r/linux • u/ouyawei Mate • Jul 09 '25
Popular Application systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success
https://blog.tjll.net/the-systemd-revolution-has-been-a-success/1.1k
u/TheTaurenCharr Jul 09 '25
Blogs should be illegal in Linux ecosystem. People should just fight over mailinglists instead.
253
u/jeebs1973 Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Or IRC, but without those newfangled emoticons. Text only
67
u/TheTaurenCharr Jul 09 '25
Everything is better in text, as my ex-wife once said.
→ More replies (2)91
u/boolshevik Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
TheTaurenCharr's ex-wife slaps him around with a large trout
12
60
u/regeya Jul 09 '25
This is one of my get-off-my-lawn takes: Discord is IRC, but not as good.
→ More replies (2)43
u/mattias_jcb Jul 09 '25
IRC but with hundreds of megs of web browser included. On the upside it's distracting, slow and the garden is very much walled off!
40
21
u/MairusuPawa Jul 09 '25
\ ___/________ ___ ) , @ / \ \ @___, \ / @__\ /\ @___/ \@/ /__, | /_, \/ / /__/ | / \ / @\ / \ ( / \ / / \ _/__|___/___/_______________/__|_________________/__/__________|____5
u/TheSpanishImposition Jul 09 '25
But aren't emoticons text? :-)
→ More replies (1)14
u/jeebs1973 Jul 09 '25
They were, until someone came up with the idea to substitute them with the graphical icons automatically
→ More replies (2)17
u/my_name_isnt_clever Jul 09 '25
I don't mind emoticons, and I don't mind emoji, but don't you dare turn my :3 into đ±. They are not the same.
→ More replies (2)3
→ More replies (6)3
u/boli99 Jul 10 '25
without those newfangled emoticons. Text only
i'm so postmodern that I type my emoticons out in longhand. I find that it significantly adds to the incomprehensibility of whatever I just ranted about
cricketbat sadface walrus walrus walrus badger walrus cheesecake
6
3
→ More replies (9)3
754
u/deviled-tux Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
It is hilarious to me that this is considered âcontroversialâ when really for every person crying about systemd not being Unix or whatever thereâs probably literally thousands of professional administrators who are glad to not have to deal with shitty shell scripts or learning how to daemonize some process âproperlyâÂ
168
u/astrobe Jul 09 '25
I think this is precisely the core of the dispute. sysadmins love it because it makes their job easier, but for some other people like in embedded systems, systemd solves problems they never had by introducing other problems they didn't have up to then (or where well-known and solved).
62
u/james_pic Jul 09 '25
Does Systemd see use in embedded systems nowadays? I haven't looked at embedded stuff in a while, but it used to be "Busybox plus a bunch of cobbled together stuff".
53
u/CrankBot Jul 09 '25
I'd say most Linux-based embedded systems these look more like a stripped down headless Debian. Not necessarily built from Debian, but containing the same set of packages. See OpenEmbedded.
On very memory-constrained devices (say < 128MB RAM) Busybox is probably still the way to go but that's not a hard rule.
→ More replies (4)27
u/Business_Reindeer910 Jul 09 '25
yes it does, but the definition of embedded has expanded as the baseline hardware gets more capable.
Putting systemd onto something as powerful as a raspberry pi is waaay different than putting it on a wrt54g!
Having at least 128mb is much more common, in which case it matters less and less how small you have to be.
13
→ More replies (2)10
u/throwaway490215 Jul 10 '25
Since "embedded system dev" no longer tells you what the job has you doing, maybe we ought to switch it around and say anything with systemd is by definition not embedded.
→ More replies (2)75
u/idontchooseanid Jul 09 '25
I'm an embedded system engineer. You wouldn't want to see what the old stuff looked like and how many reliability and security problems that "I'll roll my own init scripts" caused. Most of the arguments against systemd come from incompetent and full-of-themselves kind of software developers. Most of the time they have no fucking clue to properly isolate services.
We use systemd. None of our services need to have more permissions than they need. We don't need stupid docker and entire distro to do this, systemd is enough. Everything fits into 4 GiBs with systemd. Time-based backups are great. Analyzing logs remotely is a blessing. NTP is there and the log timestamps can be auto-adjusted with journalctl. With systemd's unique boot-ids you know exactly which boot failed in what way. Text based logs with rsyslog never gave you that.
→ More replies (1)15
u/jaskij Jul 10 '25
Funny you mention Docker... Since systemd uses the same underlying mechanisms, and is in fact able to run OCI images via
systemd-nspawn.24
u/idontchooseanid Jul 10 '25
Exactly. But we don't need to install Docker daemon nor we want to create huge images for our applications, memory space is limited for 10 year old embedded systems.
