You can also read The problem with the anti systemd attitude.
This is not just hatred towards systemd, it can do things very well, the direction it is going isn’t great.
Linux is the second-most popular descendent of Unix, the first being OSX.
This ruffles my feathers. Disregarding servers where Linux has near monopoly, surely Linux is installed on more devices and has more users than OSX? OP is clearly counting only desktop users
alternative reality where macos is the backbone of servers worldwide eurhghghrugr
At least we would all be able to slow down for awhile
cept for the poor IT departments of the world that have to maintain this shit. “ye hold on the server is being bottleneck’d by liquid glass”
Linux is the second-most popular descendent of Unix, the first being OSX.
Linux is not really a descendant of Unix. It is a Unix clone, but its roots do not trace back to Unix.
OSX comes from FreeBSD, which came from BSD, which had to rewrite everything that they got from UNIX thanks to copyright trolls
Beyond that OSX just happens to be unix-like, apple couldn’t give less of a fuck about it being unix-like
OSX also came from NextStep which came from the original BSD Unix. They used FreeBSD as well. OSX is also certified Unix starting from leopard. This year apple did not renew the certification, so later releases of macOS are not Unix, but Unix-like.
Same here, also all embedded system on linux + smartphone. I guess the author meant desktop usage. Still I am very unsure about the world at large. This is north-American take.
I agree. Linux on desktop is so good for at least five years, if not longer, maybe ten. That I imagine many people using it, can recommend it to others, and so forth. And so in absolute numbers, it would be much more than macOS gets.
I use Bazzite and have a Mac, and I despise every second I have to use MacOS. It is unintuitive and painful in comparison. IMO
I haven’t used macOS since circa 2019, which was Big Sur or something. And it was good, more or so. Perhaps it got worse since then. Specifically the Liquid Ass fiasco, I can believe it’s been a disaster.
But in general, you need to invest into their ecosystem heavily to enjoy them properly. Say, an Apple keyboard, trackpad, display, headphones, iPhone, iPad, etc. The more you invested, the more enjoyable the experience. Also, you need to use it for years (if not decades) to truly get some ‘think different’ things. Otherwise they just feel stupid and unnecessary. (Some things still very stupid to me, yeah.)
I’m heavily invested, however, and I still prefer modern Linux. None of my Apple devices run macOS today, all of them are Arch Linux, Fedora, or even DietPi (an old MacBook used as a server).
In my opinion, Gnome wins as-is. If I’m to suggest a macOS or Linux system to an elder relative, I’d choose Gnome, not macOS. About a decade ago, I’d choose macOS, thinking it’s simpler.
My favourite thing with macOS that I use on all my Linux machines is cmd key for things like copy paste (all my keyboards are from Apple). So useful, especially in a terminal.
Every time someone posts about systemd I just paste in the link to the Tragedy of systemd video https://youtu.be/o_AIw9bGogo and move on
I’ve seen this talk before, but right at the beginning he links this blog-post which I didn’t read the last time: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture
It’s worth linking here because it’s highly relevant to these kinds of discussions, and I like that he starts off his video acknowledging it.
That talk is so good. Great idea.
That’s a fantastic talk. I listen to it about once a year and it still holds up (as in the systemd haters are still mostly salty and uninterested in building a better alternative)
The only somewhat serious build-an-alternative-project I know of is Chimera Linux, see their FAQ: https://chimera-linux.org/docs/faq#what-is-the-projects-take-on-systemd
Apparently, I’ve already “liked” this video, even though I don’t remember it at all… Time for a rewatch!
Amazing talk, was hoping somebody would’ve linked it and was not disappointed
This is by far the most nuanced critique of systemd I’ve ever seen. I don’t fully agree with its conclusions personally, but I think it makes a lot of good and valid points about its architecture and its flaws. It feels like such a breath for fresh air in comparison to the most vocal anti-systemd types who vaguely and angrily gesture at “scope creep” and refuse to elaborate further.
If you think OP’s link is nuanced, try this one: https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/
It might not be to your liking or follow your philosophical inclination, but systemd doesn’t suck at all.
It’s great software developed by talented people behind it. I’m grateful it exists and makes computing on linux better.
I’ve seen a lot posts against systemd, most of them citing the unix principle as the main argument. But as a user on a desktop computer I don’t understand why would it be bad. Could someone explain it to me?
As a user you probably don’t know, and maybe don’t care.
