Is Systemd that bad afterall?

Nah, it's fine. Boot times are considerably faster than sys.v in most cases, and it has a huge amount of functionality. Most people I work with have adopted it and much prefer it to the old init.d and sys.v systems.

People's problem with systemd (and there are fewer people strongly against it than before) seem to break down into two groups:

1. They were happy with sys.v and didn't like change. Some were unhappy with how distros adopted it. (The debian wars in particular were really quite vicious)

2. It does too much. systemd is modular, but even so does break one of the core linux tenets - "do one thing well". Despite the modularity, it's easy to see it as monolithic.

But regardless of feelings, systemd has achieved what it set out to do and is the defacto choice for the vast majority of distros, and they adopted it because it's better. Nobody really cares if a user tries to make a point by not using it any more, they're just isolating themselves. The battle was fought and systemd won it.

systemd is a godsend when you need service control while getting actual work done, at scale.

there are legitimate things to criticize but in general the rants are incompetent preaching to the uninformed.

I do not think systemd is bad, I (and personal preference here) much prefer it over the older style of init systems.

Quite frankly, one of the things that has always irked me about a portion of the Linux community is that as far as I know, a strength and selling point of Linux has always been the freedom of choice. And yet, people start wars over your choices. For example, I know at least on r/Linux if you were to make a post saying that you liked Snaps over Flatpaks you'd get torn to shreds over it. Wouldn't matter what reasons you had either.

It is always something. Whether its about Arch vs other distros, Snaps vs Flatpak vs AppImage vs Traditional packaging, X11 vs Wayland, systemd vs Sys V/init.d, pulseaudio vs pipewire, etc.

I never understood why it mattered so much what someone ran on their own computer. Assuming they're the only one using it, what is the big deal if they choose to run OpenRC, X11, Snaps, and Alsa?

And I get a bad feeling the next one is going to be immutable distros vs non-immutable distros, but I guess we'll see.

systemd isn't bad at all. People simply don't understand that it is not "just an init service".

Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don't know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.

Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.

It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.

All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.

While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system... no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.

I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering's code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.

Just try to implement user session management on a non systemd distro...

Systemd is way better than others init system. I'm using Alpine Linux on my phone and I really wait for a Fedora/Arch like PMOS project (it's on the way)

Systemd (the collection of components present in a typical distro) is like many other large frameworks:

It can do a lot, has some good design ideas at its core, and is certainly useful to a lot of people.

But the implementation is opinionated and invasive, so if your needs don't happen to match what its author(s) envisioned, it can easily become more of a liability than a benefit. Making matters worse, it is buggy as hell.

I don't think it's helpful to think of the topic as "a rant". Criticisms of systemd are diverse, and at least some of them are founded in practical experience. Being dismissive of them only stirs up resentment and division.

Ok, so I have a very unique background in systemd. I worked at Red Hat supporting it basically as the primary support and I've worked with the developers of systemd at Red Hat directly. I no longer work there.

So first off, it's "systemd" all lower case. I don't care, but for some reason Lennart Pottering (creator) does.

systemd was a MASSIVE change. And Red Hat did a TERRIBLE job relaying it. To the point where I'm still trying to get my company to understand that it can NOT be treated like the old init systems. You can NOT just drop an init script in place and walk away and hope it works. Because a LOT of times it doesn't. Due to forks, switch users, etc.

systemd is NOT an init system. RHEL 5 and older had sysvinit as it's init systemd. RHEL 6 had UpStart as it's init system and looked exactly like sysvinit that no one even noticed. systemd again is NOT an init system. Init system is 1 part of systemd. systemd does a lot of cool things. It bundles applications together, it manages those applications and can restart them or kill children, it can do resource constraints, it separates out users from the system, and lots more.

Because it is not an init system there is a LOT LOT LOT of bad recommendations out on the internet where someone has X problem and person suggests Y and IT WORKS! ... except it doesn't REALLY work as far as systemd is concerned and you'll hit other issues or your application takes longer to start or stop and people just blame systemd.

It is systemd's fault that it has done an ATROCIOUS job of helping people adapt. It's a great example of RTFM. systemd's man pages are INCREDIBLE and extensive, but when you drop so much knowledge it becomes more difficult to find what you want/need. systemd.index and systemd.directives are your best bet.

So systemd does a lot of amazing things that sysvinit never attempted to do. It's never attempted to explain anything it expects everyone just learn magically. it's INCREDIBLY complex, but once you understand it's basics you can more easily get an application running, but as soon as there's a problem it'll just break your brain.

