Someone please convince me why I should hate systemd because I still don’t understand why all the hate exists.
The idea as far as I can tell is that it’s responsible for too many things and gives a massive point of failure.
The very existence of a defined kernel is an insult to the Linux philosophy
In some ways I think the filesystem is philosophically the exact opposite of systemd — I can boot my system with an ext4 root, with a btrfs /home…or vice versa. Or add some ZFS, or whatever. The filesystem is (with the exception of some special backup schemes) largely independent of the rest of the system, despite being of core importance.
On the other hand, I can’t change my init system (i.e., systemd) without serious, serious work.
It’s also “infectious” software. The way systemd positions itself on the system, it can make it more difficult for software to be written in an agnostic way. This isn’t all software, and is often more of a complaint by lower level software, like desktop environments.
https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/
This isn’t a terrible summary of some of the aspects of it.
Another aspect is that when it was first developed, the lead on the project was exceptionally hostile to anyone who didn’t immediately agree that systemd definitely should take over most of the system, often criticizing people who pointed out bugs or questionable design decisions as being afraid of change or relics of the past.
It’s more of a social reason, but if people feel like the developer of a tool they’re forced to use doesn’t even respect their concerns, they’re going to start rejecting the tool.
What do you expect from an init system? It’s like saying my cpu is infectious because my computer depends on it
the develope receive a fuck ton of hate too, and he keep the project going, against every one unix-way haters
Indeed, the Unix philosophy was do one thing and do it well. ls just list directory’s and files it’s not a network manager too. Systemd crams a lot of extra shit into an init.d/rc.
I still prefer the old system-v/openRC setup or BSD’s setup. It’s simple does 1 job and does it well. But I can work with systemd just fine in creating scripts these days and it does have some nice features like user startup scripts baked into it and podman integrates very nicely with it.
My understanding is that some people are die hards to the software philosophy of “do one thing really well”. systemd at the very least does many different things. These people would prefer to chain a bunch of smaller programs together to replicate the same functionality of systemd since every program in the chain fits the philosophy of “does one thing really well”.
For me it’s 3 things
- Do one thing and do it well
- Everything is a file in Linux
- human readable logs
Systemd breaks all three of though by being monolithic and binary. It actually makes you have to jump through more hoops to do things in certain cases. I understand it’s a mindset shift but it really starts making it feel more like Windows with how it works and the registry and event log.
People don’t like it because it’s declarative. It felt cool to be able to just put bash files into certain directories to have them executed on startup. That was elegant, in the sense of “everything’s a file”.
systemd is more of an api than a framework, so it’s a different design paradigm.
I hated systemd until I printed out the docs, for some coffee, and sat in a comfy chair to read them front to back. Then I loved it.
Mostly I hated it because I didn’t know how to do things with it.
Also, “journalctl” is kind of an ugly command. But really, who gives a fuck. It’s a well-designed system.
And if a person absolutely must execute their own arbitrary code they can just declare a command to execute their script file as the startup operation on a unit.
Your comment summarizes my entire programming career.
These steps:
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Be taught that there’s a specific way to do something because the other ways have major issues
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Find something that goes against that specific way and hate it
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After a lot of familiarity, end up understanding it
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Have a mix emotion of both loving it because it functions so well and hating it because it doesn’t align with the rules you’ve set up
Developer cognition is the most expensive resource on any programming project. It is entirely rational to stick to tried and true ways of doing things. A developer’s mind is generally at capacity, and putting some of that capacity into learning new tricks comes at the cost of all the other things that developer can be doing.
And it’s not just a matter of time. Generally speaking, a developer can only do so much mental processing between sleep cycles.
That’s not to say it’s always bad to learn new things. In fact one has to in order to keep the system working in a changing world.
But throwing shade at developers who hesitate to learn new things is foolish. I’d recommend every developer do shamatha and vipassana meditation so that they can more accurately monitor the state of their own mental resources. Those mental resources are the most valuable and most expensive resources on the project.
Good that you’ve enjoyed it. But a fundamentally wrong thing about systemd is that it is actively harming the best thing about Linux – freedom. Some programs won’t work on a non-systemd distro because how tightly coupled and vendor non-agnostic anything that becomes dependent on might become at times. Of course it’s not as bad as glib(loat)c, but still if something can be done without any degradation of functionality via standard POSIX facilities, WHY either incur additional maintenance overhead for non-systemd implementations or punish people for their computing choices if there’s no one to maintain it?
I don’t hate systemd. However:
Units and service files are confusing, and the documentation could be a lot better.
