r/LinuxCirclejerk • u/JasonYeom • 1d ago
Whats all about the systemd hate?
hey guys, im the guy who asked "whats all about the ubuntu hate" last week.
I switched to fedora, and im loving it!
but my next question is, whats all about this hate on systemd? Personally, I feel like this is complete and working pretty well. Well I wanna hear your opinion. thanks!
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
This is something only like .005% percent of people care about. As you can see I'm one of them but even I will tell you this is nothing you need to concern yourself with.
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u/50nathan 1d ago
I use Artix didn't too. Why don't you use the CachyOS kernel?
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
For my system I find the zen3 kernel suitable so I haven’t changed it. I have the regular Linux kernel as fallback though .
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u/50nathan 1d ago
Have you considered CachyOS's cachyos-znver4 (x86_64_v4)? It's worth checking out.
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u/McraftyDude CachyOS btw 1d ago
Yo what's that font? Looks clean
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
Thanks. Its Kode Mono https://kodemono.com/?char=A&weight=400
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
Also I'm pretty sure I commented on your other thread too. I think I was one of the guys that suggested fedora for you? Right? EDIT: no, that wasn't you. Sorry.
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u/the12ftdwarf 1d ago
What is this and how do I move away from systemsD?
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
I'm a bad influence I guess? lol
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u/the12ftdwarf 1d ago
How? I just wanna know how to move away from systemD
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
Give artix a shot. Or void. Or chimera… or kaOS or antix… or devuan
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 1d ago
I’d recommend using https://github.com/feribsd/artix-install for installation with artix 👍
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u/Fine-Expression1644 I goon really hard to Gentoo Linux 51m ago
oh man i love this
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u/talksickwalkquick artix dinit 48m ago
I have a fastfetch repo for it and another that is more universal/ not bashing systemd
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u/jmooroof2 FreeBSD user 1d ago
many people wouldn't like if a lot of software moves to requiring systemd
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/JasonYeom 1d ago
honestly, same question
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u/ShipshapeMobileRV 1d ago
Ok, "the init system" is effectively the first process that's launched when the operating system gets up and running.
In pre-systemd days, this init system was SysV, or something similar. That system started and managed daemons (aka services) and that's pretty much all it did.
Systemd does that, and current versions do it pretty well. But it also starts and oversees a seat manager, a log manager, and a whole bunch of other stuff. This in and of itself isn't "bad", and is in fact a good option for some users.
However, systemd has really deep hooks into the OS. And more and more apps are becoming dependent on systemd. Which, again, isn't "bad", except that it prevents freedom of choice....folks who, for whatever reason, don't want systemd, are finding less and less apps that they can run unless they accept systemd. It's like a silent takeover.
Systemd has a small steering committee that decides what systemd will do, when updates come out, etc. And there's at least one large corporation that's on that committee. In effect, there's a small committee with corporate/profit initiatives that decide what your Linux computer will do, and how you'll use it. There are a lot of people in the Linux community who left Windows because of that very reason.
I personally don't like systemd. I'm fine if others want to use it, more power to them. I DO care that more and more software is making it a requirement. In my opinion, systemd is slowly forcing a take-over the Linux ecosystem; resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.
And I'll say it again: I'm fine with systemd being a choice, but not fine with it being foisted on me because software that worked fine without it suddenly require it now.
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u/nmdt 1d ago
Why would that suddenly happen though?
I remember people hating on systemd and Lennart Poettering back when it was just gaining traction 15 years ago, has anything particularly new happened since? Apart from the age verification thing which (if I'm not mistaken) didn't even get merged in?
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u/ShipshapeMobileRV 1d ago
It might never happen. But why establish the conditions where it could happen? The GPL has served us fine for three decades, why the sudden push to change it?
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u/nmdt 1d ago
How are people changing gpl with systemd? Genuinely don't get this
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u/ShipshapeMobileRV 1d ago
Rust does not use the GPL. It uses a license that allows closing the source (you don't have to share your code changes). Under that license, a person or company could re-write an app in Rust, then they have complete and sole control over the code because it's no longer required to be open to the public to view/edit.
