this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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    I use plasma, BTW

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    [–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Can someone persuade me to not use systemd without using the word 'bloat?'

    [–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Use systemd if you want. It's not perfect, but nothing is. There are certainly good reasons to use systemd, including, but not limited to, that it's the default on most distros and you don't want to mess with init systems. My only complaint is that too much software and documentation is written with the expectation that you have systemd for no good reason, which makes it harder to leave, which makes more people stick with it, which is an excuse to neglect support for other init systems even more.

    [–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    for no good reason

    I think the reason is that almost everyone uses systemd

    [–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Kind of circular reasoning

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    [–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    My question was just curiosity. If there's a good reason to switch to something else, I'd like to know, you know?

    [–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    You get a lot more transparency with the other init systems. Systemd is a big system that does lots of things and it's not always possible to see everything it's doing, because it's doing a lot.

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It also likes to hide things behind port redirections and binary storage of things that have always been text before so you pretty much have to use their tools to even read them

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    [–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    If you try to switch a distro that's already using Systemd to some other init system, you'll have so many broken things to fix!

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    [–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

    It's not systemd doing all the things completely unrelated to system initialization that it does that I have a problem with. It's systemd doing them worse than the existing tools that do those things that the systemd equivalents replace and Lennart Poettering being completely unable to fathom why anyone would ever want to use any piece of software other than his. systemd talks big game about being modular, but makes breaking changes to how those modules communicate without warning anyone, so if you dare to be a "systemd hater" as he calls them and replace one of those modules with an equivalent he isn't involved with, Heaven help you when he breaks the API of systemd that they hook into and the developers of your equivalent scramble to implement the binary protocol he thought up yesterday so that their alternative continues to work.

    I don't want software on my system that is managed like that. It's the same reason I prefer Firefox over anything Chromium based.

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    [–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    If you actually want a reason, then most people experience faster boot up times using runit instead of Systemd. I haven't tried it yet though.

    [–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

    maybe if you ran systemd you wouldn't have to boot up so often that actual boot times mattered that much.

    [–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    I'm curious if there's any quantitative evidence to show this.

    [–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    There is none. It's all conjecture or circumstantial.

    [–] bdonvr 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think it would be pretty easy to qualitatively test this

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    [–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Fun. You can dick around with your init scripts without having to worry about the right triggers or spawn classes or anything. Your system is hackable with bash. Systemd: here are a list of approved keywords, don't insert that there, why are using cron when you can use me?

    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    oh, you haven't seen nothing yet. you know the lisp-y, hackable goodness you get in emacs? what if an init system was that hackable, and configured with a lisp? go give GNU shepherd a try.

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    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    Systemd, as a replacement init system, is fine-ish. It's sometimes slow and when it decides a service is lost there's not much to do aside from killing the thing and restarting it.

    Systemd, the full blown ecosystem that wants to replace literally everything by systemd-thesamethingasbeforebutfromscratch however, invites scepticism, especially when there are no particular flaws in the existing versions of things. DNS resolution, DHCP clients, NTP sync, etc. worked perfectly well.

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    [–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I don't care whether you use GNOME, KDE Plasma, Sway or Weston, as long as you use Wayland.

    [–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    My Nvidia card says no to Wayland+KDE :( incredibly laggy and unresponsive ui

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    There's a lot of improvements with Plasma 6 and NVIDIA 545 on my RTX 3060 Ti, so that's something to look forward to.

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    [–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    I wish it worked well on my system

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    [–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    While you blissfully ignore it, systemd is planning the downfall of humanity. Don’t fall for its lies.

    [–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

    Yes, very sad. Anyway.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

    I, for one, welcome our new systemd overlords...

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

    Now I want to do some PRs for systemD.

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    [–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    systemd isn't perfect, but it's definitely a net plus for me when compared with older init system. In case anyone's interested, this talk summarizes the key points pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

    [–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

    This was an excellent listen, thank you for the link. I had no idea what was involved in it when I started, nor the roles of initd and launchd before it and what systemd was trying to replace.

    The funny thing is that the guy giving the talk, Benno Rice, is primarily FreeBSD/openRC and not Linux, so he seemed fairly agnostic in presenting the various sides, not just from Unix and then Linux but also from the Apple viewpoint, who have also been playing a kind of parallel but separate role in this.

    Very cool. Not a beginner level talk, definitely, but there was nothing I couldn't figure out coming from Windows/Mac tech. Really informative, thank you again.

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    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

    Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

    https://www.piped.video/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo

    Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

    I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

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    [–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

    I am not interested in being preached at unless you have a workable alternative and a good reason why should I switch over.

