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I was genuinely looking for alternatives to systemd, just because I was curious.
I stumbled upon: https://nosystemd.org/
The anger sits deep. What a beautiful sight.
It’s like that very very old joke…
Geek: “So then I brought the girl home…”
Excited crowd: “and then?”
Geek: “then I pushed the keyboard and sat her on my desk…”
Excited crowd: “woah, you have a PC? What processor do you have? Do you overclock? What cooling do you use?”at first i read it as greek and was very confused
He presents well, but many of his arguments beg þe question – þey assume false premises. I’m not going to dissect þe entire hour-long video, but as an example þe main premise he starts wiþ is þat people who don’t like systemd don’t like it because it isn’t familiar. I doubt þis is true except in his BSD domain. I’ve been using systemd since before it grew into þe monstrosity it now is, and I’m equally comfortable writing systemd services and timers, and am familiar wiþ þe commands. I’ve learned to not like it as it’s grown and gotten worse, and I’d guess þat a survey of anti-systemd people will show most of þem use systemd enough þat þe presumption of disliking it because it’s “different” is wildly wrong.
I also take exception to his discounting þe value of mix-and-match systems. It’s funny þat he disparages “contempt” and þen tosses out negative statements like “having to cobble togeþer a bunch of different pieces of software,” as if somehow diversity and choice is bad. It’s such a strange mentality for someone from þe BSD community.
þe
Yeah, I’m not going to read that shit
Is that what we’re going to do today, Kitty? We’re gonna fight?
free software but you can’t be free like that
Linux users: come join the community! It’s free, safe, and accessible!
Also Linux users: you fucking swine? You do WHAT?!
Like just be happy more people are joining the community and contributing. Shesh
Is joke.
no
There’s legitimate criticism of systemd and I do understand that people can hate it.
Anyways, systemd is so nice to use. Even more with nixos.
I’m trying to use alpine Linux on a VM. The amount of things depending on systemd is extreme. It’s a pain in the ass not having it.
Orr… I’m shitty at Linux.
A lot of people suddenly talking about NixOS lately but literally the only news I’ve seen about it in a while was that the maintainers are Slopping with AI Code.
Is there an article on this I can read? I was about to start looking into trying Nix and that’s kinda disappointing to hear
I might be exaggerating based on the little I’ve seen, particularly this post LINK which has a very misleading title, but the number of packages for AI integration to NixOS and forks for Agentic OS and workflows, the amount of support (real or otherwise) for AI in the NixOS communities, and articles like this one: LINK, would be a hard sell to tell me were all coincidence.
Thanks for the link. Might put me off Nix a bit. I may look into comparing some of the other immutable distros like Fedora’s. Idk I avoided them early on, but I’ve had to spend a lot of time fixing shit lately and was considering a change.
Have you tried CachyOS? It’s built on Arch but it’s a lot easier to get into, let’s you pick a desktop environment such as KDE Plasma or GNOME in the installation, the install media itself is a portable OS.
Definitely good to keep an open mind while you shop around for your next distro.
Recently there was a hacker issue with the AUR repos, but most of the packages you need are likely already on the official CachyOS package search without requiring an AUR package.
I’m actually on CachyOS now. I’ve got a list of stuff I need to fix with it unfortunately. Namely issues with monitors, and some finicky stuff with USB devices that I’ve got to unplug after every wake on sleep, plus a handful of other items I don’t notice as often.
But it does work, so I haven’t been too unhappy with it. It’s just the time to fix things that bugs me sometimes.
Debating reinstalling again since there’s been some major changes like ditching Octopi and Cachy Package manager for Shelly. Plus I’ve kinda wanted something different from KDE and now that they’ve got Noctalia in the default installer it seemed appealing.
Lol I’m not one for doing updates too frequently so I did miss the AUR issue. I saw the news, but hadn’t updated so I was in the clear
NGL I haven’t had much experience with the package managers because I’ve been installing everything with the konsole via
pacman -Sandflatpak install flathubcommands or manually if needed. I’m surprised to hear about the USB devices issue, even my analogue audio interface worked plug and play and I’ve never had to reseat them.
Of all the people who have incredibly strong opinions about not-so-incredibly important things, the virulently anti-systemd crowd are among the ones that baffle me the most.
The real problem with systemd is figuring out what’s is or isn’t part of systemd…
There are many legitimate complaints. Bundling a bunch of services into a single binary goes completely against Unix philosophy. Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.
Copying how Windows does things isn’t necessarily the best.
I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.
