34
Init system comparisons? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Are there any comparisons of init systems that focus daily use metrics? Stuff like what writing scripts looks like and boot times and logging capabilities? (And any other use cases that are common)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

Systemd is feature-rich but controversial. Its monolithic design bundles service management, logging, networking, device management, and more into a single codebase exceeding 1.4 million lines of code.

That is a gross misrepresentation of systemd...

It's like saying GNU coreutils is monolithic because all of the individual tools combined are bundled together.

Systemd is comprised of many individual applications.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    Even systemd-less distros need to implement 'fake' systemd components. It's like a cancer. No one's voluntarily using sub-components of systemd without systemd. It is a monolithic thing.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    How does systemd dare to provide useful functionality? It should be just as useless as all the other inits that nobody ever felt the need to depend on, simply because they do nothing interesting.

    You can just build a way more functional and secure system with all the cool features systemd provides.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Most of its functionality is just reimplementing things that already existed, with an incompatible interface.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    There are significant security/reliability improvements all over the place. E..g. logind actually works as promissed, which none of the clones do as they can not have the necessary infrastructure that is provided by other parts of systemd. Or udev using systemd-pid1 to start services: That fixes a well documented problem with udev starting services itself -- which most non-systemd distributions do till today. Problems do notngo away by ignoring them.

    Checkout non-systemd distros, most of them still use group based access to devices a user needs to run wayland. Of course that does not matter at all for X11, security is so poor there anyway.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but things like human readable logs are almost all gone because of journalctl changes that went into the systemd ecosystem without anyone really running by folks who look at logs everyday.

    It's not the functionality of systemd I don't like, it's the Poettering way of just making changes to stuff without bothering to learn how any of the rest of us professionally use things.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    Yeap, you now get logs from all stages of the boot process, and you notice logs going bad or getting manipulated. It's a huge step forward for Linux, especially for people that look at logs every day. They can finally trust the logs to be correct and complete.

    And it is not even a change: I have never had real unix servers with plain text logs in 30 years working with them. Proper computers have always stored logs in databases or whatever. That's actually a legal requirement in many parts of the world for many kinds of servers.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    You can dislike systemd, its6okay. But there's no need to be stupid about it.

    Yes - things built to work with systemd... require systemd to work.

    But you don't need to use all the systemd services. You can use other tools. Because systemd is not a monolith.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent