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:

  1. Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
  2. Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
  • @[email protected]
    89•1 year ago

    Nah, it’s fine. Boot times are considerably faster than sys.v in most cases, and it has a huge amount of functionality. Most people I work with have adopted it and much prefer it to the old init.d and sys.v systems.

    People’s problem with systemd (and there are fewer people strongly against it than before) seem to break down into two groups:

    1. They were happy with sys.v and didn’t like change. Some were unhappy with how distros adopted it. (The debian wars in particular were really quite vicious)

    2. It does too much. systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - “do one thing well”. Despite the modularity, it’s easy to see it as monolithic.

    But regardless of feelings, systemd has achieved what it set out to do and is the defacto choice for the vast majority of distros, and they adopted it because it’s better. Nobody really cares if a user tries to make a point by not using it any more, they’re just isolating themselves. The battle was fought and systemd won it.

    • Yozul
      33•1 year ago

      One of my biggest problems with critics of systemd is that a lot of the same people who make that second point also argue against wayland adoption when xorg does the exact same thing as systemd. It makes me feel like they’re just grumpy stubborn old Linux nerds from the 90s who just hate anything that’s not what they learned Linux with.

      Which is sad, because honestly I think it’s kind of not great that an unnecessarily massive project has gained such an overwhelming share of users when the vast majority of those users don’t need or use most of what it does. Yeah, the init systems from before systemd sucked, but modern alternatives like runit or openrc work really well. Unfortunately they get poorly supported because everyone just assumes you have systemd. I don’t like the lack of diversity. I think it’s a problem that any init system “won”.

      • @[email protected]
        12•1 year ago

        Unfortunately they get poorly supported because everyone just assumes you have systemd.

        No, they get poorly supported because they were a pain to support even before systemd ever showed up. I for one was extremely tired of writing the same shit over and over again in every init script and then going through the tedious process of porting the script to every platform for minor idiosyncrasies of the various distros (start-stop-daemon available or not was one I remember, the general bash/GNU vs. BSD stuff you get with any script was another) from 10 year old RHEL to modern ones.

      • @[email protected]
        4•1 year ago

        Maybe systemd gets grouped with wayland and xorg with other init systems simply because of usability?

        I mean, I got used to the thought that what I prefer is less usable, because some pretentious UX designers say so, and we Unix nerds use inconvenient things because we are all perverts.

        But when I read about industrial design and ergonomics, it seems that my preferences are consistent with what I read, and all those UX designers and managers should just be fired for incompetence and malice.

        Back to wayland/xorg and runit/systemd (for example), same reason FreeBSD may seem easier to set up and use than an “advanced” Linux distribution - there’s less confusion.

      • @[email protected]
        3•1 year ago

        Xorg, or X11, “used to” do the “minimum necessary” for a remote display system… in the 80s. Graphics tech has changed A LOT in the last 40 years, with most of the stuff getting offloaded to GPUs, so the whole X11 protocol became more and more bloated as it kept getting new and optional features without dropping backwards compatibility.

        The point against Wayland, was dropping support for remote displays, while kind of having an existential crysis for several years during which it didn’t know what it wanted to become. Hopefully that’s clear now.

        OpenRC and runit are indeed working alternatives, but OpenRC is kind of a hack over init.rd, while runit relies a bit too much on storing all its status in the filesystem. Systemd has a cleaner approach and a more flexible service configuration.

    • animist
      18•1 year ago

      I like it too. Very easy to work with and set up services as needed.

    • @[email protected]
      11•1 year ago

      “do one thing well”

      Arguably, Systemd does exactly that: orchestrate the parallel starting of services, and do it well.

      The problem with init.d and sys.v is they were not designed for multi-core systems where multiple services can start at once, and had no concept of which service depended on which, other than a lineal “this before that”. Over the years, they got extended with very dirty hacks and tons of support functions that were not consistent between distributions, and still barely functional.

      Systemd cleaned all of that up, added parallel starting taking into account service dependencies, which meant adding an enhanced journaling system to pull status responses from multiple services at once, same for pulling device updates, and security and isolation configs.

      It’s really the minimum that can be done (well) for a parallel start system.

    • quaffEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      Is there somewhere I can read about the Debian wars? I am curious about that 🤓

    • @[email protected]
      5•1 year ago

      I just hate the syntax, systemctl start apache2 feels like dumb manager speak over service apache2 start.

      But other then that I love how systemd has been for me.

      • @[email protected]
        9•1 year ago

        How so? I like the systemctl syntax more, since it allows for starting/stopping many units at once. It also supports a much richer set of commons than service ever did.

        • @[email protected]
          3•1 year ago

          it just feels like a manager decided the command should read like english, made the decision then went back to never entering a command again in the terminal again. every day, i get to decide, should i enter “systemctl restart problem_service” all again or hit up on the keyboard and and hold back, then rewrite over the previous status command. bit less work if the status/stop/start/restart bit was on the end like it used to be.

          • @[email protected]
            7•1 year ago

            In BASH ALT+T will swap the last white spaced separated strings… It’s still annoying but makes “systemctl problem_server start/status/restart” a bit easier. CTRL+W will clear the current string to whitespace, so up arrow, ALT+T, CTRL+W, status, ALT+T, Enter.

          • @[email protected]
            3•1 year ago

            The bit was on the end because it was an argument to the script specific to that program. Instead, the control is now at the start because it is an argument to systemctl itself. This removes the ability to define custom controls, but enables you to control many things at once.

            • @[email protected]
              3•1 year ago

              Yeah, command subcommand args.... The service format makes more sense when you’re seeing it as “run this script to control this service”. The systemctl format makes more sense as a frontend subcommand to control systemd itself.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        Y’know, I felt that way to begin with and it certainly took a long time for my fingers to adjust, but I’ve grown to adjust to that.

        And it’s better - you can do: “systemctl restart Service1 Service2 Service3” Before, with “system Service1 restart” you could only action on service at a time.

        Plus, it’s linux, so you can set up aliases to change the order into anything you like, even carry on using the old muscle memory formats. (Although I don’t encourage this if you intend working on multiple servers!)

    • @[email protected]OP
      3•1 year ago

      Thanks a lot. I truly hope this is the big picture and SystemD whiners are just a fringe minority lol

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - “do one thing well”.

      Linux itself (i.e. the kernel) breaks the hell out of that so-called core tenet. Have you looked at make menuconfig at any point? There’s everything but the kitchen sink in there.

        • @meismeEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          You can also not install many systemd components… how is it apples to oranges? I wish Linux was a microkernel, but if it works it works, and Minix doesn’t.

    • @reddit_sux
      2•1 year ago

      It does too much. systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - “do one thing well”. Despite the modularity, it’s easy to see it as monolithic.

      So is linux kernel. It has hardware drivers, filesystem drivers, scheduler, interrupt handler, IPC handler and tries to do many things. So do we abandon it for gnu hurd.

    • @cybersandwich
      1•1 year ago

      I think @[email protected] 's point should be thrown in as a #3.

      The lead dev was an absolute dick. That fanned the flames of discontent. People that would have otherwise come around to what systemd was trying to do, dug in their heels and have been entrenched since. It didn’t help that Pottering was employed by Redhat. Eventually most of the feelings were overshadowed by what ultimately has become a better solution.

      The systemd hate that we hear now is the reverberations of those internet arguments from years ago and a very small handful of people who probably still hate Pottering.

      At the end of the day, people still have a choice of what they want to use, so if you think systemd sucks and is slow, then use something else.