To give you an example, sshd's old init script is like 250 lines of bash. systemd's unit file comparative is like 12. Because systemd handles a LOT of what you manually had to handle before. BUT to get to that 12 you literally have to learn EVERYTHING new.

There is no "is it good or bad" here really imo. It's a completely different fundamental design. Red Hat made it for themselves. Other distros picked it up. It can be argued that lots of folks followed Debian and Debian had a few Red Hat board members that were pushing it. Whether they pushed it of their own accord or because they were with Red Hat I don't have a clue.

What I can say is at my current company they're suffering from a LOT of systemd issues and they don't even realize it. I've been working with Red Hat to try to get Insights to alert people to the failures and we're making progress.

To see if you have issues just to start run the two following commands:

# systemctl list-units --failed
# systemd-cgls

If you have any units that are failed, investigate those. If you don't need them, disable them. As for the systemd-cgls this shows HOW systemd is grouping things. ANY application that runs as a service (or daemon or application or runs in the background or however you wanna say it) should be under system.slice. ONLY humans logging into the system (meat bags NOT applications switching to users) should be in user.slice. A LOT of times what happens is an old init script is dropped in place, they start it, it has a switch user and systemd assumes it's a user and puts it into user.slice. systemd does NOT treat anything in user.slice the same as in system.slice and this WILL eventually cause problems.

So again, is it good or bad? Eh. It does a lot of cool things, but they did a MASSIVE disservice to ALL of us by just expecting to relearn absolutely EVERYTHING.

It's a massive question, and I think quite a lot of the argument comes from the fact that it depends what direction you're answering it from.

As a user, do I like being able to just systemctl enable --now whatever.service , and have a nice overview of 'how's my computer' in systemctl status ? Yes, that's a big step up from symlinking run levels and other nonsense, much easier.

As an administrator, do I like having services, mounts and timers all managed in one way? Yes, that is very nice - can do more with less, and have to spend less time hunting for where things are configured. Do I think that the configuration files for these are a fucking mess of 'just keep adding new features in' and the override system is lunacy? Also yes.

As a developer trying to do post-mortem debugging, who just wants all the logs in front of him for some server that's gone wrong somehow, which I often have to request via an insane daisy-chain of emails and 'Salesforce nonsense that our tech support use' from our often fairly non-technical end users, on some server that I've no other access to? No, I do not find having logs spread between /var/log and journalctl (and various CloudFormation logs in a web console) makes my life easier. I would be pleased if that got sorted out.

tl:dr; mostly an improvement, some caveats.

I am fine with it and personally make heavy use of it. On my Arch install, I use systemd-boot, systemd-timesyncd, neworkd, resolved and unified kernel images with ukify.

Roast me you systemd haters.

Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?

In my experience, the same arguments against systemd (not systemD) are still used. No matter how often they have been disproved or whether the problem has been fixed in the meantime. With many users I am sure that it is only about making the project systemd bad.

Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?

I would prefer it if there were no rants at all. No matter what the topic. Because that doesn't help in any way. It would make more sense to invest the energy in the projects in question or in alternative projects to improve them.

A lot of the people I see complaining about it are comparing to what was before it.

As someone who has only ever known systemd, I have no issues with it and, dare I say: I like it.

Complains against systemd are not about boot time. It is about overengineering and vendor lock-in.

We'd probably need to qualify this with "bad compared to what". I can't complain, as it does its job, and I've been able to tweak what I needed to. As I don't tinker with it every week, I keep a sticky note rolled up on my desktop, or I quickly use 'cheat systemd' to remember some key examples.

I was getting really long start up time earlier this year (like 19 mins before the desktop was fully responding) and after trying everything else I tried ditching BTRFS and reverting my /home drive back to ext4. Turns out BTRFS start and checks was killing my boot times. Now, as fast as anything.

The following have been my saviours though in identifying boot times: journalctl -b -p err systemd-analyze blame --user systemd-analyze blame

Speaking as someone who uses OpenRC on all my machines . . . no, systemd is not necessarily slow, and personally I don't care about the speed of my init system anyway. Thing is, systemd also has nothing that makes it more useful to me than OpenRC, so I have no incentive to change. Plus, I dislike the philosophy behind it, the bloat, and the obnoxious behaviour the project showed when interacting with others in its early days. I'm a splitter, not a lumper, and systemd's attempts to absorb All The Things strike me as rather . . . Windows-like.

So, in a technical sense I have no reason to believe that systemd is inferior to OpenRC + sysv, and it may be superior for some use cases which are not mine. I don't spend a lot of time ranting about it, and I see no point in trying to convince people not to use it if it fits their needs. But I still won't use it if I have another option.

