The Tragedy of systemd

It’s interesting you say that? It runs completely counter to my experience coming from the “BSD-style” rc.d init Arch used to use, and migrating to systemd. Any specific issues? I didn’t see any. No offense. One factor may be that Arch prioritizes not patching upstream - helped save them from targeting here, and it doesn’t go overboard with default configs, which I’ve long appreciated. Not to distro-war, I’m very grateful for Debian. My background is finding Linux in the mid-00s and breaking many SuSE, Ubuntu, and one or two Debian systems before finding something I could understand, repair, and maintain in 2008 Arch. systemd accentuated its ability to stay relevant with enterprise Linux, made it even easier to package for, and has been a useful tool in diagnosing service issues and managing bad software for me. I’m not sure how often it’s posted here but Benno Rice formerly of FreeBSD Core Team has an excellent and amusing discussion of systemd’s technical merits. [VIDEO]

> Turning Linux into Windows by replicating svchost.exe shouldn't be applauded by the Linux community. ... We've got Linux's PID 1 (for most distros) controlled by a MS employee, who replicated Windows' svchost.exe. And people are all excited? systemd was pretty consciously patterned after launchd, not svchost. The goal was, and for good reasons, to make Linux behave like a more integrated Unix-like that already existed: MacOS. Benno Rice has an excellent presentation on systemd that's worth watching through to the end; unlike most of the table-pounding (and "it's just svchost.exe!!" is exactly that), he provides what I think is a pretty fair--and, interestingly to me, a BSD-grounded--view as to where systemd is strong and is weak. [VIDEO]

[VIDEO] (The Tragedy of systemd) is an interesting talk on this topic from the view of someone (Benno Rice) in BSD land. Highly recommended. EDIT: this is mentioned in the article, thanks koalacola

There is a wonderful talk by Benno Rice a few years ago. Insightful and entertaining. Not focussed only on the negatives, BTW. [LINK] [VIDEO] HN discusion: [LINK] LWN comments: [LINK]

I linked it elsewhere in this thread, but you should really watch this talk, particularly 12:45 through 16:20: [VIDEO] tl;dr: systemd isn't meant to be an init system, it's meant to manage services, and the alternative world where you don't have a unified system for managing services and events actually sucks.

I think that the section on change at is great. The first 1500 seconds are about systemd any why it is and what it's trying to do, but that doesn't really get to the core of why I complain about it. [VIDEO] Systemd is change. Massive change that's being forced on us by a twat. Unlike Linux, which was a kernel delivered by a twat but was take-it or leave-it, this is being forced on us. It's untrustworthy and threatening and unknown. In some cases it's an attack on our identity -- "the way you did it in the past is rubbish, do it this way". Clearly we are going to be defensive about it. This isn't unique to people who've used linux for the last 3 decades. Douglas Adams knew this 20 years ago: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.” His original article (in a newspaper - remember them?) is at [LINK] He mentions John Humphrys and his sneering view of this new fangled internet. Humphrys was (and still is) the bbc radio 4 breakfast presenter. At the same time Terry Wogan was the radio 2 breakfast presenter, a similar age (about 60 at the time). His attit

> SystemD definitely spurred some controversies years ago but is it that bad in 2019? The reasons for the controversies have not really changed (lennart, the idea that it's not "unixy", a takeover of many subsystems by various systemd components, …) so people who didn't like systemd years ago probably still don't. As somebody who's not really involved, I found Benno Rice's The Tragedy of Systemd[0] interesting and enlightening. [0] [VIDEO]

I recommend watching this to give you some perspective on the SystemD hate: [VIDEO] I too was furious about the existence of systemd, but now I realize that was mostly because I don't want new things and consider many new things to be bad because they are new and there have been a few 'bad apples' in my personal experience