sh.itjust.works tabs for one systemd suite. Or did you send that comment using curl because web browsers are bloated?

For another comparison 200 MiB of RAM is less than two dollars at current prices. I don’t value my time so low that I’ll avoid spending two bucks by spend hours debugging whatever bash scripting spaghetti hell other init systems cling onto to avoid “bloat”. I’ve done it, don’t miss it.

Wanna explain?