Because people here accuse Poettering of being an asshole: I’ve read some of his blogposts and seen some talks of his and him doing Q&A: He answered professionally, did his best to answer truthfully, did acknowledge when he didn’t know something. No rants, no opining on things he didn’t know about, no taking questions in bad faith.
As far as I can tell all the people declaring him some kind of asshole are full of shit.
He answered professionally
Until you ask him about security and CVEs advisories…
Source?
I don’t appreciate the attitude and arrogance of the guy behind systemd because he actually believes what he produces can replace everything that already “just works”. He wants to push out systemd-homed because “why not”. He wants to replace grub. He wants to replace a myriad of things that just flat out don’t need to get replaced. autofs, cron, you name it! That kind of thinking and one-size-fits-all mentality is backwards and does not benefit the community in any way. All it does is stuff everything into one bin and so long as influencers like this guy continue to restrict what works or doesn’t work according to their own work, the community and its users will not be able to freely develop FOSS. Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency on systemd and so when you’re trying to use something like Gentoo, it becomes very difficult to get that done and hacks have to made in order to get it working. FOSS shouldn’t work like that. He’ll keep stripping away legit projects from major distros until IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good. Sorry if I can’t rejoice in the woah whiplash.
The is the first time I’ve ever heard someone accusing grub of „just working“
Grub is working perfectly fine.
If it breaks it is, in my experience as a grub user for over 20 years and as a guy working in server hosting for 15 years, either because of failing HDD/SSD or because of user error. People don’t read when the updater tells them that running “grub-install” is needed (or they perform it on the wrong drive/partition) and then blame grub when it fails on the next boot.
The crappy bootloader that comes with systemd very often, in my experience, fails to register that a new Kernel was installed and boots the old one (or fails to boot if the package manager removed the old Kernel).
Oh and GRUB has so many useful features, like booting a ISO image. GRUB is a piece of programmer art!
He wants to replace grub.
I hope so!
All it does is stuff everything into one bin
Well, it is not one bin. There is no monolithic systemd bin that does everything. There are a lot of separate bin files for all the different tasks. Well and if you don’t want to use timers, then don’t and just use cron instead. If you don’t want to use journald, then just don’t and use rsyslog or whatever you want. Don’t need systemd-homed? Well, then don’t use it. You want to configure your network with something else then systemd-networkd? Great, do it if you want.
The Poettering Army will not come and force you to enable all the options 😜
Except, they are. Pottering is the front man who does the dirty work for IBM and Microsoft to take over Linux by forcing distros to adopt systemd.
Those of us old enough to remember the “vote” that resulted in Debian going to Systemd remember it was almost at gunpoint.
Death to systemd, long live FOSS culture
I am not seeing how IBM and/or Microsoft are winning anything here or how systemd enables them to take over Linux. But maybe I am missing something.
Last time I checked (60 seconds ago) systemd was using FOSS licences for all it’s code. So it seems to be living the FOSS culture, or not?
I am always open to learn and correct my view on things under new information, so if you can provide them I am open to read it.
Ah but you see, you have to understand the FOSS community a little more than just “using a license that FSF and OSI endorsed”.
In terms of inter-project politics, systemd is almost wholly owned by IBM. They can override any will they want, they can change anything they want, all while fucking the community over. In short, IBM, using systemd as a massive octopus growing it’s tentacles all over mainstream Linux distros, is gaining considerable weight to pull in the Linux world.
They can essentially dictate matters to everyone they want, because you don’t want your distro to stop being supported, do you? And now, another IBM-majority project, GNOME, is almost dependent on systemd (despite the very good word of both gnome and systemd that this wouldn’t happen, IT HAS) and KDE is also being slowly pulled in that direction, with DrKonqi becoming systemd only in it’s latest update.
Essentially, we are handing over 30 years of work in FOSS to IBM, literally the caricature of evil tech company, and now they control the mainstream and can dictate their will.
Allow me to remind you that this same IBM almost immediately after taking over RedHat, started closing down the source sharing of RHEL, which is it’s own whole thing so I digress.
Let my final word be this, R.M.S as much of a problematic piece of shit he is, correctly predicted we being fucked over by DRM and subscription services 20 years ago and was ridiculed for it.
Don’t you think it’s time to take a fucking hint? You don’t have to be an anarchist to see where this is going.
So, I don’t like the guy either, but for a little devil’s advocacy:
The stuff that already “just works” was developed during a very different era in terms of computing power, tasking of the computers which were running the systems, etc. Nobody (serious, and he is serious) develops something different because “why not?” they, at least from their perspective, feel that they are improving on the status quo, at least for the use cases they are considering.
one-size-fits-all mentality is
being decided by the distro maintainers, not the developers. Sure, developers promote their product, but if a distro thinks that multiple flavors are a better path, they distribute multiple flavors. It’s not like the systemd developers are filling billion dollar war chests with profit because they’re using strong-arm tactics to coerce distro maintainers to adopt their products.
stuff everything into one bin
When one bin serves the purpose, it’s a lot easier to maintain, modernize, security harden, etc. than ten bins.
the community and its users will
notalways be able to freely develop FOSS.Fork it and your loyal users will follow.
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
FOSS shouldn’t work like that.
