I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/systemd/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus systemd Linux.
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.
Unrelated but how do people feel about the ai images when used for something like this.
The font is very telling for being DallE
Personally I think it's fallen out of fashion. For my blog I'd either use a meme or other dump picture for each post. When generated images first came out I used a few for blog posts, it was new and interesting and said "I'm interested in technology and like playing around with new things".
Nowadays I'm back on the meme pics. I feel now it's so much easier to generate images, it more says "I want to look professional but also spend no money and have no standards".
People would be less mad if you straight up used a stock image with a watermark so I don't understand why people go out of their way to use AI when they know people will comment on it and it will detract from the point of the article.
Also, using AI in the thumbnail makes people automatically assume you're using AI in the text as well. And if you're not doing that, why would you lessen the perceived value of your writing by making it seem like you are?
It just seems pointless and actively harms your actual goals because people will get hung up on the fact that you used AI and ignore your actual valid points. Especially when you're writing about open source projects when most people interested in open source are vehemently anti-AI, it really just shows you don't know your target audience.
I strong hate these imagines with a piss tint. I can't stand them. And the text has these tiny AI-flavoured imperfections too.
I think it strongly detracts from the post. I basically skipped right to the comments without clicking the link because I'm assuming it's AI slop, and I'm hoping the comments are interesting.
I only read the blog because of the thumbnail.
The piss stain colour palette confirms it.
Clocked it right away. I hate it 100% of the time.
Also that leftmost card hovering behind the hand
I hated it and still do because for a period of years every weird, difficult to find issue on a bunch of servers was caused by systemd. It may be fine now, but I switched to Devuan and have had incredible stability. Poettering's response to security issues was also terrible and honestly the dude seems like a real piece of shit.
I've never used anything but systemd. I feel fine about it, but I think I'd feel the same way about not using it.
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.
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.
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
It's refreshing to read to someone that actually says "I was so wrong"
I was wrong also with systemd, I hated it mainly because I already knew init.d, where files are, where configs where etc. Some years later hate is gone, I'm not a power user, but I just now know how to handle my things with systemd and all is good.
Void Linux doesn't use systemd.
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.conf or 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'd say the main bad part of systemd is how it's used and now expected everywhere.
If you search for some Linux guides or install something complicated or whatnot, they always expect you to have systemd. Otherwise, you're on your own figuring how things work on your system.
This shouldn't really happen. Otherwise, yes, it's great, it integrates neatly, and is least pain to use.
I suggest Gentoo.
Great documentation, systemd optional.
Lol, this is borderline evil advice
But yeah, it works!
In my opnion, systemd is like core-utils at this point.
It's so integrated into most things and the default so many places, that most guides assume you have it.
There is no authority delegating responsibilities of writing tutorials for Linux. It is the responsibility of nobody and everybody. If you can't find one for your problem, write it yourself when you have figured it out.
I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.
Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.
I've been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.
The thing I don't like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the "do one thing, do it well" Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.
My issues with systemd is that it isn't an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it's slow and doesn't seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).
Recently I've been using dinit on a system, and I'm pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I'm running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.
Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?
Systemd is modular not monolithic. Distros choose which parts of system d to implement and it just happens to be most of it since its really good at what it does.
It is not modular. This is a lie Poettering keeps pushing to defend building a huge edifice of interdependent systems.
Look at the effort required to factor out logind. It can't just be used in it's own; it has a hard dependency on systemd and needs code changes to decouple.
I will repeat that journald is really bad at what it does, and further assert that you can not run systemd without journald, or vice versa. That you can not run systemd without getting timed job control. Even if you chose not to use it, it's in there. And you can not get time job control without the init part. In most unix systems, init and cron are utterly decoupled and can be individually swapped with other systems.
Systemd is not modular if you can't swap parts out for other software. Systemd's modularity is a bald-faced lie.
The one exceptions are homed and resolvd, which are relatively new and were addedlong after systemd came under fire for being monolithic. And, ironically, they're the components most distributions don't use by default.
Systemd boot, Systemd network and elogind I'm pretty sure can be decoupled. There's 69 modules so I'm not entirely sure about all of them just the ones ive encountered.
I know logind can't easily be, because I ran Artix for a while and they were using a decoupled version of it, and there was a big discussion about swapping it for something else because it was so hard to maintain.
You cannot even decouple SystemD from Glibc, never mind separating the various components from each other. It is a bunch of processes but it is designed as a monolith.
What do you mean by modular though? I assume there's serious coupling amongst systemd modules that make "modularity" just theoretical
Its like 70 different files and not all are required. You can swap out parts of systemd like run a different init system.
Sure but I wouldn't say something is modular just because some things are modules. LIke yeah you can swap out networkd, but how about journald?
I would. There are a lot of modules only a few have hard systemd dependencies
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.
I'm over here still using OpenRC. Mostly because I want to. Some servers I run have systemd on them. systemd is generally nice. OpenRC has finally gained the ability to run user services, which is also very nice.
dinit also has the ability to run user services, FWIW.
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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).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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