cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24764351
Systemd is pretty cool honestly
Can you elaborate? Are there a lot of security holes in systemd? (Genuine question)
I’m pretty sure their arguments boil down to “big company bad” as systemd is developed by Red Hat. Putting a single entity’s products in charge of several basic functions of the computer (like booting, init, daemons, networking) is seen as a bad idea, especially Red Hat which disgraced itself by making the RHEL source code available only to customers (which does not violate the license), but so far I don’t know of any solid evidence of security holes caused by either incompetence or malice.
I don’t hate systemd, but I prefer OpenRC and usually use it on my Debian systems. My preference is purely vibes based though, and I think most of the anti-systemd arguments in common usage are a bit silly.
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.
I see why that may not be an ideal position in an ideological sense, where every distro uses the same thing, but i see it the other way around: it’s a way to finally attempt to standardize Linux desktops. Having a standard desktop is crucial for mainstream adoption, because developers won’t bother supporting 4837 different combinations of software. This is the reason I am really excited for the future with flatpak, xdg-portals, systemd, pipewire, Wayland etc etc. This way the distro is no longer the platform, it’s the distro agnostic software stack that becomes the target platform. For example there’s no longer a need to support KDE’s file picker, and gnome’s file picker and xfce’s, you can just call the portal and it will (should) display a file picker. And if the user doesn’t have a supported environment (which the vast majority don’t) then the burden is on them for being different I guess :p
Systemd-boot and the service files and timers are pretty neat. Works fine as an init too I guess
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.
My thoughts on systemd:
runit entering the chat
