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https://lwn.net/Articles/777595/
LWN (Linux Weekly News) provides a written account of Benno Rice's talk. The former FreeBSD core developer gives some context around systemd and what FreeBSD should learn from it. He compares the affair to a Greek tragedy which contains much suffering followed by catharsis. His attitude toward systemd is generally not negative, but I won't cherry-pick any specific sections; you'll have to actually read the article for once.
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The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an
open doorway with an open mind.
-- E. B. White
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday February 08 2019, @07:40AM (7 children)
I'm aware that anyone who claims that they like systemd, or at least are happy to use such as myself, are thought to be heretics to the cause of Unix and should be condemned to some sort of Hell for their beliefs. But I use it, it does exactly what it says it will do and, now that I have become used to it, I find it more convenient to use than the previous init systems.
I am aware that it does not follow the rules that the purists believe are essential to the spirit of Linux, but I have not yet encountered any problems in maintaining 8 desktops using 3 different distros, and several RaspPi that just keep running and doing what they have been programmed to do. Problems do occur from time to time in any computer, but none of those that I have experienced were caused by systemd, not has systemd made the recovery process any more difficult than it would have been using a different init system. It is possible to conjure up any number of potential drawbacks to using systemd - but I've not encountered any personally.
The like/dislike of systemd has become as polarised as US or European politics, and it seems that no amount of sensible discussion will convince either side that one system is better or worse than another. Perhaps it is time that we cease the arguments about the various systems - it is as pointless as comparing Thunderbird and Evolution, or LibreOffice rather than the MS offering. People will use whatever they are happiest with and whatever gets the job done in the most efficient way to their satisfaction.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Friday February 08 2019, @07:54AM (1 child)
I've seen systemd scotch several very important live demos. With its near useless logging the autopsies were very difficult, but there was enough data to find the cause. The bottom line was that systemd failed.
systemd violates the K.I.S.S. principle in so many ways and complexity is just a disaster waiting to happen. Or in those cases, just going ahead and happening.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Friday February 08 2019, @08:24AM
I knew there was something unsettling about janrinock, he is a Microsoft enabler! And here I thought that he was just opposed to exposing Nazis and stuff. You are wrong about this as well, janrinok! It is subversive. Camel's nose under the tent! Difference between genders accepted! IQ is real! And then we have both Nazis and Microsoft, and Lennart, and Miguel de Icaza, if anyone remembers him. It is the Goddamn Paradox, Louise! (Millenniun [wikipedia.org]) Time-Quakes to follow.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @10:04AM
$ cat /etc/hostname
my_hostname
$ hostnamectl set-hostname my_hostname
(no output)
$ cat /etc/hostname
myhostname
Our definition of "works" differs.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rufty on Friday February 08 2019, @01:32PM (2 children)
I wasted a couple of hours thanks to systemd. I had a very old debian (version "squeeze") system running a huge RS232 plotter. Whipped out the hdd and put in a new(er) one with debian "stretch" on. The plotter was not highly erratic, not connecting to the device, even. After much poking about I found systemd was helpfully spawning a getty on the serial device, presumably in case anyone ever wanted to log in through the plotter. And it seems that even a "service disable" is not enough to stop this. Think it was "system mask" or some such that stopped it eventually. Wanna bet this is a "WONTFIX"?
(Score: 2) by rufty on Friday February 08 2019, @01:42PM
s/not/now/
;-)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday February 09 2019, @12:00AM
>I found systemd was helpfully spawning a getty on the serial device
lol a literal backdoor
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Friday February 08 2019, @06:26PM
You could say the same for Windows frankly.
I can't imagine how. /etc/init.d/my-service stop/start is about as easy as I can imagine. I have however seen plenty of anecdotal evidence that leads me to believe that systemd with it's totally unnecessary parallel service start doesn't always get service dependency order correct...stuff that's trivial in, for example, openrc. Maybe stuff like this has been fixed (NFS starting before the network and the like) but that's a failure of an init system's basic functionality there.
From what I've seem the pro-systemd trolls have desperately tried to make it so in order to distract from the reality. That is, that all the arguments against system have proven out, for reasons that have been understood for over 40 years, and all the arguments for system have been debunked. Also to be clear, it's not an init system. At this point it's clearly by design an operating system.