FOSS, by its very nature, should be expected to work all the ways. If a particular way can’t get enough developer traction, it stagnates but never really dies, not until the ecosystem it is dependent upon can no longer find hardware to run on and users willing to run it.
IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good.
I am very glad that I walked away from CentOS about 8 years back, its proximity to Red Hat never made me happy. I have been trying to walk away from Canonical (toward Debian) for about 3 years now, but it still has some hooks that keep our professional team happier than Debian. If the unhappy ever outweighs the happy, we’ll execute the move.
Sorry if I can’t rejoice
Never asked you to. End of devil’s advocacy. I still don’t like the guy, but I never really interact with him. I do interact with his products and the alternatives, and in my use cases the products speak for themselves. There’s nothing about systemd that makes me dig around for systemd free alternatives - they are out there, but for my use cases I don’t care. YMMV.
I use it because I’m frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.
I’m a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the “unused ram is wasted ram” phrase that has caught on with people.
I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and…require you basically to be a developer to use them.
I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can’t imagine how fucked I’d be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.
Unused memory IS wasted memory and my Linux machines, AFAICR, always have buffered everything possible since twenty years ago, it’s not a systemd thing. It also speeds up things, why the long face?
90mb ram
If you’re in a system where 256mb of RAM is the limit, sure - go for the RAM efficient OS options, they’re out there.
Can you even buy less than 2GB of RAM in a desktop system anymore? Even the Raspberry Pi 5 starts at 2GB (and, yes, the older models have less, but I did say desktop system, implying: reasonable desktop performance.) Maybe if you feel the need to use a RasPi 3 as a desktop for something then you should dig around for one of your more efficient OS configurations, but I’ll note… back when RasPi 3 was the new model, Raspbian came default without systemd, but offered a systemd option. The systemd option booted to a desktop (such as it was) in about 1/3 the time.
So you just like having ram doing nothing? Unused ram is wasted ram. Distros cache a lot in ram because they can. I mean why hav RAM is you just want to stare at it and say ohh look at all the free RAM.
Even a system that uses 90mb of ram on a cold boot will accumulate gigs of stuff in cache if you’re using it. (assuming it has the memory for it) That isn’t what people have a problem with though.
Maybe this is an incorrect use of language on my part, but I feel like I’m not the only person who means “memory actively being used by a process” when referring to memory usage. I understand the whole linux ate my ram thing. That just isn’t what I or what I assume a lot of people mean when talking about this.
When I boot up my system, pull up my terminal, run htop, and see 800-1200mb being used just by processes (not in buffer, not in cache), that doesn’t raise any flags or anything, but I also know that some people have gotten their systems so streamlined they use 10x less than that. That’s all memory that could be used by other things. That could be the difference between a low memory system running a web browser or not. Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system. There are endless possibilities.
Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system.
One reality of the world is: the developers choose what hardware/OS configurations they target. If the makers of your game don’t target your RAM efficient system, you’re outta luck. Developers make their choices for their own reasons, but even with the ever-growing FOSS communities, the majority of developers work for a paycheck, that paycheck comes from profitable businesses and those businesses have very strong influence on what the developers work toward. The businesses only exist because they are profitable… FOSS may not be bound by those realities, but it lives in a world dominated by them.
I’ve never used any other init system since I’m relatively new to Linux (8 years of use). So, systemd is all I know. I don’t mind it, but I have this one major issue with it. That “stop job for UID 1000…” Or whatever it says. It’s hands down the most annoying thing I have ever experienced in Linux. Making me wait for 3 minutes sometimes is just insane. I know I can go in and make it wait for 5 seconds
/etc/systemd/system.confor whatever, but why? Also, another one usually pops up.Other than that, I really like how I can make timers. I like how I can make scripts run on boot, logout or login. And I like how I can make an app a background service that can auto start if they ever crashed. Maybe all of this can be done with other init systems? I wouldn’t know, but I like these in systemd
I decided to finally lean into using systemd more while i’ve been using NixOS, since the OS already relies heavily on it anyway. Created targets for my window managers, starting all my programs with services instead of autostart scripts, etc. And it worked fine for the most part, except for some reason, in qtile the systray widget refuses to load the nm-applet when it’s started through systemd. Waybar does not have this problem. I can’t help notice that systemd is not just a little slower, which isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it also tends to hang more often when shutting down, which is a bit annoying and reminds me of windows lol. Before NixOS i used Void, and while i never really cared too much about what init system i’m running, i can’t help but really appreciate runit for being so simple and fast. I’m thinking of moving back to Void but using the Nix package manager on top. I recently found a solution to the nix driver problem when using it on other distros, so now i should be able to combine the best of both worlds.
I still doesn’t like it…
I totally agree.
I hate to admit I didn’t want anything to do with systemd because it took me forever to get somewhat familiar with some other mainstream init systems.
Then, I didn’t care for a while until I developed software that had to keep running using some sort of init system. The obvious choice was whatever the default I had (systemd) and I fell in love with the convenience of systemd (templates, timers, …). I started shipping sample systemd with the things I provide & yes, you are on your own if you use something else.
Though I see Systemd as an improvement, I still do not like it.
The Chimera Linux FAQ captures my thoughts quite well:
https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-on-systemd
