Comment by palata
9 days ago
This. I don't like that it's not modular, and that more and more projects simply depend on on it. It feels like it makes it harder to not have systemd.
Which makes sense for systemd if their goal is to kill the "competition". But that's not my vision of how open source should work.
> But that's not my vision of how open source should work.
Exactly. I expect a modular fork of systemd when people get annoyed enough. I still don't understand why people treat systemd as the second coming of the Christ.
Disclosure: I'm managing large number of servers for the last 20 years. Don't tell me that init scripts were bad. I won't buy it. Don't tell me systemd is fast, again, I won't buy it.
> Exactly. I expect a modular fork of systemd when people get annoyed enough.
That's exactly the case with elogind, used by e.g. Alpine, Void, and Gentoo.
> I still don't understand why people treat systemd as the second coming of the Christ.
FWIW it managed to pull most distros in a single direction, decreasing ecosystem fragmentation. The outliers are well, outliers.
Just to be clear: it's not an endorsement from my side; there's enough criticism of systemd which I will not repeat. But the fragmentation aspect is what kills so much momentum, and it just runs too deep: Gnome was started because KDE's dependency on Qt wasn't kosher; Qt later got relicensed, but both projects kept pulling in different directions. It feels like any compatibility between anything is coincidental.
> Qt later got relicensed, but both projects kept pulling in different directions.
Both desktop environments pull in different directions in appearance only. Esp. KDE team works their heads off to be compatible with GNOME and to support/build standards which work equally well on both systems. For example, ".desktop" file specification. Another notable example is, every KDE release comes with identical GTK themes for flagship Qt theme, plus numerous others which I can't remember now.
So, the underlying standards of many Desktop Environments are the same, because there are standards which many don't see, know, care (and this is a good thing). Vaxry is a case study here, and I exclude his creations.
I know this, because, I took part in developing a Debian derivative distro for ~5 years or so.
> FWIW it managed to pull most distros in a single direction, decreasing ecosystem fragmentation. The outliers are well, outliers.
On the other hand, every distribution selects parts of systemd, patches part of the selected set and configures this set, hence integrates systemd differently in different levels. This creates behavioral differences in systems and their systemd installations.
IOW, systemd didn't reduce fragmentation to the level people wanted them to believe.
Moreover, pulling from that 20+ experience with Linux systems, their behavior was already this consistent since forever. RedHat had a wrapper called "service" on top of "/etc/init.d" system, but the scripts were portable. Some config files unrelated to systemd/init.d were in different places (and still are). e.g. apache/httpd, /etc/network/interfaces vs. /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, etc.
So, the defragmentation by systemd is an illusion. Since forever, I had to either look for /etc/{redhat,debian}_version or type apt/yum/dnf and press enter to see which distro I'm on. The rest is basically the same, across hundreds of installations.
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How is it not modular? Yes its all in one repo, but most of the parts are modular. Every distro adopts different parts of it.
Why doesn't someone make a modular systemd? Honestly I think a lot of systemd should be moved into the services its overriding or controlling.