Comment by hedora
3 months ago
In my experience, it doesn’t get its extremely simple job done.
I’ve tried a half dozen systemd distros. Each one hit some insane bug at some point that took a day to debug. Every single time, it was some undocumented systemd thing that has no reason for existing.
Anyway, it’s all devuan and openbsd at home these days. I’ve had zero non-hardware related issues in over a year.
Actually, that’s not true. Devuan still defaults to pulseaudio (the moral precursor to systemd), which still doesn’t support locking your audio output port in a way that survives reboot. It also crashes randomly when audio ports come and go. The upside is it randomly requires a reboot or moves audio out to an unconnected jack.
I replaced it with pipewire, bringing the number of Poettering services on my machines to zero. Now things work reasonably.
My n=1 is that I only ever had problems with it during the "early days", now I just use it and get on with things. I can't recall the last issue I had with systemd. tbf I generally only write a few scripts and rust microservices that need to be loaded/start/stop/reload... It's simple to add them to the systemd process. The rest of the system stays out of the way. I will admit I stick to more conservative systems like Redhat and Ubuntu LTS. I guess everyone's opinion is valid on this. It's definitely kind of heavy but it's next to nothing of a load on modern systems of the past 7 or 8 years.
Pipewire has pulse protocol behind the scenes, so your still using his tech you just don't know about that, also I got it now, is mostly ideological thinking and no reasoning behind systemd hate, is about not using that person tech, and if you break dozen of distros messing where you shouldn't the fault is yours not the distro
And yet, some of us manage to successfully run critical national infrastructure on stacks that include Linux distributions running systemd.