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:

1. 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)

2. 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.

systemd is a godsend when you need service control while getting actual work done, at scale.

there are legitimate things to criticize but in general the rants are incompetent preaching to the uninformed.

I do not think systemd is bad, I (and personal preference here) much prefer it over the older style of init systems.

Quite frankly, one of the things that has always irked me about a portion of the Linux community is that as far as I know, a strength and selling point of Linux has always been the freedom of choice. And yet, people start wars over your choices. For example, I know at least on r/Linux if you were to make a post saying that you liked Snaps over Flatpaks you’d get torn to shreds over it. Wouldn’t matter what reasons you had either.

It is always something. Whether its about Arch vs other distros, Snaps vs Flatpak vs AppImage vs Traditional packaging, X11 vs Wayland, systemd vs Sys V/init.d, pulseaudio vs pipewire, etc.

I never understood why it mattered so much what someone ran on their own computer. Assuming they’re the only one using it, what is the big deal if they choose to run OpenRC, X11, Snaps, and Alsa?

And I get a bad feeling the next one is going to be immutable distros vs non-immutable distros, but I guess we’ll see.

Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don’t know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.

Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.

It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.

All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.

While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system… no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.

I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering’s code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.

systemd isn’t bad at all. People simply don’t understand that it is not “just an init service”.

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Complains against systemd are not about boot time. It is about overengineering and vendor lock-in.

Systemd (the collection of components present in a typical distro) is like many other large frameworks:

It can do a lot, has some good design ideas at its core, and is certainly useful to a lot of people.

But the implementation is opinionated and invasive, so if your needs don’t happen to match what its author(s) envisioned, it can easily become more of a liability than a benefit. Making matters worse, it is buggy as hell.

I don’t think it’s helpful to think of the topic as “a rant”. Criticisms of systemd are diverse, and at least some of them are founded in practical experience. Being dismissive of them only stirs up resentment and division.

It’s a massive question, and I think quite a lot of the argument comes from the fact that it depends what direction you’re answering it from.

As a user, do I like being able to just systemctl enable --now whatever.service , and have a nice overview of ‘how’s my computer’ in systemctl status ? Yes, that’s a big step up from symlinking run levels and other nonsense, much easier.

As an administrator, do I like having services, mounts and timers all managed in one way? Yes, that is very nice - can do more with less, and have to spend less time hunting for where things are configured. Do I think that the configuration files for these are a fucking mess of ‘just keep adding new features in’ and the override system is lunacy? Also yes.

As a developer trying to do post-mortem debugging, who just wants all the logs in front of him for some server that’s gone wrong somehow, which I often have to request via an insane daisy-chain of emails and ‘Salesforce nonsense that our tech support use’ from our often fairly non-technical end users, on some server that I’ve no other access to? No, I do not find having logs spread between /var/log and journalctl (and various CloudFormation logs in a web console) makes my life easier. I would be pleased if that got sorted out.

tl:dr; mostly an improvement, some caveats.

Ok, so I have a very unique background in systemd. I worked at Red Hat supporting it basically as the primary support and I’ve worked with the developers of systemd at Red Hat directly. I no longer work there.

So first off, it’s “systemd” all lower case. I don’t care, but for some reason Lennart Pottering (creator) does.

systemd was a MASSIVE change. And Red Hat did a TERRIBLE job relaying it. To the point where I’m still trying to get my company to understand that it can NOT be treated like the old init systems. You can NOT just drop an init script in place and walk away and hope it works. Because a LOT of times it doesn’t. Due to forks, switch users, etc.

systemd is NOT an init system. RHEL 5 and older had sysvinit as it’s init systemd. RHEL 6 had UpStart as it’s init system and looked exactly like sysvinit that no one even noticed. systemd again is NOT an init system. Init system is 1 part of systemd. systemd does a lot of cool things. It bundles applications together, it manages those applications and can restart them or kill children, it can do resource constraints, it separates out users from the system, and lots more.

