Linux

Do we have to bring this up again? It's just boring.

systemd is here and it isn't going anywhere soon. It's an improvement over SysV, but the core init system is arguably less well-designed than some of the other options that were on the table 10 years ago when its adoption started. The systemd userspace ecosystem has significantly stifled development of alternatives that provide equivalent functionality, which has led to less experimentation and innovation in those areas. In many cases those systemd add-on services provide less functionality than what they have replaced, but are adopted simply because they are part of the systemd ecosystem. The core unit file format is verbose and somewhat awkward, and the *ctl utilities are messy and sometimes unfriendly.

Like most Red Hat-originated software written in the last 15 years, it valiantly attempts to solve real problems with Linux, and mostly achieves that, but there are enough corner cases and short-sighted design decisions that it ends up being mediocre and somewhat annoying.

Personally I hope that someone comes along and takes the lessons learned and rewrites it, much like Pulseaudio has been replaced by Pipewire. Perhaps if someone decides it needs rewriting in Rust?

One of the big complaints of systemd detractors I read is that it’s “monolithic” and “taking over everything” and this “shouldn’t all be part of init”

You might want to point out that all the features outside of systemd-as-init are optional and can be replaced or ignored if you don’t want them. They also don’t run as PID 1

You do have to use systemd-journald, but you can also just forward it to syslog if you want

systemd brings much functionality. It can't follow unix philosophy because unix is 50 years old. the whole community drama about this systemd VS sysV VS OpenRC VS whatever comes up, is funny. There are distros that are systemd-free if you wish so much to avoid it.

Finally a systemd praise post after so many hateful remarks. I knew systemd could do dns resolving but just learned it could handle the entire network stack and replace NetworkManager. I have a question: How can services such as Apache adapt to both NM and systemd at the same time? NM and systemd have different wait-online services. You can also add systemd-analyze for boot time analysis to the list.

Very interesting article with lots of links that I'm sure to revisit often. I use Linux daily and was not aware of all the possibilities that systemd has to offer.

Some of the cruft I use nowadays to manage Linux machines can be optimized by simply moving over to the systemd equivalent. Of particular interest to me are: triggers, timers, file monitoring, and ntp.

systemd-nspawn is basically chroot but better

Having choice is the best part of Linux, but Systemd is something so ubiquitous to Linux that it might as well be called Systemd/Linux instead of GNU/Linux.

When you think of it like that, it feels much less like a bloated behemoth that needs to be de-monopolised and more like an integral piece of the puzzle that is turning the Linux kernel into an functional operating system.