I've been using Slackware for more than a decade, and all this systemd talk has me feeling like I dodged a bullet.

Fedora uses dracut as opposed to initramfs, so that's also a major difference.

As someone who recently started learning linux properly by setting up arch, systemd is nice. It does a lot of things that make life easier for me and it never gets in the way.

The Systemd init system and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. It has greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “just werks” distros, but it has destabilized GNU/Linux society, has made life unfulfilling, has subjected users to indignities, has led to widespread psychological suffering (in the BSD world to physical suffering as well) and has inflicted severe damage on the Unix world. The continued development of Systemd will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the Unix world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “just werks” distros.

The Systemd system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing users and many other Unix processes to engineered products and mere cogs in the Systemd machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying PID 1 so as to prevent it from depriving users of dignity and autonomy.

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

We therefore advocate a revolution against the Systemd system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the Systemd system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not distros but the init-system basis of the present GNU/Linux ecosystem.

Yes and yes.

Personally I always found systemd amazing, it brought logic and order in the init world.

Finally some consistent API and predictable behavior.

linux is also about choice, so it doesn't matter if something is bad for you. you can use a different alternative or even make/fork one.

If we are talking about desktops and servers then yes and yes.

However SystemD in an embedded system with tight process serialization needs, it's hell on earth.

I guess I'm in the camp if it doing too much. I prefer each program has its own script to run in a more isolated manner from anything else the system does so if one program locks up everything else on the system runs independent from the other software that has stopped responding to system calls.

I think it is one of those situations where everyone complains about what they use.

The reality is that system startup is insanely complicated due to the nature of software dependencies, and there will never be a perfect solution across multiple distros.

It's not THAT bad. It was THAT BAD remembering who invented and pushed it. You know, all these psh-sh-sh-sh-audio memes. People just do not want to:

1. Use software written by developer who didn't manage previous project to work properly.
2. Change anything if it just works (c)(r)(tm).

Currently systemd does its job well and right, despite on fact that systemd not so modular as you would expect. Event hardcore systemd haters now using it and happy. Including me :)

For someone coming from NeXTStep (BSD based), having worked with SCO, various BSD and mostly Linux for the last 20 years, the worst thing about systemd is documentation that's easily accessible/readable for people used to a traditional init system.

"How do I get it to do special use case X" was a basically unanswerable question when it got dragged into the mainstream (for reasons I can very well understand - the reasons for the dragging, that is, the bad docs, not so much).

Maybe that's improved in the mean time - I wouldn't know, I had to figure it out back then and now I know its lingo when searching and such.

As service manager systemd nice, but look all services:

systemd + systemd/journal + systemd/Timers
systemd-boot
systemd-creds
systemd-cryptenroll
systemd-firstboot
systemd-home
systemd-logind
systemd-networkd
systemd-nspawn
systemd-resolved
systemd-stub
systemd-sysusers
systemd-timesyncd

That's look as overkill. I use only systemd, journald, systemd-boot, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved and systemd-timesyncd, but that a lot systemd. Feel like system make monolith.

systemd-nspawn for example. Systems manager for containers. Seriously. Why than exists? I don't understand. Really, someone use that daemon?

SystemD is blamed for long boot times

That is and always was nonsense. Systemd shortens boot times by starting things in parallel. That's one of its key features.

There are some things to note about that:

Systemd only starts services in parallel when it isn't told otherwise by Before and/or After settings in the service files. This makes it pretty easy to make systemd slow by misconfiguring it. You can use the systemd-analyze program to see which services held up your boot.

Systemd has a very long default timeout (90 seconds) for starting or stopping a service. It's appropriate for the big, lumbering servers that systemd was probably designed for, but it might be wise to shorten the timeout on desktops, where a service taking more than 5 seconds to start is almost certainly broken. It's a setting in /etc/systemd/system.conf.

Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?

I'm an early adopter of systemd. I installed it on my Debian desktops pretty much as soon as it was available in Debian, and I later started moving servers to it as well. I had long been jealous of Windows NT's service manager, and systemd is exactly what I had hoped would come to Linux one day.

Yes, the rant you're talking about is old, and yes, systemd is better now than it was then, but not in the sense of what the rant was complaining about. The rant was already patent nonsense when it was written, which has given me a very dim view of the anti-systemd crowd.