This is more for developers, technology is not magic, vendor/technology-locking can be problematic. It’s not like systemd was made by bad people with bad intention. You may have heard of X11 too. The list could go on, there is a big amount of legacy in our technology, some would just keep it that way. But some argue for changes thus discussing (and criticizing) those legacy, why it fails on some points and what to do/build from that.
So right now if you’re a desktop user, I don’t see why you would bother indeed. This discussion are still interesting to some devs, for instance here I learned about dinit, and it’s code is damn small and clean, hence it was informative and I will definitely try it.
Application developers are not being forced to integrating with systemd at all. They are choosing to do that because it helps them. The only developers negatively affected by this are the ones developing other init systems that don’t want to provide the same features the application developers want to use.
Yes and no, I said “devs” and you come saying “actually […]” but really people “integrating” software “usually” are developpers. If you want to start a web server you will have to deal with systemd. If you want to check logs, you will also. If you need to debug an application that crashed (in C at least) in a production/test environment (not in “my machine”) you might want to get into core dumps.
They are choosing to do that because it helps them
Really? In what universe are you living? Any piece of software I built, professionally or not, had to run on debian-based or arch-based linux hence systemd. Did I choose or any fellow developers of my time? No, maybe people 20 years ago, maybe… That really reminds me of conservative views on “social contract” like we all chose the society we are living in.
On desktop systemd is only now getting used for user services. I don’t care that much about it either, but am not a sysadmin.
One annoyance is long shutdown because of systemd or maybe thats youre holding it wrong type of problem…
Definitely a “holding it wrong” or “you’re using Fedora” type of problem.
I really like systemd’s user services.
The crux of the issue, at least as I understand it, is that traditionally you’d build the system components in a way that they were interchangeable by defining some standard-ish API. While you can interchange some Systemd components, since “ststemd-xyz” is just the umbrella name of the project as a whole, so some components are completely independent, the core ones can’t really easily be swapped, and it’s only getting worse, especially as systemd is starting to become a hard requirement, a lot of people are rightfully feeling peeved. There’s a great talk made by a BSD developer that admits the virtues of Systemd while bringing the downsides, so no blind hate, you can google for the video “The tragedy of systemd”.
most of them citing the unix principle as the main argument.
It’s like building codes. You don’t always know you need a smoke detector, but we have 6 in this apartment.
People suggesting the Unix philosophy needs to prove itself have issues incorporating anyone else’s experience into their own. It’s okay, but watch for that oppositional disorder.
I haven’t read the whole article yet, but it bothers me how athe author mistakenly calls the init (with the process id 1) pid 0, which is special and belongs to a part of the kernel.
Yeah, I noticed that too. At the end of the day, it’s not particularly important, but it is a bit of an embarassing mistake.
I never liked it much because didn’t fit my use case, and didn’t see the need for it, but I use it when I need to and honestly it has a few quicrks I don’t like but like many other tools.
But what are you actually referring to? Which direction?
I am not the author (I am asking him right now if I should tag him). I didn’t know about dinit but this looks like a nice alternative.
I would have been fine with just systemctl/journalctl , I really dislike the locking of homed, network, etc. This is very much unnecessary and remove any future possibility of improvement/innovation.
I didn’t care about coredumps as it is part of my setup to disable the dumps to avoid unnecessary garbage on my SSD while activating for debugging with gdb (it is kind of awesome to load the program state from core dumps, also coredumpctl felt like magic).
Networkd is pretty nice on servers and non-wifi desktops imo
“Soldier Found Deep In Jungle, Still Fighting For Extinct Empire!”
This guy was complaining in the blog post about how bloated systemd is because it uses 36MB of space and it could be done with ~6MB if you used different tooling.
If you’re the kind of user where 30MB of disk space genuinely matters either at scale or in some very niche edge case, then you’re also the kind of user who won’t have much trouble using an alternative init system or building/tuning your own.
Okay, I agree 30MB isn’t a big deal, but that’s not really an argument not to optimize. The entire Debian Stable mirror for example has like 70,000 packages in it. Let’s say all of those packages took the position that “A few extra MB doesn’t matter.” If each one had just 1 extra MB that is 70GB of extra bloat. If each one had 2 extra MB that is 140GB of extra bloat. If each one had 30MB of extra bloat that is 2.1TB of extra bloat. Now obviously thats a very unrealistic, and extreme, example, but the point is that with a super complex operating system things add up. We should appreciate the nit picky little dudes who yell over 30MB because they’re probably responsible in part for a good bit of cumulative extra disk space for the rest of us.