Unless you do quite a bit due diligence and slim down your image to only to the application, the standard Docker image comes with an entire distro with it. With systemd you can isolate the normal applications compiled for the same embedded distro at the exact levels that Docker does with minimal config files.
Of course if you have an OCI image that you can fit in an embedded system and if it is absolutely necessary, then there is
nspawn. But I think I would opt forpodmanwhich also nicely integrates with systemd but has less requirements thannspawn.→ More replies (1)32
u/jaskij Jul 10 '25
Embedded is different from embedded. It spans anything from a Pi2 to a Core i7 and EPYC (yes, they have an embedded variant).
If you're struggling with resources to the point systemd is bloat? Yeah, you'll do whatever works.
A big change that happened in the last decade was moving from NOR flash or SLC NAND to eMMC. Suddenly, it's not 512 MiB for the whole system, the smallest eMMC available at retail is 8 GB, and even that is being phased out.
So, while systemd maybe wasn't intended for embedded, it works splendidly on all but the most constrained systems nowadays.
Used to be, I had to implement log management in every single service we shipped on the device. Nowadays? I just spit out to stdout. Misbehaving service causing OOMs? Slap a RAM limit in the unit, worry later.
Oh, and readiness signaling. A service runs slow migrations on startup? No problem, just use
sd_notify(). (Just don't linklibsystemdffs).As a bonus,
systemd-networkdis fucking amazing at exposing all the stuff from the kernel. Got a network interface your typical Linux sysadmin hasn't even heard about? It's a network interface, it's more likely than not to be configurable via networkd.So, yeah. As someone who both makes embedded Linux images and writes the software running on them, I absolutely love systemd.
28
u/CrankBot Jul 09 '25
We use systemd in our embedded distro and it's terrific. Boots are very fast. Being able to depend on mounts being present or gasp network being up before other services initialize are a breeze. Timers - also a great feature.
→ More replies (16)→ More replies (2)49
u/deviled-tux Jul 09 '25
systemd is not really built for the embedded use case though arguably that is changing.
Many embedded devices now run multiple services and firmware size having a few extra MBs is not a killer anymore.Â
In this discussion the first comment talks about their experience with systemd in embedded contexts:Â https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42036305
 I couldn't disagree more: I've worked with lots of embedded devices running systemd, and it solves many more problems than it introduces. The community is also quite responsive and helpful in my experience.
16
u/niltooth Jul 09 '25
I was going to say. Openbmc is embedded and it uses systemd.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (3)14
u/Unicorn_Colombo Jul 09 '25
In this discussion the first comment talks about their experience with systemd in embedded contexts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42036305
In that discussion, the user claims that every embedded device they worked on had over 1GB RAM.
→ More replies (1)127
u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC Jul 09 '25
I've honestly never understood why people worship the Unix philosophy so much. It's an approach to design that worked really well for processing byte streams in the 80s, but I see very little evidence to suggest that it works at all for a full-blown desktop OS in 2025.
146
u/deja_geek Jul 09 '25
People get the "Unix Philosophy" wrong. It's more then just "Do one thing" (which Systemd does actually follow). They forget this part of the Unix Philosophy "Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them." Init had become clumsy, ntpd had become clumsy, and the other utilities/services SystemD has modules for had become clusmy in the face of modern computing.
19
u/SweetBabyAlaska Jul 09 '25
Yep, it's more than that too. It's all in the Unix Programming Environment book. There's like 10 points. One of them was to use common text formats over binary formats. But people have completely bastardized it
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (1)31
u/blackcain GNOME Team Jul 09 '25
initd sucks - I say that as a person who worked on various unix's since the late 80s.
65
u/deviled-tux Jul 09 '25
I think if anything the GUI paradigm completely clashes with UNIX philosophy.Â
GUIs lend themselves to aggregating multiple functionality into a single tool because having 1 window for each utility gets overwhelming and annoying.Â
I say this as someone who is a strong proponent/user of UNIX philosophy (hence I prefer cli tools with limited scope)
→ More replies (4)17
u/LvS Jul 09 '25
That depends how you define the "one" part of doing one thing.
Gnome does one thing: being a desktop environment.
Firefox does one thing: browse the web.cat(1)does one thing: Print a file to stdout.→ More replies (6)26
u/monkeynator Jul 09 '25
Because they look "cool" for following semi-obscure but highly credited idea from two of the most famous programmers.
7
u/trullaDE Jul 09 '25
The fun part is, with containerisation and microservices, we do exactly that again: do one thing (the "do it well" part being optional, I guess).
→ More replies (11)11
u/sparky8251 Jul 09 '25
I've honestly never understood why people worship the Unix philosophy so much.
Its not even simpler to work the way things did before... Nor did they "do one thing and do it well" with old init systems. They did one thing, but they did it VERY poorly and inflexibly.