    [–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I don't even know what systemd is ☠️

    [–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (1 children)

    It is between systemc and systeme

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    [–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

    Oversimplified: It's the service that handles starting and stopping of other services, including starting them in the right order after boot. Many people hate it because of astrology and supersticion. Allegedly it's "bloated". But still it has become the standard on many (most?) distros, effectively replacing init.

    I like init. It's simple. I like systemd as well. It's convenient. Beyond that i don't have very strong feelings on the matter.

    Also, see important answer by topinambour-rex.

    [–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

    I think the arguments against the "bloat" are not towards systemd as an init system, but rather are because systemd does so many things other than being an init system. I also don't mind systemd, but I absolutely hate systemd-resolved. I do not want my init system to proxy DNS queries by setting my resolv.conf to 127.0.0.53. Just write systemd- and press tab, that's "the bloat". I'm not saying that the systemd devs should not develop any new tools, but why put them all inside one software package? systemd-homed is cool, but useless for 99% of users. Same with enrolling FIDO2 tokens in a LUKS2 volume with systemd-cryptenroll. Far from useless or "bad", but still bloat for an init system.

    [–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Now that you mention it, I find systemd messing with my DNS settings incredibly annoying as well, so I can't help but agree on that point. At this production system at work, when troubleshooting, I often need to alter DNS between local, local (in chroot), some other server in the same cluster, and a public one. This is done across several service restarts and the occasional reboot. Not being able to trust that resolv.conf remains as I left it is frustrating.

    On the newest version of our production image, systemd-resolvd is disabled.

    [–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    • systemd is an init system commonly used in distros like Linux Mint, Arch, Manjaro, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

    • init systems have a process id of 1 and manage services like a login manager, network, firewall service, etc.

    • a process id is assigned to every process in a linux system.

    the average user usually doesn't worry about the init system, although more experienced/techy users may care about it.

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    [–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

    I just use systemctl because I know how to use it and know all the ins and outs of any bullshit I might encounter. No way I'm switching. I like not being stumped on issues I can't fix for weeks.

    [–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

    As an OpenRC user, Systemd is fine. I prefer openRC but I have systemd on my server and all its LXC containers and I have had no issues with it.

    [–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

    Ok, but listen, though, systemd is the embodiment of evil...

    [–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    DE wars? Get off my lawn sonny, before I chastise you for using vim.

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    [–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you think the init wars are stupid, take a look at the FSF people's (attempted) war against Libreboot and their absolute humiliation by the project leader..

    [–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    To be fair, while it's the Libreboot creator's project and they can do whatever they want with it, I can see why people are upset that Libreboot has had the "Libre" in it's name seemingly neglected.

    The FSF is an ideological organisation. It's important that they exist. It's also important that pure free software exists. Pragmatism is also important, but without any purity, the "extreme" of software freedom gets watered down, and so the window of an "acceptable" amount of proprietary-ness shifts as a new, less hardline "extreme" takes it's place, if that makes sense. We should be striving for full software freedom, even if it's currently just a dream.

    Libreboot was a pure libre software project. Now it isn't. Originally, a fork called osboot was created with the new blob reduction policy. That was fine, because it was a different name that didn't mislead (also because nobody knew osboot as the fully free BIOS replacement). Then that policy became Libreboot policy. Libreboot is no longer fully libre, despite it having been exactly that for it's whole life. It had an established name as the fully free BIOS replacement. It was known for that. Hence the upset.

    Also, I see Canoeboot as a success. Rowe seems to be doing it out of spite, but it's achieved what the GNU project wants. It has successfully pushed Rowe to at least provide some sort of fully free release again.

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    [–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I just use whatever that does the job. Sometimes I switch to systemd free distros just to know what it's like (currently checking out dinit version of Artix)

    I think most of the discrimination arises from a way of thinking which puts minimalism, simplicity and speed as the first priority and starts a unhealthy obsession over it. Sometimes keeping things too minimal can require more work than doing the actual work. This can also be seen in people who rave about WMs vs DEs and Wayland vs X.

    Oh and I use XFCE btw. I feel like that's the DE which gives me enough control over everything while not bombarding me with a truck ton of settings. I started using DEs again because I was spending all my time ricing away with window managers (and none of my rices were not even that good).

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    [–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    At the level I care about, which is "I want this daemon to start when I boot up the computer", systemd is much better. I can write a ~5 line unit file that will do exactly that, and I'll be done.

    With init, I needed to copy-paste a 50-line shell script that I don't really understand except that a lot of it seemed to be concerned with pid files. Honestly, I fail to see how that's better...

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    [–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
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