Comment by steinuil

The usual arguments against systemd border on religious drivel. I've seen the talk and while I very much value the work that the speaker has done I did not appreciate that the reasons for doing this are the usual vitriolic cat-v talking points.

systemd is very good because it makes many things that the Linux kernel can do very easy. I would like to know how the people who swear against it implement features that I regularly use in systemd like socket/mount/dbus activation, services that dynamically create a user and group on activation and keep their service and temp directories private from other services, syscall filtering, user session services that start when I log into a graphical session (very useful when you have issues with your system tray's config, for example), network mounts that get mounted asynchronously only when you're using them, actual service management and restarting a service when it fails and service dependencies (which some init systems still don't do!), and so on and so forth...

Yes you could do all of these things by composing other programs, but there is lots of value in having them all bundled together and only having to consult one resource for documentation on them, and the fact that these are all designed to work together reduces the friction that you would get by composing other "general-purpose" tools.

On the other hand, systemd is bad because the implementation is messy, when it does fail it tends to do so in odd and obscure ways, it comes bundled with tons of components that most people won't need, and yes the fact that it's essentially the only option you're given and that it's not portable to BSDs is not very nice.

I would encourage people to read dinit's comparison page and Chimera Linux's FAQ section on systemd for good arguments that are not fueled by religious belief as to both why systemd is valuable and in which ways it is bad.

https://github.com/davmac314/dinit/blob/master/doc/COMPARISO...

http://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-...