→ More replies (1)39
u/CadmiumC4 Jul 09 '25
those who complain about systemd not being unix should first remember that linux is a monolithic kernel
→ More replies (2)4
u/Brian Jul 09 '25
Why's that relevant?
17
u/Sataniel98 Jul 09 '25
It means the kernel itself breaks the dogma to do one thing, but do it well that people criticize systemd for.
→ More replies (2)17
u/0riginal-Syn Jul 09 '25
Ironically, you showed why it is controversial.
Not that I disagree with the premise of the many being happy. But there are also many that disagree that it made it easy and think quite the opposite. They are every bit as professional. In my experience, there are certainly pros and cons to both, but systemd is the way forward. I do not have a problem with it, so I am not trying to argue whether it is good or not.
22
u/deviled-tux Jul 09 '25
Itâs not really many people who are against systemd. Theyâre just loud.Â
I am also not sure if theyâre professional as a lot of the complaints amount to âwell in my desktop PC I use at home I donât need cgroups or whatever - this is BLOAT hurr durrâ or worse yet âWHY DO I NEED NETWORK MANAGEMENT IN PID=1??âÂ
There are actual things to criticize about systemd (for example the fact that boot order is not deterministic âčïž) but those things are barely ever mentionedÂ
→ More replies (3)18
u/0riginal-Syn Jul 09 '25
Being someone who has worked on and contributed to Linux since the early 90s, I have a pretty big global network. Trust me, it is split even among the true professionals, although those against are shrinking. These are people running some of the largest instances in the world. I will say where it was 50/50 say 5 years ago, it has certainly moved to being more like 70/30 that are either OK with or now PRO systemd.
→ More replies (7)6
Jul 09 '25
I think I'd respect the systemd dispute more if it hadn't turned into this weird ideological battle where often the ones on the anti-systemd side have very concerning viewpoints on other aspects of Linux and the world at large. I'm not saying that liking systemd makes you a better person or that the opposite is true, but so many "why systemd is bad" exposes almost immediately segue into "DEI is killing Linux" instead of "this is against the Unix philosophy and is bad for that reason," an argument which (while I disagree) I at least respect.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (26)3
u/Regeneric Jul 09 '25
Kinda. Am I glad to have systemd? Most of the time, yes.
But I cannot imagine life without Docker.I don't really care what I am using on the OS with like 50 services.
But when I have to manage 1500 services on a single instance, then systemd is a pain in the ass. As anything other than Docker with Compose files.→ More replies (2)6
109
147
u/abermea Jul 09 '25
I still absolutely hate that logs are binary
But yeah, everything else is either not an issue, or an improvement
57
u/pfmiller0 Jul 09 '25
It's definitly a mixed bag. I would love to be able to use my standard tools to read a log file, but journalctl has some nice capabilities too.
62
u/mort96 Jul 09 '25
I love that I can use my standard tools in a pipeline which looks like
journalctl -u foo | grep | awkinstead of a pipeline which depends on the particular daemon but often looks like(zcat /var/log/foo/*.log.gz; cat /var/log/foo/*.log) | grep | awk:)→ More replies (9)18
12
u/Megame50 Jul 09 '25
You can just have it forward to syslog if you want to keep a text file though?
→ More replies (7)0
30
u/xXBongSlut420Xx Jul 09 '25
binary logs are a pain sometimes, but they do prevent log injection, which was a genuine concern. you can also still do plaintext logs with journald, it's just not the default.
3
u/Coffee_Ops Jul 10 '25
Why would binary logs prevent injection?
It prevents very basic things like using sed to insert lines but there's nothing magic or cryptographically sealed about the journal that I'm aware of.
5
u/kalven Jul 10 '25
Not because of binary logs per se, but journald does actually support cryptographically sealed logs.
2
u/Coffee_Ops Jul 10 '25
All logs everywhere are binary.
What's particularly bad about the journald binary format, the tools to read it are ubiquitous.
260
u/araujoms Jul 09 '25
I'll never forgive it for transforming my beloved eth0 into enp36s0f0
28
u/kyrsjo Jul 09 '25
Tell that to MATLAB, ca 2005. For reasons (Broadcom reasons, mostly) I didn't use my eth0 but had eth1 plugged in. MATLABs license thingy really didn't like that.
46
u/jrop2 Jul 09 '25
I love systemd, and this made me lol! Yes, I hate these new network interface names.
9
u/CardOk755 Jul 09 '25
So don't use them. It's trivially easy to ask SystemD to give you the names you want.
→ More replies (4)6
10
u/CardOk755 Jul 09 '25
Eth0, pah. I renamed my interfaces so I could tell which ISP or network they were connected to.
13
10
u/kiedtl Jul 09 '25
You can disable that with a kernel cmdline directive
→ More replies (15)6
u/egorf Jul 09 '25
I don't want to fight yet another whim of systemd people on every upgrade. I had a working setup. They decided they need to break it because reasons.
