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:

  1. Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?
  2. Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?
  • fox@lemmy.fakecake.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    systemd is a godsend when you need service control while getting actual work done, at scale.

    there are legitimate things to criticize but in general the rants are incompetent preaching to the uninformed.

  • Felix@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    I am fine with it and personally make heavy use of it. On my Arch install, I use systemd-boot, systemd-timesyncd, neworkd, resolved and unified kernel images with ukify.

    Roast me you systemd haters.

  • digdilem@feddit.uk
    0·
    1 year ago

    Nah, it’s fine. Boot times are considerably faster than sys.v in most cases, and it has a huge amount of functionality. Most people I work with have adopted it and much prefer it to the old init.d and sys.v systems.

    People’s problem with systemd (and there are fewer people strongly against it than before) seem to break down into two groups:

    1. They were happy with sys.v and didn’t like change. Some were unhappy with how distros adopted it. (The debian wars in particular were really quite vicious)

    2. It does too much. systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - “do one thing well”. Despite the modularity, it’s easy to see it as monolithic.

    But regardless of feelings, systemd has achieved what it set out to do and is the defacto choice for the vast majority of distros, and they adopted it because it’s better. Nobody really cares if a user tries to make a point by not using it any more, they’re just isolating themselves. The battle was fought and systemd won it.

    • Yozul@beehaw.org
      1·
      1 year ago

      One of my biggest problems with critics of systemd is that a lot of the same people who make that second point also argue against wayland adoption when xorg does the exact same thing as systemd. It makes me feel like they’re just grumpy stubborn old Linux nerds from the 90s who just hate anything that’s not what they learned Linux with.

      Which is sad, because honestly I think it’s kind of not great that an unnecessarily massive project has gained such an overwhelming share of users when the vast majority of those users don’t need or use most of what it does. Yeah, the init systems from before systemd sucked, but modern alternatives like runit or openrc work really well. Unfortunately they get poorly supported because everyone just assumes you have systemd. I don’t like the lack of diversity. I think it’s a problem that any init system “won”.

      • vacuumflower@vlemmy.net
        1·
        1 year ago

        Maybe systemd gets grouped with wayland and xorg with other init systems simply because of usability?

        I mean, I got used to the thought that what I prefer is less usable, because some pretentious UX designers say so, and we Unix nerds use inconvenient things because we are all perverts.

        But when I read about industrial design and ergonomics, it seems that my preferences are consistent with what I read, and all those UX designers and managers should just be fired for incompetence and malice.

        Back to wayland/xorg and runit/systemd (for example), same reason FreeBSD may seem easier to set up and use than an “advanced” Linux distribution - there’s less confusion.

    • jarfil@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      “do one thing well”

      Arguably, Systemd does exactly that: orchestrate the parallel starting of services, and do it well.

      The problem with init.d and sys.v is they were not designed for multi-core systems where multiple services can start at once, and had no concept of which service depended on which, other than a lineal “this before that”. Over the years, they got extended with very dirty hacks and tons of support functions that were not consistent between distributions, and still barely functional.

      Systemd cleaned all of that up, added parallel starting taking into account service dependencies, which meant adding an enhanced journaling system to pull status responses from multiple services at once, same for pulling device updates, and security and isolation configs.

      It’s really the minimum that can be done (well) for a parallel start system.

  • gnumdk@lemmy.ml
    0·
    1 year ago

    Just try to implement user session management on a non systemd distro…

    Systemd is way better than others init system. I’m using Alpine Linux on my phone and I really wait for a Fedora/Arch like PMOS project (it’s on the way)

    • jarfil@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      [pi@raspberry]# sudo su

      Just saying, not everyone needs session management…