• GreatDong3000@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Hi am noob why systemd bad? I use Debian, is fucked?

    Honestly I’ve been hearing about this for a while now but never bothered to check, I’m too lazy for that.

    • Queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      It’s not inherently bad, it “fails” the Unix Philosophy of “Do one thing and do it well” but since Linux’s kernel is:

      • Unix-like, not Unix
      • Fails this philosophy, as it does more than one thing but does all of it pretty well
      • systemd is just a bundle of tools that do one thing and do it well under one package, like Linux’s kernel

      It used to be a mess, but that’s solved. The biggest reason to avoid systemd is mainly user preference, not anything malicious. 90% of current distros use systemd as its easier for the maintainers and package programmers to build for the general than each package and each distro having their own methods of how to do an init system and other tasks.

      How Debian and Arch and Gentoo and Slackware and other big distros worked was different, and the maintainers of those packages had to know “Debian’s way” and not a general way that most places accept. Systemd actually solved the Too Many Standards! issue.

      I’ve never really seen a big argument against systemd, but maybe I’ve just not heard it.

      • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It also didn’t help that Poettering isn’t particularly popular on a personal level. I think there would have been a lot less drama if he had better people skills.

        • TxzK@lemmy.zip
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          8 months ago

          Yeah, but to be honest, I would have terrible “people skills” too if people sent me death threats over writing a free software.

          • bus_factor@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Doesn’t take much to get death threats on the Internet, unfortunately. He probably would have received less of them with a better attitude, though. He wasn’t full-on Ulrich Drepper, but still pretty divisive.

      • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        back when you had an init system and you got it just the way you wanted it, you would be pissed that you had to move to systemd

        now its there when you install and it is stable so it isn’t a big deal. But old beards hate change.

        • dukatos@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          Old beards built linux and everything around, have some respect.

      • _cnt0@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        It used to be a mess, but that’s solved.

        Do you mean the past tense of the verb solve or the systemd service that solves mathematical equations? Because solveds code is still a mess. It used to too, but it still is.

    • dariusj18@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I believe partly because it takes over so many responsibilities that it becomes a requirement for things that don’t need to require it. Plus it diverged from the Linux principle of do only one thing.

      Also, afair, it was buggy for a while.

    • Trashboat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      8 months ago

      Debian does use systemd, as do most other big distros. If you weren’t already complaining about it, it’s probably not something you’ll care about at all. The biggest issue is more of a philosophical one rather than practical I think, where some people don’t like that systemd attempts to handle many parts of the init process at once. The “Linux way” is generally to have a program that does one thing and does it very well, not one that does many things. Systemd seems to go a bit against this principle to my understanding, which carries the longer term risk of damaging the modularity Linux generally offers, but evidently most big distros have deemed it worthwhile to switch.

      Could be slightly wrong since I’ve not paid much attention to it the past couple years, but that’s the gist of it to my knowledge

      • CEbbinghaus@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        The principle of “do one thing and do it well” still applies to SystemD as it builds into many different applications which each do one thing only. The problem is that you require most of them to have a fully functioning unit system which makes it function more like 1 big product rather than many smaller ones as it actually is.

        A lot of the hate I feel started with Pottering which extended to SystemD. And while it certainly had downsides it had less than the other i it Systems which is also why It has become the new norm.