That said, when systemd came out the traditional init stack was largely abandoned. Thanks to systemd (and the hatred of it) there are now a couple of traditional-style init systems in active development.
I don’t hate it now, though I did when it first came out, as it borked my system on several occasions. I’m still not a fan, but it works so eh.
One borkage was that the behavior of fstab changed, so if there was e.g. a USB drive in fstab which was not connected at startup, the system would refuse to boot without some (previously not required) flags in fstab. This is not a big deal for a personal laptop, but for my headless server, was a real pain. The systemd behavior is arguably the right one, but it broke systems in the process. Which is somewhat antithetical to, say, Linus Torvalds’ approach to kernel development (“do not break user space”).
It also changed the default behavior of halt — now, it changed it to the “correct” behavior, but again…it broke/adversely affected existing usage patterns, even if it was ultimately in the right.
In addition to all of this, binary logs are very un-UNIXy, and the monolithic/do-everything model feels more like Windows than *NIX.
systemd tries to unify a Wild West situation where everyone, their crazy uncle, and their shotgun-dual-wielding Grandma has a different set of boot-time scripts. Instead of custom 200-line shell scripts now you have a standard simple syntax that takes 5 minutes to learn.
Downside is now certain complicated stuff that was 1 line need multiple files worth of workarounds to work. Additionally, any custom scripts need to be rewritten as a systemd service (assuming you don’t use the compat mode).
People are angry that it’s not the same as before and they need to rewrite any custom tweaks they have. It’s like learning to drive manual for years, wonder why the heck there is a need for auto, then realizing nobody is producing manual cars anymore.
There is also the argument that it’s more complicated under the hood and harder to troubleshoot, particularly because of it’s inherent parallelism and dependency-tree design, whereas initv was inherently serial. It was much more straightforward to pick the order in which services started and shut down on an initv system.
For example, say I write a service and I want it to always be the first service stopped during a shutdown, and I want all other services to wait for it to stop before shutting down. That was trivial to do on an initv system, it’s basically impossible on systemd.
For those wondering, yes I did run into this situation. My solution was clobbering the shutdown, poweroff, and restart binaries with scripts earlier in path search that stop my service, verify that they’re stopped, and then hook back to systemd to do the power event.
I had numerous situations where systemd didn’t let me abort a hanging service startup during boot or stop during shutdown.
So what do I do now, systemd? Wait till infinity??
That never happened while using other init systems. Because they simply fail properly (“sorry I did my best to stop this, I needed a SIGKILL finally”). Or simply let me log in: “sorry, some services failed to start and now it’s a huge mess, but at least you can log in and fix it.”.
“I am a new linux user. After 15 minutes of research on google, I found a few forum posts and some niche websites that said SystemD was bad, so I took it as gospel. Now my system doesn’t work as simply as it did with installer defaults? How do I make everything Just Work™ after removing any OS components I don’t understand the need for?”
I mean you essentially just highlighted a primary user experience problem with Linux…
Information & advice is fragmented, spread around, highly opinionated, poorly digestible, out of date, and often dangerous.
And then the other part of it is that a large part the Linux community will shit on you for not knowing what you don’t know because of some weird cultural elitism…
When you finally ask for help once you realize you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re usually met with derisive comments and criticism instead of help.
Do you want Linux to be customizable so that users can control it however they want. Or do you want it to be safe so that users don’t mess it up? You can’t have it both ways, and when you tell users to “go figure it out” and then :suprise_pikachu: that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what’s good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.
It’s the biggest thing holding Linux desktop back.
Debian, Arch, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Redhat, Manjaro all have docs and wiki on their primary websites. Slackware has docs, Gentoo has a wiki. Anything that’s not on a distro’s site needs to be carefully considered before tampering. Almost all of those distros have a warning in their installation instructions to only listen to the information in their docs and wiki, and to a lesser extent their forums. Hell, even nosystemd.org tells you what systemd is, what it’s for, what replacements there are, and the proper way to get rid of it in bold text under the header “How do I get rid of systemd?”
Listening to hackneyed advice from unvetted sources just because they have strong opinions is a problem that any and every computer will face. That’s not a problem with linux anymore than the hoardes of trolls on random social media sites telling you to “delete System32” is a problem with Windows.
I want Linux to be customizable AND safe. But safe in the way that someone takes the time to learn how what they plan to do will effect their system, not safe in the sense of “impossible to bork”
As for elitism: if it’s “elitist” to indirectly poke fun of someone who deleted a core system component without understanding what it does without a backup, then so be it. It feels more like that word is levied by people whose ego is too big to take respobsibility for the mistakes they made, and instead blame others for laughing when it bites them in the ass.
