[TriLUG] Why the hate/dislike for systemd?

[Aaron Joyner via TriLUG]

Change aversion, and railing against complexity (maybe rightly so)?

At a super high level, the first visible effect for the user is that this
single daemon handles the boot process, and the system boots faster.

For my two cents, as someone who primarily maintains servers for a
living... they don't boot very often.  When they fail to do so, someone
will have to troubleshoot why, in some cases in a hurry, to be able to
resolve an actual problem.  If the bootup sequence involves a series of
linear[1] shell scripts that I can find the line where it breaks relatively
quickly, then read temporally everything before and after that in well
under half an hour, that's a fairly narrow problem space.  Absorbing the
complexity of parallel bootup, (and an init system which is overall more
flexible), does not outweigh the tradeoff of having to understand D-Bus
communication to figure out why something started when it did.

In short: Gains in bootup time at the expense of complexity, are not a good
tradeoff.

Sadly, that's far from a fair treatment of the complexity of the choice of
an init system.  There are a large number of other advantages, in terms of
having a single, more powerful and flexible, process-management system.  A
large part of this benefit accrues to the distribution and package
maintainers, and only *indirectly* to the users of the average linux
desktop or small server deployment, so it's harder for people to understand
how to assign value to those benefits.

If you want an honest appraisal of the trade-offs, with less FUD, I'd
suggest searching for the opposite phrasings, either "Why not SysV init",
or "Why systemd".  I'll also directly recommend Debian's internal
discussion of this topic, accessible as a set of Wiki pages, here:
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/systemd

If all of this makes you feel curmudgeonly, like you just wish people would
stop layering on complexity for the sake of features you don't want or care
about... have you considered OpenBSD?

Aaron S. Joyner

1 - Yes, very few linux distributions (just Slackware?) use a pure linear
SysV init any more.  Debian derivatives have been using parallelized boot
for a long time, but that's not something most people pay attention to or
are aware of.  The change to systemd highlights the philosophical change
away from "a set of shell scripts I can edit" to "a compiled binary with
some config files".


On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 8:58 AM, Lee Fickenscher via TriLUG <
trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

> The "Recommendations for a systemd-less Linux distribution
> <http://www.trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20150713/074201.html>"
> thread has me wondering why people don't like systemd. I'm not trying to
> bash anyone in that thread or attack anyone for their stance. This is
> purely for my own edification.
>
> I read/skimmed http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page but
> that
> came off like a lot of rhetoric and FUD and seemed to have little substance
> that I could find.
>
> I've seen arguments that it isn't *nix-like but that seems incorrect as
> systemd appears to be more of a framework of separate executables than a
> single monolithic application. IMHO, that fits well into the
> toolbox-mentality.
>
> Concerns about stability were mentioned, but I'm running systems that use
> systemd that are rock-solid, so that would imply to me that it isn't
> specifically a systemd issue.
>
> Some other comments/concerns seemed to be a rally cry against change, which
> seems ironic in the computer field.
>
> Does anyone have any concrete reasons why systemd is bad? If so, I'd
> honestly love to hear them.
> If it is just a matter of opinion and people just don't like it, that's
> cool too.
> I'd just like to know into which bucket it falls.
>
> Thanks!
> -Lee
> --
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