Besides systemd proper, they also spent a lot of time ranting about the journal system, which redirects syslog entries into a set of binary log files. They complained that this would make logs impossible to read in emergencies. This isn't even close to being true—any emergency bootable Linux image worth its salt has a copy of journalctl on it—and the binary nature of systemd's logs has caused me serious problems on exactly zero occasions.

No, it's not bad.

tbh, I've always like Apple's launchd.

Getting a "control center" for your init, with user groups, modularity, memory limits and queryable status/control is great. (Sometime people forget how painful init scripts can be...)

The only problem I see is the tendency to cram everything into systemd.

No. The people with a raging hate boner for systemd are just a vocal minority in lots of online Linux spaces.

Most people either don't care or actively prefer it. Personally, I much prefer unit files to hacking away at init scripts or whatever the fuck Upstart was.

Permanently Deleted

I go crazy over boot times, systems is faster on every machine I’ve tried it on. The biggest difference I’ve seen is replacing grub, both systems-boot and car-boot seem to shave off a decent amount.

I'm honestly a big fan. Systemd-init has tons of options like run targets, sandbox options, users you want things to run as, etc. System-oomd has tons of qol stuff for desktop users to help with stutter and responsiveness. I am also kind of excited for UKI that systemd-boot is set to support.

As a guy that's been installing Linux since you had to compile network drivers and adjust the init scripts to use them; SystemD rocks.

1. Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?

No it's almost always been derived from people's behinds.

2. Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?

Yes.

Systemd is spectacular in many ways. Every modern OS has a process management system that can handle dependencies, schedule, manage restarts via policy and a lot more. Systemd is pretty sophisticated on that front. I've been able to get it to manage countless services in many environments with great success and few lines of code.

Yes. Yes it is. systemd isn't bad for boot times, but more for tying so many goddamn things to init, PID1, creating just about the best attack point one could ever ask for. Wayland not being ready can be solved by not using it for the time being. Just use X. Also, it's still called plymouth.

I make plymouth do the verbose mode because it's cool and hacker-y. Also I like when it says "failed" and I know what failed. For a few weeks I kept having to manually start firewalld and I never would have known otherwise, update seems to have fixed that though.

Tbf, I really only have experience with fedora and thus systemd, so, I like it but I "don't know what I'm missing" in a sense.

The traditional init systems suited me just fine, i saw no need to change them. If they were so bad, then they could've been fixed or replaced.

The migration to systemd felt forced. Debian surprised everyone with the change. Also systemd's development is/was backed by corporate Red Hat, their lead developer wasn't exactly loved either and is now working for Microsoft. Of course Canonical's Ubuntu adopted it as well. Overall feels like Windows' svchost.exe, hence people accusing it of vendor lock-in.

It's not just an init system, it's way waaay more. It's supposed to be modular, but good luck keeping only its PID1 in a distro that supports systemd. It breaks the "do one thing right" approach and, in practice, does take away choice which pisses me off.

I had been using Debian since Woody, but that make me change to Gentoo on my desktop which, to me, took the best path: they default to OpenRC but you're free to use systemd if you want to. That's choice. For servers i now prefer Slackware and the laptop runs Devuan whenever i boot it up.

To be fair systemd hasn't shown its ugly face in the Ubuntu VMs i'm forced to use at work.

YMMV. If you're happy with it, fine. This, of course, is only my opinion.

God damn I'd forgotten about Plymouth

Why do people keep insisting on capitalizing it wrong? It's systemd, all lowercase. Never has it been Systemd, and never has it been SystemD.

Systemd is tolerable but it still messes up my day. I'm moving away from it soon.

The idea was sound, the implementation not so much.

no

I can't like it bc its complicated.

I am on Guix works great with shepherd.

1. systemd hasn't become a better project built by better, smarter people to deliver a better set of features. It's still hot garbage.
2. it's okay to continue pointing out it's hot garbage, in the hopes we can go forward or back or just get on something better/else (same thing).

Boot times aren't really an issue and not really relevant to good vs bad. You should be able to rice each one for speed on your particular use case if you really want to.

Be wary of anything you get from RedHat. I use their stuff sometimes but ensure I can happily live without gnome, systemd, pipewire, wayland or whatever else they are generously gifting to us freeloaders.

Not against systemd (although it’s bad and needs replacing), just against pottering.

The problem of systemd is that it hasn't been just a replacement of init as they initially claimed, and now deny they ever did. Things like Mono, Gnome and systemd are bad for the ecosystem long term.

An init done by constructive people wouldn't be a problem at all.

It's spyware

It would be fine if it kept to system init rather than growing like a cancerous tumor.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hard_dependencies_on_systemd