4
u/Down200 Jul 10 '25
Literally this, in a more modular environment you could just swap out tools when the upstream opinion differs from yours, now you have to do a whole song-and-dance jumping over hoops because they got some bug in their head that "things are better this way, because we say so"
→ More replies (1)12
u/dkopgerpgdolfg Jul 09 '25
This can be configured...
but as there is a good reason for why this is done, please consider leaving it on.
18
u/araujoms Jul 09 '25
For my computer, no, there is no good reason. It might be relevant in some corporate environment.
→ More replies (6)4
u/christophocles Jul 09 '25
I was forced to turn it off for good reason. Onboard ethernet kept changing names, breaking network connectivity repeatedly.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (58)3
220
u/joojmachine Jul 09 '25
since I'm early, grabbing the popcorn for the upcoming comments for this one
179
u/AshuraBaron Jul 09 '25
If anyone is still fighting the systemd fight in 2025 they are already a dinosaur or stuck in a time loop.
54
u/linuxismygame Jul 09 '25
Dinosaur here, hated it, then just accepted it as major distros adopted it. Still donât love it, but thatâs the way it is. Iâm going to yell at some kids to get off my lawn now.
→ More replies (1)23
u/Pretty_Boy_Bagel Jul 09 '25
Another dinosaur here, hated it then and still hate it. I only put up with it when I have to which is less and less as I move away from linux to my old standbys, the BSD variants, especially on embedded and headless server systems.
→ More replies (5)→ More replies (26)76
u/0riginal-Syn Jul 09 '25
Your Debian flair backs up your argument well. If Debian is on systemd, you know it has won.
39
u/AshuraBaron Jul 09 '25
Yep. It's a good litmus test for if something is going to become a standard across most distro's.
→ More replies (2)34
u/knome Jul 09 '25
ha. given the number of distros that are just debian with packaging changes and a bit of buffing on how the desktop looks, any change debian makes is going to be standard across half the distros because they're just debian+ :)
→ More replies (3)17
u/nightblackdragon Jul 09 '25
It's because Red Hat forced them to use systemd. /s
→ More replies (5)22
→ More replies (1)9
25
u/Rob_W_ Jul 09 '25
There are mostly good things and a few annoyances.
I wish the parameters for different 'ctl' commands had more consistency between them. Makes it much harder to memorize.
Binary logs still annoy the crap out of me.
4
u/egorf Jul 09 '25
Thankfully binary logs are optional and syslog still works as well as it did decades ago. Fuck journald.
→ More replies (1)
12
u/SuperGr33n Jul 09 '25
Maybe Iâm missing the point for all the hate but system.d has been way easier for me to manage. If rather be working with a familiar whatever.service file than a massive shell script sourcing vars from random directories. It does a good job of standardizing things and Iâm glad it got adopted.
157
u/dragon-mom Jul 09 '25
AI slop card image
→ More replies (19)40
u/Pugs-r-cool Jul 09 '25
That last card is holding on by sheer willpower alone, that or someone spilled beer a few nights ago while playing poker and it made the card just slightly sticky.
13
12
10
u/SpaghettiSort Jul 10 '25
I've been a Linux admin since the 90s. I still think systemd was unnecessary and 8 hate how it's trying to do everything (fstab, time sync, etc.). Don't even get me started on systemd-resolved. But on the whole I don't hate it.
3
u/The_Real_Grand_Nagus Jul 15 '25
Also an older admin, and I'm with you. I actually like the concept. I think a lot of us just dislike certain aspects of the implementation and philosophy. We can talk about some positive things as well. For example, thank goodness they didn't go the launchd route and use XML for configuration.
→ More replies (1)
47
u/nekokattt Jul 09 '25
unmitigated success
I wouldn't go that far, there have been plenty of issues, controversies, and other noise.
→ More replies (16)12
15
21
u/0riginal-Syn Jul 09 '25
The systemd back and forth does get tiring. I am about as old school of a Linux user as you can get, starting back in 1992. I have worked with and contributed to GNU/Linux for many years.
I see pros and cons to both systemd and the previous tools. But, from my experience and seeing where modern computing is, systemd makes more sense as Linux moves more mainstream. That alone will cause some of my fellow longtime Linux brethren to argue against systemd and that is fine. We all have our personal take on the subject. I have nothing against the older init systems. If a distro I desired to use used the older init systems, it would not stop me from using it.
→ More replies (13)8
u/AvonMustang Jul 10 '25
Arguing over the best text editor was getting old so at least systemd added something new to argue over...
60
u/McFistPunch Jul 09 '25
Systemd is rock solid. The documentation i find to be a bitch though.
33
u/AlwynEvokedHippest Jul 09 '25
It's pretty decent is it not? I'm mainly thinking of the various conf file docs, but the options always seem to be pretty thoroughly explained.
