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Controversy is nothing new when it comes to systemd. Many people find this new Linux init system to be inherently flawed in most ways, yet it is still gaining traction with major distros like Arch Linux, openSUSE, Fedora, and soon both Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux. The adoption of systemd for Debian 8 "Jessie" has been particularly fraught with strife and animosity.
Some have described the systemd adoption process as having been a "coup", while others are vowing to stick with Debian 7 as long as possible before moving to another distro. Others are so upset by what they see as a complete betrayal of the Debian and open source communities that there is serious discussion about forking Debian. Regardless of one's stance toward systemd, it cannot be argued that it has become one of the most divisive and disruptive changes in the long history of the Debian project, threatening to destroy both the project and the community that has built up around it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 28 2014, @07:23PM
Your comment does a great job depicting just how infectious systemd is. Even when you go out of your way not to use it, you still need to use a hack like systemd-shim, in addition to whatever real init system you want to use.
It's completely stupid that you still need to use something like systemd-shim when the whole point is to avoid systemd and the stupidity it brings!
Then the "systemd + systemd-shim + sysvinit (or runit, upstart, etc.)" setup you describes sounds far more complex and fragile than just using sysvinit alone, like we've done for so long now. Thanks, systemd, you've "solved" a problem that didn't even exist in the first place, you've made the system more fragile, and now you've created several new problems that never existed before!
systemd is a menace. It's a fucking menace. It needs to go.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Monday September 29 2014, @02:33AM
Yep, it's creeping into everything by way of a handful of packages that are basically required for a user-friendly desktop experience. Infection is a good word for it.
For what it's worth, you can still completely avoid systemd if you're careful. Just make sure you don't need power management; are willing to handle removable storage via "mount"; don't want to use GNOME3, Cinnamon, possibly MATE, etc.; and watch the deps when adding KDE apps or anything that uses Gtk3.
So far, from what I've seen, it's not really any more fragile than parts of the system relying on HAL or dbus currently. As long as the -shim package provides an abstraction to whatever systemd expects, the rest of systemd seems to plod along being an annoyance at worst, and ignorable at best. Surprisingly, the non-init parts have been less fragile for me than HAL and dbus were during their early adoption phases. The problem is that it connects too many disparate parts together into an unfathomable mass that makes debugging problems that arise daunting.
Oh, something I forgot: an extra benefit to using systemd-shim and your own int is the init part is what gives you the idiotic binary logs. Use the -shim and your own init and you keep text logs.
It doesn't need to go, it just needs better separation and interoperability with other non-systemd parts. Some parts of it could be viable alternatives to other similar software, if they didn't all require all the other parts to work. You know, like the rest of the init, logging, etc. systems.
Won't happen, though. RedHat, GNOME, and Poettering all love their not-invented-here mindset. If anybody else makes a good solution to something, one of them will re-create it their own way, tie it to GNOME, and then refuse to support anything else, eventually becoming the de facto standard through stubbornness and unwillingness to cooperate. It's happened repeatedly in the past and it's going to keep happening.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday October 06 2014, @03:42AM
Slackware got rid of GNOME several releases ago; Slackware uses a very transparent BSD-style init system; Slackware's philosophy is that "it's your system" and you should be able to configure it however you want, and the distro should help facilitate your choices as much as is reasonable. Slackware is the oldest still-living Linux distro. Slackware's current users would probably immediately fork the distro if it adopted systemd as anything other than an optional add-on.
Don't want systemd? Slackware's waiting for you.