New Group Calls For Boycotting Systemd

[halo9en]

TL;DR. Megabytes of code (and heap) in pid 1 is something I am grumpy about. But it boots faster than sysv, shuts down immediately, no crashes so far, and no better alternatives from the boycott crowd, so, meh.

[sdack]

same like everybody bashed pulseaudio back in the days and now its pretty much the accepted standard throughout.

Pulseaudio still causes issues with some applications including VLC, but this shall not be my point. Instead, one should mention the disaster when Gnome 3 was released. People were more furious than they are now with systemd. There seems to be a trend developing on Linux and if it continues then the worst might still come. My only hope is that I can find a bucket big enough for all the popcorn I want to eat with it when it happens.

[robclark]

Oh, these nuts should immediately delete tar/gzip/lzma/bz2 and of course in no event they should dare to try to gzip old logs. Because compressed data format is a binary stuff and you'll have a real headache decoding gzip with pen and paper back into text, because of adaptive huffman + LZ make it not so easy at all. I'm just amazed by amounts of bullshit thrown on systemd without even trying to turn on brain and think a bit.

Concluston? Binary formats are not evil. It's matter of tools to transparently access them. E.g. you can pipe compressed log to other tools and they will handle it. If systemd would permit same thing, it is not anyhow worse of gzipped logs, isn't it? And then binary format can allow efficient indexing. Let's assume we have 10 gigz of logs. Now I'm interested what IP 10.10.10.10 did on my system. Classic *nix solution assumes parsing whole 10 gigz and then discarding all entries not matching criteria. Needless to say it is not efficient at all and stinks when it comes to dealing with large log files. OTOH binary format can offer index, so I can quickly get idea what mentioned IP did without reading whole 10 gigz by only looking matching records as long as there is proper index built. Not to mention IPv4 takes 4 bytes to store as binary but up to 15 bytes as text. That is it - almost 4 times larger than it could be. So when it comes to dealing with large logs from busy servers, Lennart getting some point, huh?

tbh, a consolodated log isn't really such a bad thing. It will save me a lot of effort remote debugging things with users. ("Hmm, ok, can you send me Xorg.0.log... ok, no there there, can you send me dmesg? Hmm, I wonder where gnome-shell logs end up.."). In fact, if you take a step back from the drama and look at it a bit more objectively, it is kind of crazy that we *haven't* had a unified log yet.

(that was directed at the boycott-systemd folks, not the OP..)

btw, anyone noticed that boycott systemd abbreviated == BSD :-P

[Remdul]

I know nothing about systemd, and I don't even need to, to understand a boycott is rediculous. Systemd is open source, linux is open source. Valid arguments against systemd will have to come in the form of a practical, working alternative. This group should start talking in a programming language. You just can't take anything else seriously.

If systemd turns out to be down a bad road, it can (and will be!) fixed in the future. If the alternatives prove to be better at some point, perfect, replace systemd with it! Nothing is set in stone here.

There's a reason nobody wants to use linux (myself included). It is an operating system. Average users don't want or care for an operating system, they just need it to run their software, to do their daily tasks.
Linux is by programmers, for programmers. We need to move beyond that, and make it work for both programmers and users alike. The only reason linux has become more attractive is because Windows has gone to shit. Today, linux is just as shitty as Windows, but of course people don't have to pay for it. That's a pretty bad reason to recommend linux to users, no? Of course that's not to say linux hasn't improved a lot in the last 5 years (it definately has and I only encourage this path!), but let's be honest with ourselves. linux is only barely good enough. We can't afford to wait any longer for systemd alternatives to catch up.

Users have work to do. Whatever they need, make it work. It doesn't need to be perfect the first time around. Yeah, it can cause problems down the path, but that's just life. Balance is the key.

(Note: I do use linux exclusively, and AM a programmer.)

[LoneVVolf]

archlinux user that doesn't boot with systemd

When archlinux swtiched from sysv-init to systemd, i looked for alternatives.

On my personal systems i boot with openrc (apg packages) , but have systemd installed so i can use udev.
While i like openrc a lot, it's not mature enough (yet) for general use imo.
I also help friends to maintain their Arch linux systems which are setup with systemd as they lack knowledge/skill/interest/time to dig into openrc.


To those stating systemd is a collection of many small things, and you can decide which you want to use :
I do like some parts of systemd, like systemd-nspawn & timedatectl and would like them to use them.
Unfortunately they only work when the systemd is booted with systemd.

Another example is the new rootless option for Xorg 1.1.6 that has many advantages imo, and i would like to use it.
It requires systemd-logind and that's another part that only works if systemd is pid1.

Systemd has many things i dislike and some i do like.
If systemd had stayed a PID1 replacement and all it's other components would be usable by other PID1 implementations, i'd probably see it as a good thing for linux.

In my opinion systemd's weakest point is it's deviation of the unix philosophy, especially the 2nd part :

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

[haplo602]

I don't like systemd for my own reasons (killed consolekit, swallowed udev, created hard /usr dependency). Howeve I do not understand those bycott groups. They should support the next best alternative, that would be usefull. Boycott will not server anything.

Systemd goes against the KISS principle I so like about UNIX systems. It is modular, but it is still all or nothing (try using logind without systemd as a consolekit replacement, not possible). So the choice presented by systemd is not a choice at all in my view.

[markg85]

I actually quite like systemd. As in just systemd as replacement for sysvinit.
I hate it when it comes to journald. It's just an unintuitive piece of crap. I don't get apps or distros would even want to consider moving to that logging systems as opposed to just plain understandable (r)syslog and log files in /var/log.

Actually, much on that boycot site that talks about journal stuff is something i fully agree with. It also seems to be the major pain point in systemd. If that stubborn dev just fixes those issues then a lot of people who now hate it might start to like it.

[TheBlackCat]

and no better alternatives from the boycott crowd

And there is never going to be as long as the boycott crowd is convinced that there is no need for systemd. It seem that no one in the boycott crowd is willing to admit that systemd offers features projects want to use. They have convinced themselves that the only reason any project would ever use or even cooperate with systemd is because they were forced to by some upstream dependency or coerced by Red Hat. When provided specific examples of projects that don't fall into either category, they either claim (without evidence) that there is something shady going on behind the scenes or just ignore the example outright.

[TheBlackCat]

I don't get apps or distros would even want to consider moving to that logging systems as opposed to just plain understandable (r)syslog and log files in /var/log.

I think it has something to do with actually being able to find exactly the information you are looking for in a consistent manner.

And, again, you can configure logging to log to a text file if you want.

[jayrulez]

Pulseaudio still causes issues with some applications including VLC, but this shall not be my point. Instead, one should mention the disaster when Gnome 3 was released. People were more furious than they are now with systemd. There seems to be a trend developing on Linux and if it continues then the worst might still come. My only hope is that I can find a bucket big enough for all the popcorn I want to eat with it when it happens.

This is surprising. I watched a video about a day ago where Linus stated that he does like systemd.