this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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    [–] BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 201 points 7 months ago (63 children)

    Someone please convince me why I should hate systemd because I still don't understand why all the hate exists.

    [–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 119 points 7 months ago (38 children)

    The idea as far as I can tell is that it's responsible for too many things and gives a massive point of failure.

    [–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 65 points 7 months ago (23 children)

    It's also "infectious" software. The way systemd positions itself on the system, it can make it more difficult for software to be written in an agnostic way. This isn't all software, and is often more of a complaint by lower level software, like desktop environments.
    https://catfox.life/2024/01/05/systemd-through-the-eyes-of-a-musl-distribution-maintainer/ This isn't a terrible summary of some of the aspects of it.

    Another aspect is that when it was first developed, the lead on the project was exceptionally hostile to anyone who didn't immediately agree that systemd definitely should take over most of the system, often criticizing people who pointed out bugs or questionable design decisions as being afraid of change or relics of the past.
    It's more of a social reason, but if people feel like the developer of a tool they're forced to use doesn't even respect their concerns, they're going to start rejecting the tool.

    [–] snake_case_lover@lemmy.world 35 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    What do you expect from an init system? It's like saying my cpu is infectious because my computer depends on it

    [–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 36 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    It's that it also decided to take over log management, event management, networking, DNS resolution, etc, etc.

    If it were just an init system that would be perfectly portable. People were able to write software that way with sysv for years.

    It's that in order to do certain low level tasks on a systemd system, you need to integrate with systemd, not just "be started by it". Now if a distro wants that piece of software, it needs to use systemd, and other pieces of software that want to be on that distro need to implement integration with systemd.

    A dependency isn't infectious, but a dependency you can't easily swap out is, particularly if it's positioned near the base of a dependency tree.

    Almost all of my software can run on x86 or arm without any issues beyond changing compiler targets. It's closer to how it's tricky to port software between Mac and Linux, or Linux and BSD. Targeting one platform entails significant, potentially prohibitive, effort to support another, despite them all being ostensibly compatible unix like systems.

    [–] Vilian@lemmy.ca 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    log management, event management, networking, DNS resolution

    and this is a bad thing? the distro can choose to not use it, but because every systemd distro uses it, it's a 1000x easier to implement it without needing to put a fuck tons of if-else's for every distro

    [–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    No, not everyone thinks it's a bad thing. It is, however, infectious, which is a reason some people don't like it.

    Knowing why people dislike something isn't the same as thinking it's the worst thing ever, and liking something doesn't mean you can't acknowledge it's defects.

    I think it's a net benefit, but that it would be better if they had limited the scope of the project a bit, rather than trying to put everything in the unit system.

    [–] Vilian@lemmy.ca -4 points 7 months ago

    and what's the problem?, it's not like everything is in the same binary or it's a monstrosity that can't be used without using every single feature, it's a project that just has different programs under the same project name, because no one wanted todo theoe programs

    [–] radiant_bloom@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago

    That’s why I personally try very hard to only rely on POSIX stuff, even when it’s massively inconvenient. The only thing I haven’t gotten around to replacing yet is GNU make.

    [–] nick@midwest.social -4 points 7 months ago

    Bro I’m with you on this but the systemd bots will just keep arguing with and downvoting you. Don’t bother.

    [–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    I think the init system is the best part of systemd. It is sooo easy to use. You don't have to write the same complicated shell script for your software like everyone else. You just give systemd the path to your executable and that's basically it. It does the rest and you don't have to worry about PID files or forking the actual software. Systemd basically runs it like you did while developing it.

    I think what people don't like are all the other parts of systemd that seem to be tightly coupled. I don't know if it is even possible to run just the systemd init without any other systemd package.

    The last time I got angry at systemd was when resolvd did some DNS shit I did not approve of.

    [–] hisbaan@lemm.ee 3 points 7 months ago

    I may be wrong but I believe that all of the systemd programs are decoupled. You can run the systemd init system without any resolved or networkd. They just happen to be used by default on a lot of distros.

    [–] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    I expect it to not run a stop job for 90 seconds by default every time I want to quickly shut down my laptop. /s

    [–] snake_case_lover@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    it doesn't run a job it waits for your jobs to end. You can set the default want time. Its the same thing on windows that asks programs to close before shutting down. If a critical application got stuck systemd has nothing to do with it

    [–] Deckweiss@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

    I know what it is. But it literally says "A stop job is running" and since english is not my first language, I had no good idea how to better express the technicalities of it in a short sentence.

    As for it having nothing to do with systemd:

    I am dual booting arch and artix, because I am currently in the middle of transitioning. I have the exact same packages on both installs (+ some extra openrc packages on artix).

    • About 30% of the shutdowns on arch do the stop job thing. It happens randomly without any changes being done by me between the sessions.

    • 0% of the shutdowns on artix take more than 5 seconds.

    I know that I can configure it. But why is 90 seconds a default? It is utterly unreasonable. You cite windows doing it, but compare it instead to mac, which has extremely fast powerups and shutdowns.

    And back to the technicalities, openrc doesn't say "a stop job is running", so who runs the stop job if not systemd?

    [–] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

    The question you should be asking is what's wrong with that job which is causing it to run for long enough that the timeout has to kill it.

    Systemd isn't the problem here, all it's doing is making it easy to find out what process is slowing down your shutdown, and making sure it doesn't stall forever

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