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Is Systemd that bad afterall?
(sopuli.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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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:
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)
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.
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".
Maybe
systemdgets grouped withwaylandandxorgwith 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.