SystemD is blamed for long boot times and being heavy and bloated on resources. I tried OpenRC and Runit on real hardware (Ryzen 5000-series laptop) for week each and saw only 1 second faster boot time.
I’m old enough to remember plymouth.service (graphical image) being the most slowest service on boot in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. But I don’t see that as an issue anymore. I don’t have a graphical systemD boot on my Arch but I installed Fedora Sericea and it actually boots faster than my Arch despite the plymouth (or whatever they call it nowadays).
My 2 questions:
- Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
- Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
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.
The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could’ve been fixed or replaced.
The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd’s development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn’t exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical’s Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows’ svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.
It’s not just an init system, it’s way waaay more. It’s supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the “do one thing right” approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.
I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you’re free to use systemd if you want to. That’s choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.
To be fair systemd hasn’t shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i’m forced to use at work.
YMMV. If you’re happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.
Boot times aren’t really an issue and not really relevant to good vs bad. You should be able to rice each one for speed on your particular use case if you really want to.
Be wary of anything you get from RedHat. I use their stuff sometimes but ensure I can happily live without gnome, systemd, pipewire, wayland or whatever else they are generously gifting to us freeloaders.
We’d probably need to qualify this with “bad compared to what”. I can’t complain, as it does its job, and I’ve been able to tweak what I needed to. As I don’t tinker with it every week, I keep a sticky note rolled up on my desktop, or I quickly use ‘cheat systemd’ to remember some key examples.
I was getting really long start up time earlier this year (like 19 mins before the desktop was fully responding) and after trying everything else I tried ditching BTRFS and reverting my /home drive back to ext4. Turns out BTRFS start and checks was killing my boot times. Now, as fast as anything.
The following have been my saviours though in identifying boot times: journalctl -b -p err systemd-analyze blame --user systemd-analyze blame