The article is full of dishonest nonsense. It compares file sizes without comparing features. Well, actually it’s blatantly lying by saying that the setups have the “same functionality” when they clearly do not. For example, systemd-homed supports encrypted home directories which is potentially a useful feature for shared PCs, but the non-systemd setup uses nothing for managing /home, so it takes 0 bytes. NetworkManager has a size of “N/A” apparently. It looks like there should be notes or citations but they’re missing. They’re archived here if you’re interested, but it’s just a bunch of upstream URLs; this doesn’t show us what the author is comparing.
The other related point is also nonsense:
We can evaluate the “systemd isn’t monolithic” claim based on how it’s packaged and distributed.
Well, no. We can evaluate how distros package systemd, not what systemd is or isn’t. The author uses Arch Linux to show that a systemd-based setup requires 36MB. But as the article itself states, arch linux puts every single binary into a single package. Not mentioned in the article is how Arch Linux also bundles other stuff most people don’t need in the packages, like header files, programming manual pages, completions for various shells, default configurations not part of systemd etc. Is the non-systemd setup done in the same way or is the author manually installing 6 executables and calling it “equivalent”? We can’t know because one the one side we have a real (worst-case) example of Arch Linux packaging systemd, and on the other side we have “to get the same functionality without systemd, a distribution could use”.
None of this illustrates any waste of space on the entire Debian Stable mirror if you’re worried about that. In fact the bundling of systemd component into a small number of packages saves space for Debian (though it potentially wastes space for your PC).
Ah okay. I was just taking issue with the idea that a few MB don’t matter. Thanks for expanding on your point. I’m very much pro-optimization got no real opinions on systemd tho.
Even if it is, the biggest problem is that there isn’t today a big distro that is not using it. Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch, Debian, are all using systemd. One can say, you can try Void or Artix, Void repos are small, Artix is small (and kind of non-reliable) project. Or go to Gentoo and compile your applications, no ty.
Gentoo does support binary repos, I haven’t researched them in depth, but creating a binary-only child distribution should be very possible.
Except as you said - I don’t think is popular enough, I don’t know how comprehensive the current set of binary packages is.
But it should mostly be just a matter of actually precompiling everything with a reasonable config
There already are binary gentoo based distress.
Well if Void Linux is unpopular enough for it to be a problem, are the Gentoo-based ones better in that regard? Like, does it have comparable repositories to gentoo?
That article contradicts itself a bit, especially about journalctl. I also don’t see how an article from 4 years ago is related to the current direction?
I was also confused for a moment due to the way my Lemmy client shows it, but op has actually linked two articles, one from 2022 and one more recent.
I am pretty sure this is from 30th of July 2026 (and not 2025 as the article says, the blog menu seems correct). Did I miss something about it being 4 years old?
It was the 2nd link, Lemmy showed me that rather than the first.
While I get the sentiment, isn’t the fact that systemd is broken into various components and you can use or choose not to use each part of it still within the unix philosophy? You can use the init system without using the rest. It just integrates well with the other components.
That argument is addressed in the article. With few practical exceptions, systemd components expect you to be running the other systemd services. E.g. running systemd without journald is not a supported usecase.
Not supported doesn’t mean it won’t work
Fair enough, but there’s a reason no one runs almost any of the systemd services in isolation. There’s a big difference between “takes a bit of tinkering” and “need to maintain massive patch files to make journald independent of systemd”
Yeah that’s fair. I will say that I’ve used distro’s that used systemd and journald, but not resolved, networkd, etc and it worked fine.
Definitely a very good post.
It reminds me of Chimera Linux’s stance on systemd, which I found to be the best explanation on systemd before these blog posts.
Did the author intentionally omit systemd-boot or am I missing something? The EFIStub part of it seems to be the only way to package a UKI. Void Linux even has a package with just the Sub for uses wanting to go that route.
I made the mistake some years ago and moved all my Gentoo installations from openRC to systemd and now I’m too lazy to switch back and I don’t want to handle the fallout. when I think about doing rsyslog config and logrotate I start to puke a little. also I heavily use timers and I’m afraid if something I use might not have init scripts. service units are much simpler
I read the article and find the title to be clickbait.