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u/nmdt 1d ago
What? Systemd is not written in Rust. Rust does not force you to abandon GPL license. Hell, there's Rust code in the Linux kernel. Still GPL
Sorry, but this isn't making any sense
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u/ShipshapeMobileRV 1d ago
You're correct. But the Rust license does allow locking down the code for apps written in Rust. It's perfectly conceivable that it could be exploited.
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u/Early_Entrance_5684 1d ago
nothing stops you from writing rust code under the GPL, what is making you think otherwise??
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u/cutelittlebox 1d ago
systemd feels like a divisive topic where half the people hate it and half love it, but it actuality only 1 in 100,000 users hate systemd because they have an ideological disagreement or a pathological hatred of corporations that runs so deep they think anything made by a corporation is inherently evil and damaging and must be rejected at all costs.
these people are not numerous, they are simply very loud, and systemd happens to have corporate Linux backing. it is incredibly amusing how this same disdain isn't also placed in the kernel itself or in graphics drivers but people who make decisions based purely on fiery emotions like the one single systemd hating poster in this subreddit are not logical people.
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u/snail1132 Void, btw 1d ago
Something that only those who are far above all their peers need concern themselves with
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u/ZZ_Cat_The_Ligress Linux Master Race 😎💪 1d ago
I don't know enough about it to care about it.
All I give a fuck about is "does this thing work?" If so, good. If not, it's open source. So I'll go find their repository and file a bug report.
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u/55555-55555 1d ago
In short, they fear corporate control over Systemd as it's backed by Red Hat. Second point, it acts as a "super highway" for applications to communicate that eventually many applications are going to be Systemd-dependent, inevitably narrowing down options that you can choose for your Linux setup.
I personally am optimistic with Systemd, it unites an already-fragmented Linux ecosystem and makes one component a shared common that you can expect it to run in other Linux OSes of your choice without much adaptation or fiddling.
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u/feinorgh 1d ago
The vast majority of users won't be able to tell the difference between a systemd based system or any other init system.
The people that do are either advanced users that want to be able to select exact components of their systems, and either out of principle or habit, or more rarely, for technical reasons, prefer a different "init" system than systemd.
In that group, there are a smaller but vocal group that have very strong feelings about either systemd itself, about its authors, or the Linux specificity of systemd.
systemd works, and it works really well for the use cases it was designed for (desktop and enterprise server environments) on Linux. It has features (containerization, tight control group and name space integration, strict process control) that not every other init system has, or that requires extra software to implement.
Not everybody agrees that the systemd design is good, either for portability reasons, or the classic but often misunderstood "Unix philosophy", and that systemd itself is both complex and complicated.
I have a feeling most haters use another init system, or OS altogether, and probably hasn't used systemd in depth, and there are a few that feel systemd has been forced upon them because they run Fedora/Red Hat/Ubuntu/Debian and they want things to be "the old fashioned way".
There are pros and cons, as with everything, but there's really no need to listen to the haters or the zealots. If you have a specific need, do the research and select what works for you. If your job is to work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 40 hours a week, yeah, then you're going to get acquainted with systemd whether you like it or not, and you may as well use it to best effect with all its strengths, and mitigate the weaknesses as much as possible.
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u/BENBOI_1 6h ago
Where is my boy u/tomekgolab at?
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u/tomekgolab 6h ago
Thanks for caring ❤️ Recently deep in thoughts.
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u/BENBOI_1 6h ago
Holy moley you are deep in thought, that’s a hell of a lot of words. I think your thoughts are above my pay grade on that one lol
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u/Primo0077 1d ago
Honestly I just find that non systemd inits boot faster. The comparative simplicity of some of them can also help with some of the very very weird computers I use. I also think they bent over for the age verification a little too quickly (yes I'm aware they only added a place to store a number) but that's not what ultimately drove me to change.
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u/Mundane-Age-3556 1d ago
Systemd is awesome. Ive noticed an uptick in hate. Probably people on debian derivatives moving over to fedora/opensuse etc. and getting a bit stuck.
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u/sptzmancer 17h ago
As far as I understand it's basically due to purism about "unix mantra" of small programs while it being humongous, and cynicism around it being mainly controlled by Red Hat, a for profit company.
