this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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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:
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)
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.
Arguably, Systemd does exactly that: orchestrate the parallel starting of services, and do it well.
The problem with init.d and sys.v is they were not designed for multi-core systems where multiple services can start at once, and had no concept of which service depended on which, other than a lineal "this before that". Over the years, they got extended with very dirty hacks and tons of support functions that were not consistent between distributions, and still barely functional.
Systemd cleaned all of that up, added parallel starting taking into account service dependencies, which meant adding an enhanced journaling system to pull status responses from multiple services at once, same for pulling device updates, and security and isolation configs.
It's really the minimum that can be done (well) for a parallel start system.
One of my biggest problems with critics of systemd is that a lot of the same people who make that second point also argue against wayland adoption when xorg does the exact same thing as systemd. It makes me feel like they're just grumpy stubborn old Linux nerds from the 90s who just hate anything that's not what they learned Linux with.
Which is sad, because honestly I think it's kind of not great that an unnecessarily massive project has gained such an overwhelming share of users when the vast majority of those users don't need or use most of what it does. Yeah, the init systems from before systemd sucked, but modern alternatives like runit or openrc work really well. Unfortunately they get poorly supported because everyone just assumes you have systemd. I don't like the lack of diversity. I think it's a problem that any init system "won".