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Debian Talks About Systemd Once Again
An anonymous reader writes: A couple of months ago the technical committee for Debian decided in favor of systemd. This is now a subject for discussion once again, and Ian Jackson says he wants a general resolution, so every developer within the Debian project can decide. After a short time, the required amount of supporters was reached, and the discussion can start once again.
I've been a Debian user for 14 years now, please do the right thing and get rid of systemD.
I've been trying systemD on another machine for about a month now, it's not terrible but it's not all it's cracked up to be either.
The part that I don't like (besides it going against the unix philosophy) is how fast it's taking over before the majority of the Linux community even had a chance to have their say. And what really gets me is, if systemd was just an init system, fine. But at the rate they are going there is going to be a systemd everything.
Debian's offering of Gnome 3 and Systemd are not comparable. Gnome 3 is only the default desktop for people who just want to click through the installer. But you can completely avoid Gnome 3, and indeed many people do because they do e.g. headless server installations or choose another GUI. Systemd, however, is spreading through so much of the system that it may not be possible to avoiding installing it. Even if one hangs on to sysvinit as one's init system, programs like Gimp on Debian now end up pulling in systemd libs.
I personally would like to see it (and its evil compatriot, firewalld) as options.
In RHEL 7 and downstreams, you can choose between LVM2, standard partitioning, or btrfs as ways to carve up your disks. It would be nice to have systemd as an option, so for laptops where parallel starting of daemons makes a nice speed increase, it is useful. For a server where one doesn't want many changes to the underlying OS unless it is something to be tested, it can be an option. If one is using containers, maybe systemd might be useful to have.
There are changes to Linux like SELinux and AppArmor which are must haves. These add significantly to the security of the OS. systemd does add security... but not really that much. One can specify that a program run with ulimits and possibly in a container, but a wrapper can do the same thing, and one thing that I get concerned about is one program having so many moving parts that touch everything on the system, even perhaps the TTY functions.
is for me that it isn't interoperable. Please correct me when I'm wrong, but AFAIK systemd never did anything to create standards their new functionality is compatible with. Instead they only support linux APIs. I recognize that their needs exceed POSIX, but their current approach "lets make everything a hard dependency" is -to be polite- hacky. It doesn't have to be an official ISO standard, a simple document that ensures exchangeability of components inside systemd, and perhaps even makes systemd cross-platform.
> In my mind, this comes down to whether we want a better functioning OS or an OS that adheres to the mindset that I think attracted many of us to Linux in the first place.
I'm not even convinced that it makes for a better-functioning OS. I've been a Debian user for 12 years, mostly running 'testing' distributions. When systemd first turned up, I let it run for a couple of weeks, but switched back to sysV after half of my startup daemons didn't. Tried it again a month or two later, but when it had trouble stopping Samba (and, worse, claiming that it would wait *five* *minutes* before killing the processes, I decided enough was enough, and now I'm in the process of switching all five of my Debian boxes to Gentoo. Now, granted, the testing distribution is for just that purpose -- testing -- but if I'm dealing with the kind of idiot that would claim that systemd results in faster startups, but thinks that a five-minute wait to shut down a process is acceptable, then I want no part of it.
Debian should listen to what its users want, rather than just its developers. We're not all technically ignorant.