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Ask Slashdot: Practical Alternatives To Systemd?
First time accepted submitter systemDead (3645325) writes "I looked mostly with disinterest at Debian's decision last February to switch to
systemd as the default init system for their future operating system releases. The Debian GNU/Linux distribution is, after all, famous for allowing users greater freedom to choose what system components they want to install. This appeared to be the case with the init system, given the presence of packages such as sysvinit-core, upstart, and even openrc as alternatives to systemd.
Unfortunately, while still theoretically possible, installing an alternative init system means doing without a number of useful, even essential system programs. By design, systemd appears to be a full-blown everything-including-the-kitchen-sink solution to the relatively simple problem of starting up a Unix-like system. Systemd, for example, is a hard-coded dependency for installing Network Manager, probably the most user-friendly way for a desktop Linux system to connect to a wireless or wired network. Just this week, I woke up to find out that systemd had become a dependency for running PolicyKit, the suite of programs responsible for user privileges and permissions in a typical Linux desktop.
I was able to replace Network Manager with connman, a lightweight program originally developed for mobile devices. But with systemd infecting even the PolicyKit framework, I find myself faced with a dilemma. Should I just let systemd take over my entire system, or should I retreat to my old terminal-based computing in the hope that the horde of the systemDead don't take over the Linux kernel itself?
What are your plans for working with or working around systemd? Are there any mainstream GNU/Linux distros that haven't adopted and have no plans of migrating to systemd? Or is migrating to one of the bigger BSD systems the better and more future-proof solution?"
Unfortunately, while still theoretically possible, installing an alternative init system means doing without a number of useful, even essential system programs. By design, systemd appears to be a full-blown everything-including-the-kitchen-sink solution to the relatively simple problem of starting up a Unix-like system. Systemd, for example, is a hard-coded dependency for installing Network Manager, probably the most user-friendly way for a desktop Linux system to connect to a wireless or wired network. Just this week, I woke up to find out that systemd had become a dependency for running PolicyKit, the suite of programs responsible for user privileges and permissions in a typical Linux desktop.
I was able to replace Network Manager with connman, a lightweight program originally developed for mobile devices. But with systemd infecting even the PolicyKit framework, I find myself faced with a dilemma. Should I just let systemd take over my entire system, or should I retreat to my old terminal-based computing in the hope that the horde of the systemDead don't take over the Linux kernel itself?
What are your plans for working with or working around systemd? Are there any mainstream GNU/Linux distros that haven't adopted and have no plans of migrating to systemd? Or is migrating to one of the bigger BSD systems the better and more future-proof solution?"
Ask Slashdot: Practical Alternatives To Systemd?
Install Windows or OS X or some other OS that isn't still working on the basic plumbing. I read articles like this and think, nope still not time for me to return to Linux. Please get it sorted out before Windows 7 is EOL'd though, I might need you again....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's a massive, complicated, and very poorly behaved substitute for a simple, robust, and well behaved program. And it's not just a regular program, it is (if used as intended) a critical system component that will take your entire system down when it goes wrong.
Not at all. Don't substitute you not understanding a system with complicated and poorly behaved. There are careful design decisions and planning of systemd. You may not agree with them, but that doesn't make it wrong. Systemd is increasingly more popular for a number of very good reasons. It has become a freedesktop.org standard. You could start by reading this,
http://0pointer.de/blog/projec...
But since you probably won't, let me just say this. Serially executing a bunch of arbitrary shell scripts has got to be the worst possible way to design an init system. The fact that it works doesn't make it good. First of all, each script is code. Second, no script is aware of any other scripts presence, although intrinsically linked to and dependent on those other scripts. Third, a typical shell script is >100 lines of block logic to implement the equivalent of "service start". A configuration file for systemd for a single service can often be less than 10 lines and very easy to read.
I know I know, none of that matters, it is too "massive" and "complicated".
I became obvious to me with the comment of "a convenient way to kill apache with all the crap it started" that the commenter has no idea how to manage a unix system - unix has never been about "convenient" ways to do things, or "one big monolithic sysinit system", but rather small but powerful tools that can be strung together in many useful ways.
If you want "convenient", use windows or stay in the Kde/Gnome/whatever GUI, you have no business being a sysadmin.