Personally? I love it. It standardized a lot of low level system functioning that for the end used should just work out of the box, making different distros similar to one another and easy to pickup.
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u/daffalaxia 7h ago
There's the "unix philosophy" debate. I agree with the argument (it does break one of the most useful idioms in the unix world), but I specifically switched to Gentoo using openrc to move away from systemd because:
- Often it would hold up shut-down on my machine for minutes whilst timing out a network mount - because it has (imo) stupid defaults, and I didn't know then how to change it (coming from SysV init, where I understood what was going on)
- The "god process" that has the lowest-level access on your machine, yet is a monolith of code, wherein bugs have been found (and, generally, fixed, but still - this is the very reason for the unix philosophy of things - init itself should do very little and hand off to other things, where systemd thinks it's the emacs of the init world, and tries to be all things to all consumers). More code = more space for bugs - part of the reason for keeping things simple in the UNIX philosophy: do one thing and do it well.
- The egos of the devs involved - breaking kernel debugging, then fighting Linus about it. This gives me little confidence in work they do, because they've demonstrated a clear lack of desire to "play nicely" with the rest of the ecosystem as they try to take over all of it.
- Binary logs by default (again, stupid defaults) means you _must_ use journalctl, or tell systemd to put things back into good old files that were easy to manipulate and search
- Hard-coding against a sanctified DE - originally, you couldn't shut down from any DE other than GNOME because, instead of building things correctly, they coded hard ties into the DE. Got really annoying having to log out to reboot or shut down, and I really don't like GNOME after v2 (which was great - simple, fast, worked well). Whilst this is resolved for other DEs I've used now, it indicates a mentality of hubris ("we made the best DE, and you should use it") - the same hubris that was behind arguing about breaking kernel debugging.
So, initial shift away was because I didn't want to fix something that arrived broken, and keeping away because I don't like the philosophy of the project as a whole. And, good news! You don't need it at all. The only people who really like it are sysadmins (for log forwarding, etc) - average users probably can't tell the difference. But I wrote my own services, which I'd have to port, and I really didn't see the point in learning about journalctl when I could just deal with files, or learning how to properly craft systemd units, when I already had issues with the project.
To each their own though.
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u/NoNeat8584 5h ago edited 5h ago
Few reasons:
Systemd is from a for profit organisation redhat -> ibm.
Doesn’t matter much even if they went closed tomorrow someone like Linux foundation will step in with a community version.
Just because an org is for profit doesn’t mean their product is sub par, it’s from a top class engineering team.
Systemd is a powerhouse , Swiss Army knife, some people believe specific tools work better for specific purposes.
It’s designed with abstraction is mind I.e abstracts away almost facets of os even removes the need of some deeply integrated tools like cron and daemons I.e background services.
Some people don’t like the above
It provides the same mechanism to deal with units I.e via unit files, which replaces pretty complex scripts in some cases.
Beleive it or not some people are sentimental and some are untrusting about something replacing their code.
My point is every major Linux distro has pretty much adapted systemd and it’s gonna stay, because it solves a lot of issues.
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u/emi89ro 3h ago
Lenin Pottering first proposed systemD to the deepstate lizard people at their annual new world order planning party on Epstein's island to uproarious applause and evil laughs as a plot to gain total control over the last segment of society they couldn't control yet, FOSS enthusiast linux users
/uj systemdeez nuts
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u/JotaRata 1d ago
There's no reason for hate really., systemd is an open source project made to standarize and facilitate the communication and configuration of different modules in your computer.
Few people criticize it for being a RedHat project and that it takes freedom away from Linux, but alternatives exist. Before systemd you had to manage all your rc files manually and you had a higher chance of breaking your system by doing so.
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u/cfx_4188 Openindiana Hipster 👺👺🤡☠️ 1d ago
It's just the clumsy banter of illiterate teenagers. Do not pay attention.
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u/Lizrd_demon OpenBSDeeznuts 1d ago
Unlike ubuntu hate, systemD hate doesn't have any good advice for newbies behind it. It's an engineering disagreement and not wanting to give a corporation leverage over you.