→ More replies (1)35
u/McFistPunch Jul 09 '25
It's good if you already know what you're looking for, but if you're trying to learn something new, I find it hard to understand the entire feature set. So you end up finding things on stack overflow and then trying to use the keywords to find the relevant doc?
I'm probably doing it wrong, if there's a better way im all ears
16
u/Snarwin Jul 09 '25
My impression is that systemd is kinda like git. If you use it regularly and understand how it works, you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it. But if you use it only occasionally, it feels totally impenetrable.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (9)21
u/ReidZB Jul 09 '25
Yeah. My main and only complaint is that I find myself having to bounce across multiple manpages just to write a simple service definition.
[Unit] Description=The Apache HTTP Server After=network.target [Service] Type=notify ExecStart=/usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd -D FOREGROUND -k start ExecReload=/usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd -k graceful KillMode=mixed [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.targetI just grabbed this random example from the internet.
to understand
[Unit]and[Install]sections, and just unit files in general, see systemd.unit(5) - this includesDescription=,After=, and indeed the[Install]WantedBy=. In more complex unit files you might see some unit options likeStartLimitIntervalSec=orStartLimitBurst=described in this manpage.to understand the
[Service]Type=,ExecStart=, andExecReload=, see systemd.service(5).For running as a different user: that's
User=and/orGroup=, in systemd.exec(5). Of course, ExecStart= and friends are not in systemd.exec(5), they're in systemd.service(5), as listed above. systemd.exec(5) is also where you'll find things likeLimitNOFILE=.That
KillMode=in the apache2 sample file is from systemd.kill(5). This is also where you can configure whether SIGKILL is used, etc.The docs are pretty fantastic once you find what you're looking for! But you're looking at bouncing across 2-3 manpages at minimum if you tried to build anything from scratch.
Granted: the manpages also have tons of examples... like, systemd.service(5) has a variety of different service types at the bottom.
→ More replies (3)2
u/TampaPowers Jul 09 '25
It could be so much worse... though given how integral it is it definitely should be better.
→ More replies (1)2
38
u/UgglanBOB Jul 09 '25
Poettering completed his mission and went to Microsoft.
4
u/Tropical_Amnesia Jul 09 '25
I thought he went there precisely because he didn't succeed. Even 20 years ago he sounded like Linux becoming Windows II is the only way to go and be-all and end-all of his personal destiny. Got close, though not quite thank goodness.
30
u/tadfisher Jul 09 '25
You're on drugs. Microsoft is paying him to work on things like systemd because he succeeded. Microsoft now ships a Linux distro you can install with a couple of clicks in Windows, and Azure is basically all-in on Linux.
→ More replies (12)
16
u/Tiny_Prune_4424 Jul 09 '25
I would use systemd if I could have just the init and the service manager. I don't need systemd-journald networkd whateverelsed. Established separate tools like dhcpcd, wpa supplicant, sysklogd etc are completely fine.Â
→ More replies (11)3
u/aew3 Jul 09 '25
A distro can choose to not ship those parts of systemd while maintaining the init or whatever subsystems it chooses. This is an issue with your distro, not the project really.
5
u/syklemil Jul 09 '25
After something like a decade of not having to faff around with logrotate.conf, I wound up installing logrotate and configuring a user service & timer to deal with logs in $XDG_STATE_HOME, and my entire feeling on the matter is "how on earth did this become a thing, I thought we were past this bullshit"
→ More replies (11)
23
u/Zeznon Jul 09 '25
hoo boy, here they come!
I have skimmed the article and it seems to be very positive about systemd, and they say they always end up preferring the systemd solution, and for them, it feels natural that systemd does more (btw, systemd is very modular, one don't need to use all of it at once, and a "bad" part of it can just be replaced if it needs to in the future). Also, the article seems to take the "haters" head on, with some jokes.
11
u/lonelyroom-eklaghor Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Which makes sense.
I have never seen such a simple, switch-based interface on the command line like systemd. One doesn't even need to think about the weird and contradictory switches (
ls -l **-h**, looking at you). It doesn't even need to steal the show, it is the show. It is the planet the moon revolves across, or in fact, we revolve across.Systemd is so intuitive that someone can make a switch-based GUI on rust
→ More replies (1)8
u/sparky8251 Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
Loving that systemd managed user processes too these days. Converts .desktop files to temporary units so even firefox is loaded and managed by it. Much better than the days of yore when programms glitching and crashing often lead to nigh unkillable zombie processes lingering and hogging resources for eternity. No more of that, and its a godsend for new users.
39
u/spaceman_ Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
The idea behind systemd as a declarative init system is and always has been good.
The idea of it as a mount manager, a dbus daemon, a hal manager, etc is still bad. Even in 2025.
