this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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I don't really get the hate for systemd. At least for someone who started really using Linux after it was introduced, it always seemed easier to control and manage than the init.d stuff.
Obviously it's a hassle to migrate if you have a ton of legacy services, but it's pretty nice.
It's not just init.d that exists, alternative init systems such as dinit and OpenRC are a thing. The general complaint about systemd is that it's too heavy and complicated for something as simple as an init system, and it has already gone way beyond that.
This does not only increase the attack surface of a Linux system drastically, giving way to exploits and potentially backdoors, but it also puts too much power in a piece of software's hands as more and more things start depending on it.
And systemd is not even needed to create a user-friendly Linux system anyway. Chimera Linux with GNOME would be as smooth an experience as Fedora Linux if only it had more software in its repositories and PackageKit support.
It's because you now need to do
systemctl restart sshdinstead of/etc/init.d/sshd restart, I see no other reason than having to learn new syntax.Arguably, init.d scripts were easier to understand, and systemd is a bit of a black box, it somehow works, but who knows where it writes logs or saves the process pid (it's all in the documentation somewhere), with init.d script you can just open the script itself and look.
I think it's okay to not 100% know every little detail of how a system works, as long as it's possible to find out what you need when you need it.
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I prefer the ini files systemd uses to bash scripts
Don’t minimize those strengths. Init.d scripts are something you can figure out just knowing a bit of shell script, or historical knowledge from before there was an internet. For something I rarely use, why do I need to learn something more complex to do the same thing - I either haven’t been sold on all the new functionality they piled in or do not need it. After all these years crowing about the Unix/linux way being many independent flexible tools that can work together, why do we now have this all-in-one monstrosity that might as well have come directly from Microsoft?
I have the following complaints about systemd:
The first two aren't actually issues with systemd, but rather are political issues I have around the way Red Hat bullies the rest of the Linux ecosystem. I'm not going to let that become a stopping point for my using what is actually a fairly good piece of tech. The third is actually an ongoing issue, but it's not enough for me to try throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is, however, IMO a continuation of Red Hat's sketchy political play.
What kind of dirty politics are we talking about here? I remember when Arch switched, the stated reasons from the devs was that their old init system was bad and nobody wanted to maintain it, for example.
There were several cases of shenanigans from other Red Hat controlled projects yanking upstart configs and sysvinit scripts from their projects and replacing them exclusively with systemd units even though those configs had active maintainers (often people who worked at Canonical or Google). This made packaging those supposedly community owned but de facto Red Hat controlled projects more difficult for any system that didn't use systemd, since the packagers had to scramble to find or recreate those files and then maintain patch series for them. They also very quickly jumped on adding systemd-specific integrations where similar integrations to make the services work better with upstart had been rejected because services weren't supposed to favour an init system.
Something not necessarily (or provably) from Red Hat - a whole lot of misinformation about upstart suddenly started appearing on mailing lists and message boards when Debian was considering whether to use upstart or systemd. While I think they made the right decision to go with systemd, that sudden influx of new accounts complaining about upstart likely influenced the decision in ways I'm really not comfortable with.
I don't dislike systemd. I'm happy to use it and think it works quite well for many (though definitely not all) of the things it does. But I am concerned about how it's yet another case of Red Hat having a large amount of control over the Linux ecosystem and Red Hat controlled projects and the supporters of Red Hat projects using dirty tricks to further that control. And with systemd consuming more and more of how a Linux system works, I am concerned about the influence that gives Red Hat. Are we going to see
systemd-packagedthat manages your packages, but somehow the patches to make it work with non-RPM packages keep getting rejected or just held up for years at a time? (We've already seen similar things with xdg portals, where portals Red Hat wants get approved and merged very quickly, but portals proposed by Canonical or SuSE spend years "in review" with more and more petty changes requested, sometimes to be rejected because a Red Hat backed portal that only implements part of the functionality suddenly appeared and was approved within a week or two.)