Comment by greatgib

2 days ago

The proof in the end that SystemD is a cancer in the Linux ecosystem. Officially it is just a stack and you can decide to use another one if you don't like it. Unofficially RedHat money ensured that other critical stacks will depend heavily on it so that you can't easily swap without replacing the whole ecosystem.

11 comments

greatgib

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LeFantome  1 day ago

The whole GNU / Red Hat platform is this way. Try switching out Glibc. You get the same "you have to use all our stuff" dependencies.

  • guerrilla  19 hours ago

    Switching out glibc is pretty easy compared to systemd. That's the thing peoplle don't get. systemd is seriously insidius, like a virus.

    • matteotom  18 hours ago

      I've personally run Gentoo with OpenRC+glibc and OpenRC+musl on my laptop. I assure you ditching systemd was easier than ditching glibc. The OpenRC system mostly just works (tbh thanks to a lot of great work by Gentoo devs). The musl system required probably a couple dozen patches to various packages to get a basic fully working desktop (most of which were relatively straightforward, but still needed manual intervention).

  • tosti  20 hours ago

    Musl mostly works. I had more trouble taking out bash, because of all the random bashisms.

    • its_magic  11 hours ago

      On my system I forked dash to create 'bolderdash.' Right now it's pretty basic, I have changed little (just did some cleanup), but I did add in a couple tweaks to enhance bash compatibility. The goal is a complete refactor, more compatibility with bash, and much better command line editing etc, while still remaining sleek and lightweight.

      I'm also forking musl to create 'powrlibc.' It will have a lot better glibc compatibility, as well as better optimizations and some other improvements.

tuetuopay  1 day ago

Where did you get that sweet RedHat money? I feel like I'm missing out, I'm happily using systemd, where are my RedHatBucks!

Seriously, I would not ever go back to a house of cards of bash and shell scripts of an init system. systemd solves actual problems and gets shit done, with a level of consistency that cannot be achieved by LEGO-like wet-dreams of UNIX worshippers. My favorite example is systemd-resolve and systemd-network that actually communicate together to indicate which DNS server is available on which network interface and with which search domains, to gasp do proper DNS routing.

Am I happy with all of systemd? Not always, it has a tendency to break networking after an upgrade with reexec. I'm still not convinced about homed. But oh my, you don't have to look further than actually solving problems to explain its success.

  • greatgib  20 hours ago

    It's like the good old time of Windows. You asked users, they would say that Windows is great, they don't have problems, works better than Linux. Oh do I get some error popups and crashes sometimes? Indeed just I forgot, I'm so used to close them without reading the message...

    Systemd and co broke so many many things and so often that it is hard to count. A lot of things possible before are not anymore because of this giant ball of mud. It is just like the Windows monolith now.

    Is it totally bad, no, for sure there are some advantages , but nowadays you will have issues, like network issues such as the one you describe and people will not know it comes from that.

    Actually, before you almost never had to reboot or reinstall for anything. In case of boot issues and co, you would just need a console to be able to fix it. Systemd got even advanced users to be used to reboot and reinstall in case of problem as deep issues are often unfixables.