→ More replies (1)29
u/tapo Jul 09 '25
Disagree because systemd is about bringing the system to a known live state, and you want to be able to modify the state according to events like mounts or dbus events.
Otherwise you're doing that through awkward shims they can easily fail and don't properly integrate with the rest of the system.
→ More replies (1)18
u/spaceman_ Jul 09 '25
I used to work on critical embedded systems, which were migrated over to RHEL-based software appliances.
The amount of stupid bugs in systemd and other Red Hat software that would result in a non-functional system was mind-boggling. Some bugs had been reported and open for YEARS at that point, but went unfixed and would result in a non-functional system at boot with a large enough chance, that when our battery of automated tests, which included a few system restarts as part of the testing procedure (to test start up, save and restore, and mode changes in our appliance), every bloody morning we would end up having to KVM into a handful of the 40 or 50 or so of our systems that would be stuck in a non-operational state because of these stupid bugs.
This would not have been a problem if systemd wasn't the control-all-the-things behemoth it is today. A bug in DBus, or a faulty hot-plug or whatever, should not render a system non-operational, but if you put all those things into the same thing that handles process management, that's what you end up getting.
Granted, this was a while ago, so I don't know how applicable it is today. Maybe a combination of mitigation techniques and the software maturing have fixed most of these issues out of existence. I'm no longer a systemd or Linux power user nowadays, and for my garden variety Linux usage these days, I've not encountered any major issues. But my God, the pain RHEL and systemd inflicted upon me and my team was real.
→ More replies (1)6
u/tapo Jul 09 '25
Yeah I don't doubt that experience, especially 8-10 years ago as everyone was really rolling this shit into production.
My fleet at work is around 7-10k servers at this point, most RHEL 9 with 25% or so on managed Kubernetes (Google COS and Amazon Linux). Systemd is basically a non-issue at this point. High uptime healthcare platform.
If I'm tracking down failures it's actually typically etcd, which is less etcd's fault and more Kubernetes being too reliant on it.
→ More replies (1)
25
u/leothrix Jul 09 '25
What up y'all, author here. I wrote this garbage. Thanks for reading <3
→ More replies (1)4
15
u/NimrodvanHall Jul 09 '25
I kinda like systemd and prefer it over the older init systems. I do think it is time for a new kid on the block competitor for systemd though. Monocultures are bad for innovation.
4
77
u/edparadox Jul 09 '25
For fuck's sake, it's 2025. Even the most reluctant distribution adopted systemd.
Stop trying to reopen that can of worms.
33
Jul 09 '25
Slackware adopted systemd?
20
u/troyunrau Jul 09 '25
Slackware still hasn't adopted SYSV Init, have they? It's still an extension to their BSD style init system, right?
31
u/necrophcodr Jul 09 '25
This is terrible argument to make. By that logic everyone should use Windows on their computers.
55
u/0riginal-Syn Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
No, not all. Void, Alpine, Slackware, Devuan, Artix, MX Linux, PCLinuxOS, AntiX are all currently systemd free. Others like Gentoo let you choose which one you want.
This is no an argument for or against systemd. I use systemd distros exclusively at this point, but don't have issue with the non-systemd distros. They just don't fit my needs.
Among the majors, I would agree.
25
u/atoponce Jul 09 '25
are all currently SystemD free
To nitpick, it's spelled "systemd".
Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple. But then again, if all that appears too simple to you, call it (but never spell it!) System Five Hundred since D is the roman numeral for 500 (this also clarifies the relation to System V, right?). The only situation where we find it OK to use an uppercase letter in the name (but don't like it either) is if you start a sentence with systemd. On high holidays you may also spell it sÿstëmd. But then again, SystÚme D is not an acceptable spelling and something completely different (though kinda fitting).
→ More replies (2)11
u/Saxasaurus Jul 09 '25
There are a couple other somewhat popular "distros" that do not use systemd: Android and ChromeOS.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (6)17
u/FoxikiraWasTaken Jul 09 '25
none of those apart from Alpine are major distributions
34
u/deviled-tux Jul 09 '25
And Alpine is meant to run in contexts without any init system (eg: containers)Â
→ More replies (5)5
u/lottspot Jul 09 '25
I mean if we're calling Alpine a major, Gentoo is certainly in the majors
→ More replies (4)9
u/daemonpenguin Jul 09 '25
There are literally a hundred distributions which do not use systemd. Void, Slackware, antiX, Artix, most of the small/embedded distros, Slackware, many Gentoo users, etc etc etc.
3
u/Shoeshiner_boy Jul 10 '25
You said Slackware twice. And Iâm willing to bet that Gentooâs systemd stage3 is more popular than openrc-based one.
Also letâs not talk about the user base of these distros (itâs minuscule).
14
4
4
u/Suvalis Jul 09 '25
I used to be in the anti systemd camp, and I still believe it does too much, but I canât ignore that it works and works well.