Idk where these swaths of elitists that refuse to help are. OOP went to stackexchange and likely got a helpful answer complete with explanations, as that is the community standard. Over on !linux@lemmy.ml , I see people offering help with problems all the time without shitting on them. If I go to the aforementioned OS forums, or really any software-specific forums, I see people helping or pointing people to where they can get help.
And I’m not denying that assholes who say shit like “did you even bother googling?” exist. They’re nasty people with no patience, but they’re by no means the community standard unless they’re the only ones you pay attention to…
Or unless you see a screenshot of a question from a different website posted in a meme-sharing forum and expect the comments to offer advice, instead of laughing at the person who shot themselves in the foot and went to a hospital instead of seeking help at the DNC HQ
I feel this in my soul, except about Windows. I’ve got a handful of machines at work that refuse to update to Windows 10 22H2. They give an error code during the compatibility check. Googling that error code returns dozens of forum posts with hundreds of users and “Microsoft support agents” chiming in. They give the same list of suggestions—that don’t work—to fix it. Nobody can say what the error code means, or what the compatibility check checks. The official Microsoft fix is to reinstall.
I don’t want to reinstall. The suite of software these computers run would take several hours to reinstall.
This is typical of my experience with Windows. (I’m a Unix/Linux guy.) I look up how to do something in Windows, and with the official Microsoft documentation, one of three things inevitably happens:
- I follow the steps and click the things, and it still doesn’t work.
- I can’t follow the steps because one of the things to click is greyed out for some reason.
- I can’t follow the steps because the documentation refers to an older edition, and Microsoft has removed one of the things to click.
One time, when trying to get Excel to run a mail merge, I ran into all three problems in three attempts.
The same happens with 3rd party sites. They never say the edition of Windows to which their guide refers, and the feature is deprecated or gone. (Most recently it was about getting a Windows 10 start menu behavior back on 11.)
Oh, and since Windows is mainstream, a lot of the information is in the form of AI vomit, and covered in ads and dark patterns.
Its not because you’re a linux main that this doesnt make sense, its because windiws has soent the last 10 years enshittifying in order to try and take Apple’s walled garden. Once my desktop dies, I’m never going back to Windows, and tbh, if I scrounge up enough to buy a second tower before that, I’m installing linux on that tower, transferring my files over, and then installing linux on my current tower as well
To be fair, Windows and Macos support is like this too. Its random forum suggestions from even less technical people.
The distros official resources are comprehensive and don’t have the issue of being outdated and fragmented.
Debians official resources are often outdated, fragmented and not comprehensive in the slightest. I had to scour email list and random blog post if I had to deal with some Debian tooling problems. It’s only saving grace, is that it fairly widespread, and that there are these random blog posts.
Except the principles behind linux aren’t “being able to customize however you want”, that’s the principle behind certain distros like Arch. Linux is about being free and open-source, so nobody is beholden to a single entity making sweeping changes that are bad for the community but good for their bottom line.
that they found the wrong information because they have literally no idea what’s good or bad, instead of helping, they get shit on.
I don’t think anyone’s seriously shitting on nooby mistakes, because everyone has done something stupid like that and learned a lesson from it. It’s kind of a “cute noob” moment
This isn’t a Linux problem this is a society problem people just want to one up everyone In anyway they can and sometimes I dont think we do it consciencely
It turns into a Linux problem when it holds back Linux desktop adoption by creating a difficult or even toxic environment for new, low-technical or non-technical users.
Can confirm I am a Linux lurker who would love to learn all this cool shit but right now I don’t have the time/mental fortitude to wade through all the bullshit and experiment. I already do that enough with power platform at work and I know that I know nothing. It’s exhilarating and tiresome. It would be great if we could have some “training wheels” type of community on here to help new users out.
He is less technically inclined
He read a prompt asking if he wanted to remove his system and said yes
Then complained about it
To be fair it was caused by installing steam. Why System76 didn’t test that I don’t know.
Or like the good old days where you deleted COMMAND.COM
He uninstalled systemd, now his computer is not doing systemd things anymore by his retelling. Seems like it worked fine. Yet he asks for a solution of a problem. Maybe he needs to state the problem.
Nah, more like deleting explorer.exe.
There’s isn’t really a Windows equivalent for this, as Windows doesn’t give you control on this level.
It’d be as if you could delete services.msc but also the runner behind it.
I removed and sold the wheels of my car, now it does not move.