And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you’re going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top
You know it’s not a single binary, right ? Systemd is a bunch of different, mostly single usage, mostly optional, binaries. As far as Unix philosophy goes, Systemd is definitely following the principles, which is not the case for the Kernel for instance.
As for the binary logs, I used to hate it, but then, not having to manually parse logs for filtering is really nice.
I do have my issues with Systemd, but it not following the Unix philosophy is not one of them.
It’s not people disliking it that makes no sense to me; everyone has their opinions.
I just can’t imagine having the level of anger displayed by some of the most vocal of the anti-systemd crowd.
If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can’t stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.
It’s the same when Windows users get angry at things like OneDrive. It’s forced on them and they don’t want to have to work around removing it like people having to work around how Gnome is integrated into systemd.
If your favorite thing is being ruined and you can’t stop it, I can understand frustration being displayed as anger.
That’s the joy of open source though: you can stop it. You are free to use another init system, fork projects, etc. With Windows, you can’t do any of that. Since it’s closed source, workarounds that may be temporary are all you can do.
That’s the joy of open source though: you can stop it.
Not really. Unless you are prepared to devote your life to changing the source code to what you want, you have to accept it. And because you forked you are no longer downstream and will have to spend the rest of your life keeping up with patches.
It’s not much different than Windows. You could write a OneDrive uninstaller but you will have to spend the rest of your life with patches every time MS updates and breaks your uninstaller.
I mean we are literally on a couple of open source solutions communicating using an open protocol probably using some sort of open OS.
https://nosystemd.org/ is a thing. I dont have particularly strong opinions on the matter.
You don’t need to do it alone. In fact, people can come by, fix some things, then go about life. Or donate money instead of resources. If you have used lemmy/piefed/mastodon/peertube in the past, theres a tiny bit of my code in there that makes things just a tiny bit better. Thats not a brag or anything, its just that multiple people can contribute.
But I hear the frustrations. There is a certain mindset you have to have, hopeful you and others can build something…or with enough hatred to build out of spite. Sometimes thats hard to do with everything else in life. Sometimes the best thing to do is to accept and move on. Or go looking for new solutions without maintenance.
If you like a distro and they switch to systemd, there’s not a lot you can do if you aren’t up to forking the whole distro. I feel like too many people in open source forget that most people have lives outside of Linux.
That’s the joy of open source though: you can stop it. You are free to use another init system, fork projects
That and a big company looking to manufacture a perceived advantage by aggreasively pushing their shit into the mainstream - good fit to be taken over by IBM - who can bankroll the slapdash dev and bully ISVs, and you’re set.
your favorite thing is being ruined and you can’t stop it,
Hardly a ‘favourite thing’; it’s like making a water slide out of a river : Wantonly wrecking something simple, effective and usable for this mishmash isn’t ruining something sacred as much as it is destroying something for no reason to dramatically create something lesser the world didn’t need. Except with more hype, payola, ageism, strong-arm adoption and cult worship.
Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay “The Rise of Worse-is-Better,” expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the “Worse Is Better” philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.
The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (…) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, “head” and “tail,” which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, “head” and “tail” are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!
From The Unix Hater’s Handbook
(I like Linux, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows)
That head/tail thing is kind of a goofy argument. For one thing they aren’t duals;
tailis naturally more complex because the end of a file often changes and the application can optionally keep showing you the new output. Also, the fact that they’re separate applications in the first place is arguably better than the a one-application approach, which would always require a command line switch to select between outputting the start or end of a file. And finally, while I guess this could vary between implementations ofheadandtail, mine has identical switches for all the common options.The head and tail programs also do completely different things. What differences in options do they have?
Really completely different? Do they not print first / last lines of text from a file into the terminal?
“This program sucks because it doesn’t come with the world’s most confusing GUI and doesn’t do a trillion things”
If you ask this person what “technically inferior” actually means you’d probably get a different answer every day.
GUI certainly has its place.
A single binary? What?
Systemd changing from text to binary logs is my pet peeve.
Fast searchable compressed files is a fantastic idea.
There’s also a few cases of feature and scope creep, including the infamous
systemd-resolved.
Your job is to launch services, manage logs, and do timers and relaunches on a service crash. DNS is out of scope, leave that to existing services.The other day on a thread here about “people who use other init systems, why?” and i wrote about my experience with systemd and git downvoted for mysterious reasons. Other people that did the same as me also got their downvote sixpacks. And now they want to make it seem like it’s just the people that hate systemd the annoying ones…
Hey, just wanted to let you know that I downvoted your comment. Mainly because I think it’s funny when people can’t come up with compelling arguments and complain about being downvoted instead, but also because I’m part of the conspiracy making sure that people vocally complaining about systemd seem really annoying and wrong.