Because it is not an init system there is a LOT LOT LOT of bad recommendations out on the internet where someone has X problem and person suggests Y and IT WORKS! … except it doesn’t REALLY work as far as systemd is concerned and you’ll hit other issues or your application takes longer to start or stop and people just blame systemd.

It is systemd’s fault that it has done an ATROCIOUS job of helping people adapt. It’s a great example of RTFM. systemd’s man pages are INCREDIBLE and extensive, but when you drop so much knowledge it becomes more difficult to find what you want/need. systemd.index and systemd.directives are your best bet.

So systemd does a lot of amazing things that sysvinit never attempted to do. It’s never attempted to explain anything it expects everyone just learn magically. it’s INCREDIBLY complex, but once you understand it’s basics you can more easily get an application running, but as soon as there’s a problem it’ll just break your brain.

To give you an example, sshd’s old init script is like 250 lines of bash. systemd’s unit file comparative is like 12. Because systemd handles a LOT of what you manually had to handle before. BUT to get to that 12 you literally have to learn EVERYTHING new.

There is no “is it good or bad” here really imo. It’s a completely different fundamental design. Red Hat made it for themselves. Other distros picked it up. It can be argued that lots of folks followed Debian and Debian had a few Red Hat board members that were pushing it. Whether they pushed it of their own accord or because they were with Red Hat I don’t have a clue.

What I can say is at my current company they’re suffering from a LOT of systemd issues and they don’t even realize it. I’ve been working with Red Hat to try to get Insights to alert people to the failures and we’re making progress.

To see if you have issues just to start run the two following commands:

# systemctl list-units --failed
# systemd-cgls

If you have any units that are failed, investigate those. If you don’t need them, disable them. As for the systemd-cgls this shows HOW systemd is grouping things. ANY application that runs as a service (or daemon or application or runs in the background or however you wanna say it) should be under system.slice. ONLY humans logging into the system (meat bags NOT applications switching to users) should be in user.slice. A LOT of times what happens is an old init script is dropped in place, they start it, it has a switch user and systemd assumes it’s a user and puts it into user.slice. systemd does NOT treat anything in user.slice the same as in system.slice and this WILL eventually cause problems.

So again, is it good or bad? Eh. It does a lot of cool things, but they did a MASSIVE disservice to ALL of us by just expecting to relearn absolutely EVERYTHING.

Is the current SystemD rant derived from years ago (while they’ve improved a lot)?

In my experience, the same arguments against systemd (not systemD) are still used. No matter how often they have been disproved or whether the problem has been fixed in the meantime. With many users I am sure that it is only about making the project systemd bad.

Should Linux community rant about bigger problems such as Wayland related things not ready for current needs of normies?

I would prefer it if there were no rants at all. No matter what the topic. Because that doesn’t help in any way. It would make more sense to invest the energy in the projects in question or in alternative projects to improve them.

A lot of the people I see complaining about it are comparing to what was before it.

As someone who has only ever known systemd, I have no issues with it and, dare I say: I like it.

Just try to implement user session management on a non systemd distro…

Systemd is way better than others init system. I’m using Alpine Linux on my phone and I really wait for a Fedora/Arch like PMOS project (it’s on the way)

I’ve been using Slackware for more than a decade, and all this systemd talk has me feeling like I dodged a bullet.

The Systemd init system and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. It has greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “just werks” distros, but it has destabilized GNU/Linux society, has made life unfulfilling, has subjected users to indignities, has led to widespread psychological suffering (in the BSD world to physical suffering as well) and has inflicted severe damage on the Unix world. The continued development of Systemd will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the Unix world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “just werks” distros.

The Systemd system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing users and many other Unix processes to engineered products and mere cogs in the Systemd machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying PID 1 so as to prevent it from depriving users of dignity and autonomy.

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

We therefore advocate a revolution against the Systemd system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the Systemd system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not distros but the init-system basis of the present GNU/Linux ecosystem.