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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 19 2014, @12:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-either-love-it-or-hate-it dept.

The good people over at Infoworld have published a story outlining why they feel systemd is a disaster.

Excerpt from Infoworld:

While systemd has succeeded in its original goals, it's not stopping there. systemd is becoming the Svchost of Linux—which I don't think most Linux folks want. You see, systemd is growing, like wildfire, well outside the bounds of enhancing the Linux boot experience. systemd wants to control most, if not all, of the fundamental functional aspects of a Linux system—from authentication to mounting shares to network configuration to syslog to cron. It wants to do so as essentially a monolithic entity that obscures what's happening behind the scenes.

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday August 19 2014, @12:25PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 19 2014, @12:25PM (#83026)

    Its a fairly good super non-technical discussion of the inner platform software design anti-pattern.

    So... we don't like some aspect of the OS. I know, I'll do a half ass job reimplementing it in something new and incompatible. Why not move everything else outside the reimp into the reimplementation. But due to inexperience, stuff that "didn't seem necessary at the time" will have to be redone in the new, inner platform. Eventually you'll have everything inside the reimplementation, exactly like the system was architected outside the inner platform, except less well designed, less battle hardened, and more buggy. Its a huge waste of time. If you want to run linux encapsulated in a new container, try LXC or KVM or vmware or make your own new container. Or if you want to reimplement linux slowly and difficultly, just do it. But don't screw everyone else's stuff up because you know nothing about architecture and can't figure out how to fork.

    Another possible model is EEE embrace extend extinguish. Whoops I guess forcing everything in linux into violating Microsofts 1995 binary registry patent wasn't a very smart idea after all when after the move was complete MS decided to pivot into patent trolling. Well, I'm sure someone will make a lot of money both forcing this on everyone else while being bribed to do it, not to mention the lawyers, and the MS license salesmen.

    There is also the incompetence model. Anyone who's been around the block knows monoliths are a pretty dumb design pattern by almost all metrics, and the internet just "loves" some of the systemd devs past products like pulseaudio so I'm sure systemd will be of equally high utility, reliability, and usefulness. They may just literally have no idea how misguided they are architecturally. Hopefully the whole project will crash and burn before it takes all of the linux community with it.

    I'm curious how the (perhaps not public yet) non-systemd forks are doing. Obviously everyone (as in the general public of admins, etc, including myself of course) will move to the systemd-free forks given the choice. Nobody wants systemd except for a couple corporates (doing EEE?) and their paid astroturfers.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @02:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 19 2014, @02:51PM (#83100)

    i'm still hold a fading hope that debian sticks with sysvinit as default

    if not, it will always be an option

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by bucket58 on Tuesday August 19 2014, @03:47PM

      by bucket58 (1305) on Tuesday August 19 2014, @03:47PM (#83128)

      Be scared. The Debian systemd package maintainers and their friends are doing a fine job at extinguishing any means to run non-systemd init in Debian.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 20 2014, @08:44AM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday August 20 2014, @08:44AM (#83444) Homepage
        "are doing"? "Have done", more like.

        I've been Debian-only for 14 years. My next install (one of my servers needs replacing soon, I'd like it to be replaced in a controlled fashion rather than a panic) will be something else, definitely something non-systemd. Perhaps Gentoo, but I've not liked their way of unrolling loops in the past. But to be honest, I might even leave the Linux fold and hit one of the BSDs.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by cykros on Tuesday August 19 2014, @07:35PM

      by cykros (989) on Tuesday August 19 2014, @07:35PM (#83214)

      Debian may let you down, but there's always that distro that's even older than Debian kicking around, and I really don't see Patrick Volkerding giving us a Slackware that uses systemd. We're still using lilo, ALSA, and sysvinit here in the slack world...though you don't hear about us as much, because our documentation and organized, accessible system really minimizes the need for massive forums over every little thing someone might want to do with the "user friendly" "easy" modern systems that have been fed to the masses.

      And, failing that, there's always the BSD world. With Linux distros racing to abandon the Unix philosophy, people who like the Unix way are being left with little choice other than to return to Unix. I'll be sticking with Slack personally, but definitely am a bit less hopeful about the future of Linux than I was 10 years ago with all of these recent trends.