There are too many people who use downvote to disagree with cogent and well written points.
I try to only downvote if something is obviously trolling, in bad taste, or wildly stupid.
Downvoting is a legitimate tool of expressing your disagreement.
It attracts a lot of silent disagreement that’s for sure.
By far my most controversial post was negative about systemd, while posts on Palestine, anarchy, etc. received no negative attention at all.
Palestine
Well, perhaps Palestine is not controversial at all?
What systemd binary is the worst offender, in your opinion?
Logind. Right after udev.
It’s not the binary. It’s that the logs it writes are in binary so can’t be read without a program.
You can’t read a text file without a program either.
be nice to him, he’s baffled
I don’t particularly hate systemd, but when they said they are considering incorporating age verification stuff I switched to void.
Good news is that systemd is not incorporating age verification just like they are not incorporating name verification.
Both name and birth date are just userdb fields with no verification at all.
There are complicits.
the virulently anti-systemd crowd are among the ones that baffle me the most.
Tell me you need to learn more about scope creep, Unix and system design using different words.
It’s popular to hate systemd. Just as it’s popular to hate PHP. It makes people feel like they’re part of an “elite group” that are above these things. Most of the time, people can’t even explain why they hate it. Just ask someone why he hates systemd and in 95% of all cases, you won’t get a straight answer, except, of course: “It ViOlAtEs LiNuX pHiLoSoPhY” yes timmy and how does that affect you while browsing and playing games, because that’s all you do on your PC.
I’m not saying that there are no reasons to dislike systemd for some people. There might be a handful of them who genuinely dislike it and have justified reasons for it. However, an overwhelming majority of the people that hate it don’t even have a fucking clue what it is, let alone why it’s dislikeable, they just read on twitter or reddit that it sucks. And that’s it. It’s a bit like a big streamer saying: “Game XYZ is shit” and a majority of that streamers following will think its shit.
As someone who designs systems as part of his job, “it violates Linux philosophy” is a perfectly valid reason to hate something as critical and low level as an init system.
I think “hate” is a strong word, mind, but following consistent design patterns and constraining scope matters. The problem is that it’s one of those things that doesn’t tend to matter until shit hits the fan.
The scope creep exponentially raises the efforts needed to properly test, troubleshoot, secure, and just generally work with the project code. The unique design creates rough edges for integrations with other pre-existing systems and tools, while also raising the effort needed for troubleshooting when something goes wrong.
There’s also the whole “Chesterton’s Fence” aspect to a lot of it, where the project runner’s overall attitude has been dismissive of existing conventions and separation of functionality.
There’s a lot of perfectly valid reasons to dislike it. That said, I think full on hate is extreme for an aspect of the overall Linux “system” and “user experience” that most users never interact with. Like having an opinion on the order your BIOS handles things in.
Why do so many people think it’s a good thing??
Yeah I’ve seen him, too.
Yes, I do. And even worse: I like it. 😈
There’s no way he’d get laid with a keyboard like that.
I have a keyboard like that and I used to get laid…
Shepherd gang. Pretty sure only one distro uses it, but i’d love to know if i’m wrong.
I do as well and honestly after looking into the effort required to switch I’m not gonna. Altho my Linux doesn’t boot rn soooo… xD
The effort required is to install a distro without it. That’s it. Some without it are even quite popular, like MX Linux.
Clarification: I don’t care either way about systemd, just saying, it requires no effort to avoid.
Arch, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu all use systemd. SteamOS/CachyOS are based off Arch. Bazzite is Fedora-based.
If you use Linux for gaming, you are not going to have a good time avoiding systemd. It’s certainly true that some distributions don’t use it, but their market share is limited.
It seems dismissive to ignore the trends and investment in the ecosystem going towards systemd based distributions.
Idk, i mean there’s Artix. I’ve used Void for like 2 years and gaming was fine.
Your options are limited significantly if you want to avoid it, but yes, there are options. I use a steam deck primarily and while I can re install the OS, it’s a significant amount of fiddling for a worse experience.
My issue with systemd is not that it’s ‘hard to use’ or anything. My issue is that it’s getting harder to avoid as time goes on.
Yeah that’s true. On the desktop since i was already using more DIY-type distros it’s not that difficult to avoid it, but with a more specialized usecase like the steam deck it’s hard to find something that mimicks the SteamOS experience without using systemd, or at least there’s not an OOTB experience distro for that as far as i know. I’m still using the stock SteamOS on my deck for that reason, it doesn’t feel worth it to replace, especially since i only use mine to game and don’t tinker with it like my desktop.
