Might be a strange argument to make in a community dedicated to a relatively niche language like Elixir, but with respect to the systemd discussion I would say for someone new to linux starting with a non-systemd distro is likely to be painful. Systemd now dominates the linux ecosystem by a wide margin and so troubleshooting is made easier due to more readily available resources. Also lots of packages out there will have systemd dependencies so a lot more work has to be done to make them work on non-systemd systems.
stevensonmt
D4no0
Absolutely agree.
I have zero idea what the other discussions about writing custom scripts are about, I barely understand how systemd works.
For veterans maybe going under the hood and customizing their things is a plus, however for me I just want it to work and to not break. I don’t want to spend entire days compiling my own drivers to run Arch.
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stevensonmt
dimitarvp
That’s not happening with Arch and its derivatives. Maybe you’re thinking of Gentoo.
You can have a ready desktop environment with Manjaro’s installer in literally 5 minutes. Done it several times. And you’re starting the installation from its live disk/USB so you can even screw around a bit to check if you like what you see before committing to installation.
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D4no0
Back in the 2016-17 I wanted to install Arch on a notebook, just to be informed that I have to compile my own wireless drivers.
Maybe the situation got much better, but I remember having a colleague that literally took almost a month to have a fully functional Arch installation.
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dimitarvp
Arch is more bare and is the spiritual successor of Slackware, the distro for absolute minimalistic maniacs.
I sympathize with their sentiment but I’ve taken the more sane approach: have a working OS in 5 minutes, install your stuff that you need (should take you one evening for a dev machine), then you can remove packages and customize to your heart’s content. Or don’t – I’m in this camp, I like Manjaro’s out of the box experience and only uninstalled Thunderbird.
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tj0
Totally understandable. There’s no reason anyone should need to be debugging an init system.
Elixir is super-stable, so a huge community isn’t necessary. That’s why I’m 50/50 on this statement.
On the one hand, everything you’ve said is true.
- Systemd is “standard”.
- Lots of systemd dependencies into everything now.
On the other hand, I feel this is like Stockholm syndrome.
- Why should anyone need to be debugging and troubleshooting this?
- On rebooting, there’s a random lottery of of potentially waiting 90 seconds for a service to shutdown.
- Updates declare the old way as broken, but ignore edge-cases…which actually break things for complex setups. At some point, Ubuntu changed from /etc/network/interfaces to netplan/systemd-network. I don’t remember the exact combo. What I do remember was that and bunch of networking was no longer possible. Like trying to setup bridged vlans.
- Updates just change things and don’t tell you. For instance, I have a router/dhcp running on a Raspberry Pi equivalent. I come back home two weeks ago and I have no internet. OK, the sdcard stopped working after 5 years and I had to re-install. So I downloaded the old Ubuntu 18.04 image, manually set the network ip address on eth0 so that I could ssh and setup dhcp. But I could no longer update to 20.04 or 22.04 because old-releases.ubuntu.com wouldn’t let me dist-upgrade. No problem, I’ll just install 22.04…set the ip…and…I can’t ssh into the machine. Wait, what? Systemd changed eth0 to end0. Like WTF #*#!?#? And with no release notes. So yah, maybe they have some technical reasons for the change, but this cost an idiot like me several hours for a 10 min re-install job.
- nohup mysteriously quit working after you log out…changing the original behaviour? you guessed it…systemd change. tmux and distros had to change how they handle it.
- Linus himself - “And yes, a large part of this may be that I no longer feel like I can
trust “init” to do the sane thing. You all presumably know why.” - And I’m sure I ran into even more things over the past decade.
I think the init part of systemd is ok/good, other than the 30 second reboot lottery, but I really don’t want them touching any other part of the system. It breaks too often. Especially after this openssh backdoor thru systemd thru xz.
For a decade, I’ve been pretty ambivalent about systemd. It improved some things and I liked some things. It was better than the Ubuntu attempt called “upstart”. But after 10 years of hoping stuff will quit breaking, screw it. I’m ok with spending a few hours to set something up once. I’m not ok with playing russian roulette with every upgrade. Until I switched off, I didn’t even realize, I just though, “Well, I guess that’s just the way it is.”
So, in conclusion, I’m perfectly content that Void uses runit.
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stevensonmt
I think you’re making a technical argument while I’m making a sociological one. My point was simply the state of the Linux ecosystem right now defaults to systemd and therefore a Linux novice will likely find things easier to manage. I understand the arguments against systemd from a technical standpoint. I’m glad there are alternatives. But swimming against the tide is intrinsically more challenging. That’s all I was saying.
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dimitarvp
Few points here:
-
I like having a single tool for these problems. We the techies disperse our energy way too much. IMO it’s time we got our sh1t together and started contributing to something and not always going our own way and making the 179th tool.
-
Having a mono-ecosystem in this case is beneficial because people will focus on fixing the errors you showed (though sometimes the maintainers are difficult; though I have no idea if that applies to
systemd, any observations?). -
I disagree it breaks too often, though I’ll admit my Linux usage is still not as much as it was some years ago. Still, I have a server for like 3 years now and there was literally only one problem ever, and wasn’t related to
systemd. It never did anything bad to me, and this server has seen no less than 11 different hard disks, 3 external keyboards, 2 mice, seen 3 replacements of internal drives (and planning to add a NVMe drive soon as well), and I might forget a few others. Not saying this is a classic usage but you’re kinda exaggerating from where I am standing. -
Finally, have you tried reporting those issues?
I fear for the world of free computing after Linus retires or dies, but Linus himself is far from perfect, f.ex. he often said security is not a priority for the kernel. He’s awesome but let’s not idolize him.
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tj0
I did recommend Debian/Ubuntu as a first distribution and both use systemd, so in principle we’re in agreement. I think there are a lot of reasons to choose a distribution (rolling vs point, package manager, size of repos, patches, foss stance, 3rd party support, etc), but wouldn’t include init system.
My point was that there are a lot of good reasons to not use Arch / Void / Alpine, but I wouldn’t disqualify any of them based on init system. At this point, I wouldn’t go out of my way to avoid or to use systemd.
My issue isn’t that it is a single tool or not. It is that the functionality that it replaces wasn’t there. Aka - setting up bonded+bridged+vlans or split-dns or whatever thing I was trying to do at the time. So the systemd ecosystem decided to replace something for whatever reason, but either it was adopted by distros too early or the functionality was never completed. Not sure which one.
These issues I ran into have been reported which is why I knew the workaround was not to use systemd-network or systemd-resolved. Not really sure about maintainers. It’s the internet so it all seems like drama. I haven’t met any of these people, so I wouldn’t know. All I can comment on is the technical aspects of the software.
How so? The amount of times an init system should break is zero.
In the past two weeks, for me, systemd has been involved in
- breaking networking on a router by renaming eth0
- an RCE/backdoor with ssh thru xz
So I count that as two breakages. Definitely, greater than zero. 
And then there’s all the times I’ve had to work around the non-init functionality in the past, which I doubt most people would run into. I’m guessing this is why you may feel that it is stable.
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