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0 pointsvoidr4y ago0 comments

What tangible thing does systemd do that hurts your usage of the OS?

If I would hack into your computer, install systemd and set up a few clever aliases for your sysvinit commands, would you ever notice that I have done that?

I see this hard anti-systemd sentiment from some vocal people, but I have yet to see any actual problems that systemd has caused.

I know that systemd is not a POSIX standard, but neither is sysvinit.

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denton-scratch4y ago

> What tangible thing does systemd do that hurts your usage of the OS?

Well, binary logging, for a start. Usurping DNS.

Actually, let's not go down that path - it would be a long argument, and I've already lost it, years ago.

> would you ever notice that I have done that?

Umm, yes.

My case isn't that systemd is bad; it's that I objected to Debian making systemd the default init, and that it's not very easy to make a non-default init the active init. I have a preference, I don't think I have to justify it, but the Debian change made it hard for me to exercise that preference. That's all.

krinchan4y ago

I always feel like journald was not fully complete before major distros swapped over to systemd. I like the problems it was trying to solve and I get the reasons journald went with a binary database file.

I’ve personally been burned multiple times at work by log monitors missing log messages due to logrotate. It isn’t often, but often enough I’m glad for the solution.

The thing that hurt was that they did all this work for better structured data and then the only remote logging solution (that was really usable) at the time was syslog. Remote logging has gotten better depending on what sort of central logging vendor you’re using.

marcosdumay4y ago

Systemd broke my computers plenty of times; the closed logging system spread the logs into the things systemd managed and what the application manages; there were the DNS problems that Debian solved quickly; and the moronic timeouts, why fail a service in a second when you can keep retrying and increasing the timeout for 15 minutes, dragging the boot sequence and making sure nobody can fix the problem for all that time?

There were many more, but I don't write it down. Systemd is a horrible piece of software that solves a very important problem.

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