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You Got Your Windows In My Linux

Posted by Soulskill on from the entirely-uncontroversial-opinions dept.

snydeq writes: Ultimately, the schism over systemd could lead to a separation of desktop and server distros, or Linux server admins moving to FreeBSD, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. "Although there are those who think the systemd debate has been decided in favor of systemd, the exceedingly loud protests on message boards, forums, and the posts I wrote over the past two weeks would indicate otherwise. I've seen many declarations of victory for systemd, now that Red Hat has forced it into the enterprise with the release of RHEL 7. I don't think it's that easy. ... Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows."

3 of 613 comments (clear)

  1. What do we need systemd for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My main problem is that the old init system was dead simple to administer. You only needed to know basic shell scripting as well as grep and you could figure out most things you ever encountered. Systemd again is a horribly complicated program that probably no one except the developers understand inside out.

    It seems to me like this whole systemd/upstart etc. nonsense started when someone wanted to make machines boot up faster. The problem is that in today's world how fast a machine boots is completely irrelevant. On VM's you can clone a running machine, so how the OS starts is unimportant. A classic server is always on and rarely gets booted. Laptops, which seemed like the obvious target, are typically just suspended to disk, so they rarely run through the whole boot process. Desktops are typically sleeping too when not in use.

    In other words, I still haven't figured out why anyone would need systemd. I've never had a reason to need it. I've only had reasons to hate it when something that used to be very simple is now hidden behind some complicated shell commands.

  2. Lennart Poetterings rebuttal by Art3x · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would be interested in the anyone's response to Lennart Poetterings rebuttal to the common complaints about systemd.

    I'm too n00b to know who's right.

    1. Re:Lennart Poetterings rebuttal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Overall a good read for people who are against systemd, in case they are against it for the wrong reasons. However for me it rings hollow:

      monolithic:
      " we ship more components in a single tarball, and maintain them upstream in a single repository with a unified release cycle.". The design of all of them is inexorably linked. The component that lives as pid 1 is more complicated than what formerly lived as pid 1.

      speed:
      whether intended or side effect is a moot point. This should in no way be held as a point against systemd. I presume he's trying to address how dismissive some people are about systemd. He's right, it isn't about speed, it's about more complex issues.

      boot speed is needless for servers:
      Yes, there are some use cases where boot speed can be good in a server context. There are many more cases where it does not matter. It's silly to tell someone that boot time isn't a big deal to them that it really is. A sysadmin knows damn well which case his falls under.

      systemd and init scripts:
      "We just don't use them for the boot process, because we believe they aren't the best tool for that specific purpose" Here he misses the point. The complaint is not that people cannot use their own shell scripts, it's that they are now repsonsible for supporting third-party non-scripts by others more than they already have to.

      systemd is difficult:
        This is a point where it's nearly impossible to retain perspective. as the archtect of systemd of *course* it all makes sense to him. The issue is that other people who are not in that position take issue with it. His rebuttal basically boils down to 'nuh uh, I understand it fine!'

      systemd is not modular:
      " At compile time you .." I think that speaks voulmes right there... Compile time modularity is not the worrisome demonstrative facet, runtime modularity is.

      systemd is only desktops:
      true, their intent covers servers and in fact some features that only really appeal in a server. Much of the sysadmin base disagrees, but this is a subjective matter.

      Myth: systemd was created as result of the NIH syndrome
      They tried somehting else first before thoring up their hands and going NIH. Again, a moot point, the results matter more than the beginnings.

      systemd is a fdo project:
      Who the hell cares whether it is or isn't?

      systemd is not unix:
      strictly the myth is true, but linux is not unix either. The statement being addressed is that systemd is a departure form the unix-like ways. This is undeniably true, just differnt audiences have different opinions on the value of that.

      systemd is complex:
      He made it, so he understands it better than the stuff he did not make.

      systremd is bloated:
      What moist people mean here is feature creep, not resource consumption

      not nice to BSDs:
      the complaint is really not nice to people who administer both platforms, not that BSDs are themselves maligned,

      there are a lot of oversimplifications about porting it to other places, but I think people don't WANT it ported, so that's a lot of evangelizing to a group that does not exist.

      not debuggable:
      it is debuggable... if you are a developer.. again failure to keep perspective of many sysadmins.