Having sniffed around the Linux community for years, I feel like whatever flaws SystemD has as a computer program are of tertiary importance when faced with the thing that really matters:
- The developer of SystemD was mildly rude to some community members that one time. That means he is two hitlers and a stalin wearing a trenchcoat and everything he makes must be utter garbage.
Yeah they seem to think he “took over” the Linux init process all by himself. Like distro maintainers aren’t the ones who made the decision to move to systemd based on technical merits (presumably).
I think people like that view Linux as some kind of fiefdom rather than a community of individuals.
It is on technical merits as you don’t see maintainers complaining about systemd, only users who just don’t like it for number of randomly picked reasons.
I interacted with him briefly in a forum but didn’t realize who he was until later. He had that a bit of that programmer awkwardness going, but also having such a vocal abd sustained backlash against a major project you’ve been working on for years has to affect the poor dude pretty heavily.
deleted by creator
Am not sure about “giant mess” but indeed it has a lot of moving parts. All that said,
systemdis solving tangible problems which is why you will almost never see maintainers complain about it. It’s mostly Linux users which by definition oppose any change, Firefox 4 → Firefox 5, Gnome2 → Gnome3, SysV → systemddeleted by creator
If there were better options then they would have been adopted.
this is a Just World fallacy, assuming the best thing will always be adopted and therefore everything not adopted is worse than [current thing], when it is entirely possible that there are in fact better options
But in this case, there were extensive technical talks over multiple distributions.
Debian is probably the best example of how the options were pitted against each other with systemd then winning on its merits.
This is not a Just World fallacy because I’m not talking about justice or people getting what they deserve. My assumption is that OS developers are competent. Until I see otherwise I’ll maintain that assumption.
deleted by creator
If you really want the short version:
Systemd was half baked literally when it came out and figuratively as an idea, so much so that there’s already a replacement for it in the works.
A longer version:
Systemd replaced the init script style of boot and process management, which had been in place for decades. init scripts were so simple they could be understood just by looking at the name: the computer is Initialized by Scripts. Systemd was much more complex and allowed many more tools to interact with the different parts of the computer, but people had to learn these tools. Previously all a person had to understand to deal with the computer was how to edit a text file and what various commands and programs did. After systemd a person has to understand how to use the dozens of invocations of systemctl and it’s variants and if they are dealing with a problem, —you know, the only reason a person would ever be dealing with initializing services— they gotta know what’s going on with the text files that systemd uses to run different commands and programs.
So a person who already understood what was going on might rightly say “hey, this systemd thing is just the same shit with different file locations and more to learn”.
People complain about the creator and maintainer of systemd, lennart poettering . Poettering is also the person behind pulseaudio, an powerful but complex audio management daemon in Linux whose name you only recognize because it’s caused you no end of trouble. Pulseaudio was also replaced relatively quickly by pipewire.
The argument could be made (and probably has) that poetterings work is indicative of the problems with foss developers working as employees of major companies with their job responsibilities inclusive of their foss projects. The developer in that situation has an incentive to make big sweeping changes, they’re being paid for it after all, instead of being more careful and measured.
When every big foss maintainer is trying to find a way to justify being paid for it, their projects are never done.
At least poettering is working for Microsoft, ruining windows now…
E: oh my god I forgot about the binary log files! So before (and now), the universal format for log files was plain text. You know, because it’s a log that’s text. Systemd uses binary log files that need a special tool to open and parse. So if you want to look through them on a computer without that tool you’re kinda screwed. Now systemd isn’t the only software package with binary log files, but many people have made the very persuasive argument that it’s not a trait to copy.
E2: actually spelled the man’s name right. Thanks @floofloof@lemmy.ca !
Pulseaudio was also replaced relatively quickly by pipewire.
I really wouldn’t say that… PulseAudio has been around since like 2004, and PipeWire’s initial release was in 2017 (13 years later). I don’t think PulseAudio was incorporated into most distros by default until like 2007 or so, but that’s still 10 years before PipeWire was even released. PipeWire is only recently becoming the default in popular distros. We’ve had to deal with Pulse for a long time.