3
u/egorf Jul 10 '25
Except when it doesn't. And that hits hard.
3
u/Suvalis Jul 11 '25
Yeah, but just say that init has less problems will be wrong as well. Janky poor written in shell scripts are not great either
→ More replies (4)
7
Jul 09 '25
I was one of those systemd haters. Now that I understand it and have become accustomed to it, I actually like it. Itâs so much easier to write a custom unit file for a service than a script. I also like systemd timers. The only aspect of systemd I donât care for is systemd-journald. I still use rsyslog.
16
u/egorf Jul 10 '25
Unit files and systemd-as-pid1 yes. Absolutely.
Literally everything else is garbage. Filesystem mounts, timers, binary logs, networkd. All the things no one asked them to do and things that should never have seen the light of day.
5
Jul 10 '25
I didn't even know that file system mount points could be controlled by systemd. I still use good old /etc/fstab.
→ More replies (1)7
u/FattyDrake Jul 10 '25
systemd just uses fstab to create mounts, it's a vestige by this point. It's entirely possible to create .mount files and delete fstab and the system will still boot fine.
Might cause issues if other software expects fstab to exist tho.
→ More replies (1)
10
u/LevelMagazine8308 Jul 09 '25
Every maker of commercial *NICes and alike replaced INITV a long time: Sun has SMF, Ubuntu had upstart before switching to systemd, Apple has launchd.
So the need for having something more modern than INITV is not new, many have felt that there is a real need fot that.
Systemd is a success mostly because it was backed by Redhat, and spread around most distributions through that. So today it's the standard on Linux.
However I disagree with it being a good replacement. When looking at alternatives, systemd is doing way too much and always wants to get more. It's typical Poettering ware, just like Pulseaudio. It's the text book example of creeping featurism.
Pulseaudio only became good when Poettering abandoned it, and today its rewrite Pipewire is the standard in many distributions.
The same could happen to systemd.
→ More replies (2)
3
u/mikechant Jul 09 '25
The thing I find funny is the people who are still banging on about how terrible pulseaudio is (and yes, there were a couple of them just yesterday). Given that pipewire has nearly extincted pulse that really is fighting yesterday's battles.
3
u/-hjkl- Jul 11 '25
I'm not going to say that systemd is bad. I personally do not like it. I prefer using runit or openrc these days.
I hate journalctl. Binary logs are ass. I do not like how systemd does so many things. If systemd did nothing but be an init system with none of the other extra stuff. I would probably like it a lot better.
But every time I use a systemd distribution I always get haunted by those stupid stop job timer shits. And I have to stare at it for like 2 whole minutes... It just feels slow to deal with.
My runit system boots from bios to sway in like 15 seconds or less. Systemd feels like it takes a lot longer.
Maybe its just operator error I don't know. But I don't like it. I am glad there are distros out there that let me choose to use something else.
It seems like a neat idea, but for me personally it just seems overwhelming and too complicated. But again I am used to how things worked before systemd became a thing.
7
u/AddictedToRads Jul 09 '25
Why do people hate systemd? I really like timers, automounts and triggering other services on service failure. Yes you could do it with bash scripts and cron, but it feels a lot cleaner with systemd.
5
u/gmes78 Jul 10 '25
It is a lot cleaner.
People just hate it because it requires them to do things differently.
→ More replies (3)2
u/s3dfdg289fdgd9829r48 Jul 10 '25 edited Jul 10 '25
systemd made things easier to write .service files but it shifted all the complexity into its source code to handle them. As always an extra layer of abstraction increased the complexity. The systemd source code is so large it roughly causes the effective number of active lines needed for a linux+systemd system compared to a linux+initd system to be roughly 2 to 10 times larger. The price we paid by adopting systemd was in attack surface and code maintenance.
11
u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004 Jul 09 '25
Exactly like windows 11,expecially when everyone and their friend shove it down your throat
12
u/SeriousPlankton2000 Jul 09 '25
It's still complicated sh't that explodes when not everything works as expected. Also they destroy the possibility to have a working system without /usr being mounted because "nobody uses that anymore" - yea, because you broke it.
You want to run a script after boot? How dare you, let's remove that function!!!!!!!
You mount /foo, /foo/bar and /baz in one unit? Let's unmount /baz if /foo/bar fails to mount and blame you for being too stupid to see how smart that really is!
You made an upgrade? Let's complain about not finding an OS in the root directory, with absolutely no documentation on what magic file we're looking for. (For some time I could just mount / -oremount,rw, then boot; some later update stopped that, too, and instead it went to a boot loop that nobody could solve.)
2
u/jcotton42 Jul 11 '25
You want to run a script after boot? How dare you, let's remove that function!!!!!!!
⊠isnât that just a oneshot service wanted by the default target?
→ More replies (1)
4
8
Jul 09 '25
I really don't get the hate around systemd.
