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?
A lot of the people I see complaining about it are comparing to what was before it.
As someone who has only ever known systemd, I have no issues with it and, dare I say: I like it.
As someone who has been using Linux since the 90s and gone through many different unit systems, I like systemd way more than any of the past ones. It makes adding services dead simple, and is much smarter about handling dependencies and optimizing startup sequences.
The main complaints I’ve seen about it seem to be people that don’t understand that systemd init is a separate thing from all the other systemd stuff. If you don’t like all the other systemd things, you don’t need to install them at all.
I’ll never understand people who want the old init systems back. Before systemd, the common init systems on Linux more or less just ran shell scripts called “init scripts” you dropped in a directory. It was an under-engineered solution that led to people solving the same problems repeatedly with varying (usually poor) results. It was common to see things like wrappers to restart crashed daemons and every daemon needing some sort of forking or sub-process complexity so you could start as root and then drop to a lower-privileged user.
There are other modern init systems aside from systemd, and maybe there’s an argument to be made that one of them is better. I don’t really know. But nobody who ever had to get real intimate with the old init systems should want that back.