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from the or-at-least-not-be-bothered-either-way dept.
[Ed's Comment: Not wishing to ignite yet another flame war regarding the adoption of systemd, I hesitated before publishing this story. However, although it is not an formal survey, it might still reflect the views of the greater linux user community rather than those who frequent this particular site. There is no need to restate the arguments seen over the last few weeks - they are well known and understood - but the survey might have a point.]
http://q5sys.sh has recenlty conducted a survey finding many Linux users may be in favour of systemd:
First off lets keep one thing in mind, this was not a professional survey. As such the results need to be taken as nothing more than the opinions of the 4755 individuals who responded. While the survey responses show that 47% of the respondents are in favor of systemd, that does not mean that 47% of the overall linux community is in favor of systemd. The actual value may be higher or lower. This is simply a small capture of our overall community.
Although the author questions the results could this be an indication that we're really seeing a vocal minority who don't want systemd while the silent majority either do or simply don't care? Poll results and the original blog post.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Pav on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:38PM
It doesn't help with boot times [distrowatch.com], at least not on the default install of both Debian and Arch... for GUI or non-GUI.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday November 21 2014, @12:12AM
It depends on hardware as well as configuration, but for me, it did: substantially improve boot times in Arch. That's on an Eee 900A netbook, which had such short battery life I initially liked systemd for making shutdown/boot a practical alternative to suspend/resume.
As I looked into systemd, I wasn't philosophically happy with a number of aspects, but I'd still have tolerated that version of it on that machine, solely for the boot time reduction. However, the project's further expansion, following the same sort of wrongheaded design principles, leaves me firmly in the anti-systemd camp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @05:01PM
"...substantially improve boot times..."
How is this beneficial for servers where boot times should not occur? Also, how important is it to shave a negligible amount of time during boot?
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday November 25 2014, @01:28AM
How is this beneficial for servers where boot times should not occur?
Did you miss where I said I found it useful on a netbook? (FYI, netbooks aren't servers.) And where I said I'd have accepted pre-feature-creep systemd on that netbook, implying that I wouldn't have accepted it in other use cases?
Also, how important is it to shave a negligible amount of time during boot?
Since, in my case, the time saved was not negligible, that question makes no sense.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Friday November 21 2014, @12:52AM
systemd boots so fast that your stopwatch will gawp on in amazement and its heart will beat faster at witnessing the beauty of such a vision of heaven unfolding before its eyes. That's why boot times seem so similar between it and sysV init.
In all seriousness, from my tinkering with it, there is... some difference in certain scenarios. I've got a new build HTPC running jessie from an SSD that I've tried with-and-without systemd, and systemd goes from grub through daemons, XFCE and XBMC fully loaded twice as fast as sysV; 2s instead of 4. The CPU is the limiting factor there but the time difference is barely noticeable even if you're looking for it. On spinning rust systems where you're likely to be IO bound the difference is much smaller or non-existent. For heavier-duty server loads (i.e. more time spent waiting for IO and network responses) they're for all intents and purposes identical. But besides the point IMHO since POST on any of my mobos takes at least 10s before the OS can even start loading.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Friday November 21 2014, @06:08AM
To be fair, I suspect it might help a bit more for boot times if you're running virtualised servers where HW/POST time isn't a factor, and particularly if you're running a *lot* of virtualised servers. The case also known as "Red Hat's probable customers"). In fact there's probably quite a win there if you're shutting down/restarting/migrating a lot in those environments.
(Of course, that's pretty much irrelevant as far as the rest of us are concerned)