As previously mentioned, I do not have a dog in this fight. I do not personally care if my distros has it or doesn’t have it. A lot of distros use systemd because they like it. If you don’t like systemd, you can use something else. If systemd starts to get really bad for some reason, less people will use it. That is the circle of life, and why open source works as a self correcting economy.
Also, like… I do prefer to be up to date for gaming & optimizations from gaming focused distros. But if I am being honest, the single digit percent increases are not that noticeable vs something like MX Linux.
I understand that you personally are fine with it, but this is apparently a trigger for me, so please accept my apology in advance for offering commentary.
- if you don’t like it, you can use something else:
This is only really true for desktop PC hobbyists. SteamOS is responsible for a huge spike of Linux usage recently and that is Systemd-only. it’s true that you can install something else but it’ll be a significantly worse user experience. This is the case for basically any handheld Linux device, and all corporate investment is going to systemd based distros.
- if systemd starts to get bad, less people will use it:
The alternatives are less polished and switching distros is a relatively costly proposition if you are not a hobbyist (in terms of opportunity cost and time spent without a functional computer). Handheld devices such as the steam deck are much less flexible as well.
I appreciate the apology in advance, but it is not necessary. I am happy to have a civilized conversation like we are having, even if we disagree.
To my knowledge, the arguments against systemd boil down to:
- They recently added an option to ask for age verification, which distros do not have to use, and I believe they walked it back already.
- It goes against the values of Linux to have a singular project be responsible for many functions instead of doing one small thing well.
- It is large-ish for what it is, and could be more efficient with resources.
Now I’m not here to tell you to care or not to care, that’s your own prerogative. But think about the type of people who WOULD care, given the context? Is it gamers who bought a Steam Deck off the shelf and may not even know what Linux is? Or is it a specific subset of Linux enthusiasts who are a specific subset of PC enthusiasts who are a specific subset of people who use Linux machines? I think we can both agree it is the latter 99.9% of the time.
To your second point, you have more or less invalidated the 3rd possibility of not liking systemd. It simply works better in most cases. Alternatives are not that much worse or anything, that’s just what it is right now. COULD it potentially be better if it was the way we imagined it in our head? Maybe, but then just make your own version if you know how to make it better. But to really ANSWER your argument, by “less people will use it”, I mostly mean distro devs. It got forked immediately after the slightest hint of age verification. If it becomes an actual problem, you can bet it will swiftly be replaced by most distros, and non-tech people will not even realize it happened. Especially if that subset of Linux enthusiasts who don’t like it start jumping ship for others distros that don’t have it. Things change allll the time in Linux. Nothing is irreplaceable or unforkable.
Yeah I meant the effort required to change a already running distro to use something other than systemd seems too daunting. ofc if you have the luxury to reinstall a fresh distro its very easy
I’ve gotta say, I didn’t expect this argument on a Linux enthusiast sub in the Fediverse. A few hours to restore backup files and configuration files is not a luxury lol. I mean, I get really busy sometimes and don’t even have a few hours to spare to re-image, but damn. I find time eventually. You probably have a backup system in place already too. If you care enough to complain, you care enough to fix the problem.
I am baffled by the “daunted” comment. I thought about commenting “skill issue”, but this just isnt even the case here. You’re already past that. You moved off Windows or macOS, you probably tried several distros before landing on one. I can’t imagine the venn diagram of people who care about systemd and the people who are afraid to try a new distros are anything but two separate circles. And I can assure you non-systemd distros are not really any different in practice. I think I ran into one niche app that wouldn’t work without systemd on antiX. Otherwise, same old same ole.
Honestly this is just a me thing with my brain. I have VERY high PC setup inertia. If my system’s running, I’ll keep it that way. And if there’s a problem (like my current Linux being actually fucked), first reflex is to get a panic attack.
Was probably wrong of me to generalize my inertia here especially in the Linux community so I’ll apologize for that.Dang, everyone is so much nicer in the Fediverse. Now I feel like an asshole for poking fun at you a little bit. My bad. What error are you getting on boot BTW?
deleted by creator
Nothing like a lewd late afternoon meme to stir up my anxiety and dysphoria. 😭
Now, to the matter at hand.
systemdis great. I only moved away from it because being handed all the automation on a silver platter was hampering my Linux learning. Everything had preconfigured.servicefiles and[...]ctlcommands.Not everything. Some times you have to write your own .service files.
Then for a special kind of pain, learn how those file contents affect apparmor.
(I’m looking at you, Transmission Gtk Daemon.)
