
Without Systemd - supernintendo
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
======
chrissnell
I used to hate systemd until we adopted CoreOS at our last job, which forced
me to learn it. I have evolved and now love it. Once you learn the basics,
getting new services up and running with it is easy.

I really like the other parts of the systemd ecosystem, too. journald makes it
easy to view the logs of any given app/service without having to hunt through
directories.

I also love systemd-networkd--it's a HUGE improvement over older attempts at
managing network connections. I got my start on Linux in the < 1.0 kernel days
and distros back then forced you to manually configure your interfaces. This
was actually really nice because it was simple and reliable. When more modern
distros came along, they introduced "fancy" network management which was
complicated, inflexible, and often flaky. systemd-networkd restores sanity to
network interface management.

Finally, there's a great message bus that allows for API-driven interaction
with various systemd components. With a good language binding, it's now pretty
straightforward to tie your custom code into some of the systemd components.

~~~
Frondo
Oh, yes. I never really wrote a ton of systemv init scripts, but I wrote
enough to always find it kind of a pain.

Writing systemd units by comparison? Heavenly. What really sealed the deal for
me was when I needed a service to automatically restart itself if it died.
Restart=always, RestartSec=10, done. If it dies, it's back up in 10 seconds.

I wouldn't even know how to do that with an init script, and though of course
I could write something out with enough time and patience, how could that be
an improvement over two easily-understood lines?

~~~
kpcyrd
I don't know why this is getting downvoted.

I used to install systemd from backports on wheezy only because I don't have
to write sysv-init scripts that way.

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gaius_baltar
Maybe I'm stepping into a hornets nest by commenting this but after some
initial estrangement, I now absolutely love having systemd in the servers I
manage. Thanks for providing me with an easy and sane way to manage processes,
pretty simple one to configure control groups and other restricted execution
environments, monitoring, etc.

That made me see how much time I wasted writing non-trivial init scripts and
reworking with the trivial ones. I simply don't want to get back now.

~~~
sekh60
I have always been a fan of most of systemd. The only complaint I really have
is the binary file logging. I feel that should be plain text.

~~~
db48x
I think it would still have to be some kind of structured format (one json
object per "line", for instance), so that it could keep all of the metadata.
On the other hand, you can use journalctl --output=json to get exactly that,
so...

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totallyunknown
Nice collection of Linux distributions I'd like to avoid now.

There might be some issues with systemd, but systemd is by far much better
than anything else we had before.

~~~
green7ea
I'm using Void Linux which uses runit. Systemd is fine but runit works just as
well. Void Linux has a bunch of other nice things (musl, xbps, build system,
etc.). It would be a shame to overlook this fine distribution.

~~~
pmoriarty
I love runit. It's simple and elegant, is in tune with the Unix Philosophy,
and doesn't try to absorb a ton of unrelated, independent services into itself
like systemd does.

If something like runit was chosen by RedHat and the distros that followed it,
this holy war wouldn't exist.

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rad_gruchalski
systemd is great, since I started using it about a year ago, never looked
back. I like the fact that with a single service file, I have: well...
services, services with dependencies, logging, automatic restarts, timers (no
more cron, yay), sane pre-start, post-start and such.

Show me a viable, repeatably working alternative, I might consider. Until then
I really don't care if it's the "UNIX philosophy". I used upstart, init and
runit before. runit was close but there was just so much fiddling with it.
Upstart kinda worked. init is init.

systemd just works - it does one thing well: allows me to launch my services
reliably without having to install, configure and maintain tons of little
fiddly bits to make the system work.

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Rjevski
Personally as someone who uses Linux to get work done and make money (as
opposed to tweaking my machine more than actually using it), systemd has been
a blessing - it just works most of the time, and the rare time it doesn't
(that did happen - some issues with dbus) I just consider the entire machine
hosed and reboot - my software is designed to work around failed nodes so it's
no big deal.

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iDemonix
I'm fairly skilled up with Linux, but I don't often read about anything the
community is doing, saying or thinking. What is it that everyone hates about
Systemd?

~~~
pmoriarty
One of the main problems was the speed with which systemd was rolled out on
all the major Linux distros, despite it being relatively immature and very
controversial at that.

The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an
init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing
one-thing well. For a user app to do that is one thing, but for a core OS
component to do that just smells way too much like forcing Linux to be more
like Windows, which a lot of hard-core Linux users are ideologically opposed
to.

The third major issue is that on most major Linux distros, users are not given
an easy way to avoid using systemd, no matter how much they hate it or oppose
it.

The fourth issue is the apparent arrogance of the people responsible for
systemd, and their off-hand dismissal of mature and widely respected unix
conventions.

The fifth problem is that when systemd breaks, troubleshooting and fixing it
can be a lot harder than doing the same with an init script.

All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly
brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation
and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful
things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely
seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe
much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.

~~~
jbverschoor
I'm sorry. But the "Unix" way is to do one thing well. Why is it that every
single app needs to support a "daemon" mode? It is the biggest pain in the
but.

I love systemd. Finally a sane solution on linux.

~~~
JdeBP
You weren't looking very hard for such solutions, obviously, as you missed 20
years of stuff. The idea that applications do not have to have their own code
to daemonize had been around for about _a decade and a half before_ systemd
was even an idea, and there were plenty of toolsets that one could employ to
manage daemons where exactly this idea was part of the design. I myself was
explaining not to make this design mistake before the turn of the century.

* [http://jdebp.eu./FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.ht...](http://jdebp.eu./FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.html)

* [http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html](http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html)

* [http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/)

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ta33444
Making the BSDs more compelling, this Pottering coup. The astroturfing is
interesting to see on HN.