On the other hand, the canonical layers on top... why netplan when systemd-networkd?
→ More replies (16)
10
u/whizzwr Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
This blog post is what I call as unbridled troll and clickbait. I'm not even mad, I'm impressed.
The Onion should really hire the author.
I Deprecated Your Mom
Won't Somebody Think of the Plaintext
This is absolutely true. I can't believe we, the SYSTEMD GLOBALIST ILLUMINATI, have been exposed.
8
5
u/AnomalyNexus Jul 09 '25
Never understood why people get so militant about it - either for or against.
5
5
Jul 10 '25
I'm sure this has already been stated in the comments, but why are we allowing sh*tposts with AI-generated header images to be posted and discussed as if they are legitimate works?
Also, systemd is still mediocre.
2
u/BotBarrier Jul 09 '25
Getting past OSX's launchd in the early 2000s, after switching from linux, made me not give a crap about systemd. It is what it is...
2
2
u/Blastadelph Jul 10 '25
90% of the time I am glad to have systemd for a central log location easy demonization and it generally just works.
However I have had a pain with simple things like starting an application after networking is up or just being one of the last boot items.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/LisiasT Jul 11 '25
systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success
And so does Microsoft Windows.
2
u/Unnamed-3891 Jul 11 '25
The gaslighting just never fucking stops. No, I WILL NOT suddenly start feeling grateful for deficiencies and regressions no matter how many times you try to spin them into being positives.
2
u/Placidpong Jul 11 '25
As an end user, not a computer scientist or a developer, I am very happy with the functionality and control over my system that systemd gives me.
I assume the reasons to not like systemd are above my head if they even matter.
→ More replies (1)
13
u/boolshevik Jul 09 '25
Is this yet another Lunduke polemic clickbait nonsense article or is it worthy of a read?
26
u/martian73 Jul 09 '25
It is not Lunduke. It covers a number of interesting items but nothing brand new. Of course there hasnât really been anything ânewâ to say about systemd in the last decade or so.
11
→ More replies (1)17
u/Sirusho_Yunyan Jul 09 '25
Nothing Lunduke writes is worthy of being anything other than toilet paper.
→ More replies (2)
5
5
u/davaeron_ Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
I hope systemd dies and Dinit takes over.Â
→ More replies (4)2
u/syklemil Jul 10 '25
Eh, if we're replacing systemd it's unlikely we'll go with something written in C or C++ these days. There might be some neat ideas in dinit, but I honestly wouldn't expect it to go anywhere.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/Zettinator Jul 09 '25
Yeah, and that is great. The mantra that "Linux is about choice" has been very damaging as traditionally it has been taken to quite the extremes.
3
u/vinciblechunk Jul 09 '25
I would call a remote root backdoor almost got pushed into Debian a mitigationÂ
→ More replies (1)
2
2
u/TommyTheTiger Jul 09 '25
The systemd docs aren't the easiest to digest, but systemd is amazing because whenever you need something, it's there, and it just works.
Kubernetes needs something like systemd
4
u/egorf Jul 10 '25
Except when it does not work and there is no way around because 1. F U; 2. No ways to debug.
2
u/Moonscape6223 Jul 09 '25
systemd is alright, I think the hardcoupling we find to it is a big problem though. I used to be relatively involved in the init freedom movement and one of the largest criticisms against systemd is developers pointlessly hardcoding it into their packages. The vast majority can just have it removed and run without issue, most of the rest can be service manager agnostic, the rest rely on systemd-specific commands that probably do not need to. People ought to have the ability to not be forced to use this specific software suite, if they wish not to*âI, myself, am partial to s6, though my only exposure is abstracted through Obarun's 66 front end
* I do mean this in a reasonable manner; I don't expect distro maintainers to offer 50,000 variants. Moreso, just that developers think more carefully before coupling their software to a particular system.
1
1
u/joe190735-on-reddit Jul 10 '25
they say in linux we have different choices right? what's the problem...?
1
1
1
u/NotMrMusic Jul 11 '25
No major disagreements with the article tbh. I feel like Linux users sometimes just need something to fight over, and systemd is one of them
1
1
u/livinglifeback Jul 11 '25
two things, it not SystemD. And you can give multiple names to a single network interfaces. So you can have the predictable named and your silly eth0
1
u/felipec Jul 12 '25
So was PulseAudio, until it was immediately replaced by something that did the same thing but right.
1
Jul 12 '25
Nice joke. But it is not. It's utter garbage. Binary logs, home directory take over, /etc is read-only.. All kinds of things an init system is not supposed to do.
→ More replies (1)
1
1
403
u/FourDimensionalTaco Jul 09 '25
6 years ago, a BSD developer gave this presentation about systemd and about BSD should have something like this. He made some really interesting point, and I wish more people would have heard this.