Why might you like or dislike systemd?

[elsandosgrande]

I am genuinely interested on everybody's stance on systemd here. Do please keep the discussion civil and leave the pitch forks at home.

 

I was wondering whether or not to post such a question here, but I just felt like I needed to understand the community at large with regards to their stance on systemd after watching this video (it's 40-50min long):

This was, from what I gather, a conference or something to that effect. One of the talks was on systemd. I think it is really insightful.

Now, as I am asking you of your stance, I shall share mine. I prefer systemd over other initialization systems.

 

EDIT: It seems that that was a reupload. Well, here's the original video:

 

Edited April 26, 2019 by elsandosgrande
YouTube oopsie on my part

[Sauron]

I'll make it short:

systemd is a complex system that solves a complex problem. No other init system has reached feature parity with systemd by a long shot. It could definitely be better, but it does its job and nothing else can do it in its place; the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Its advanced features are only truly useful to server people, so a desktop user doesn't really need to use it - however, a desktop user is also completely unaffected by systemd's flaws, so I don't think there's any good reason to complain on that side. I think it makes sense for a major distribution to use systemd not only because it makes the maintainers' job easier but also because it helps compatibility across Linux based systems, which has historically been a problem in the community.

[elsandosgrande]

On 4/25/2019 at 6:28 PM, Sauron said:

I'll make it short:

systemd is a complex system that solves a complex problem. No other init system has reached feature parity with systemd by a long shot. It could definitely be better, but it does its job and nothing else can do it in its place; the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Its advanced features are only truly useful to server people, so a desktop user doesn't really need to use it - however, a desktop user is also completely unaffected by systemd's flaws, so I don't think there's any good reason to complain on that side. I think it makes sense for a major distribution to use systemd not only because it makes the maintainers' job easier but also because it helps compatibility across Linux based systems, which has historically been a problem in the community.

Advanced features? Could you fill me in by any chance?

 

Anyway, while this video was the catalyst for this post, the fuel was there for a long time now. I was always wondering about how those that dislike systemd see it, but I was reminded of it by a comment by @Dat Guy :

A few comments later:

Gentoo uses OpenRC by default (thank the heavens for the systemd profiles).

 

Thank you for sharing your point of view with me and enjoy the rest of your day!

[Sauron]

2 minutes ago, elsandosgrande said:

Advanced features? Could you fill me in by any chance?

The guy from the video actually mentions a few of them starting around minute 30; I won't claim to be an expert in exactly what systemd does that other systems don't, after all I only use it for very simple daemon management, but I think there are some features that are very Linux specific that most alternatives choose not to take advantage of in an effort to be more "unix like", misguidedly so in my personal opinion. There's a pretty in depth reddit post by one of the Arch Linux maintainers on why they decided to switch, he mentions stuff like dependency management.

[elsandosgrande]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

The guy from the video actually mentions a few of them starting around minute 30; I won't claim to be an expert in exactly what systemd does that other systems don't, after all I only use it for very simple daemon management, but I think there are some features that are very Linux specific that most alternatives choose not to take advantage of in an effort to be more "unix like", misguidedly so in my personal opinion. There's a pretty in depth reddit post by one of the Arch Linux maintainers on why they decided to switch, he mentions stuff like dependency management.

I got somewhat lost by that point (I'll watch it again once I get more sleep; school is hard), but might you be referring to cgroups, amongst other things?

[Sauron]

39 minutes ago, elsandosgrande said:

I got somewhat lost by that point (I'll watch it again once I get more sleep; school is hard), but might you be referring to cgroups, amongst other things?

Yes, those too.

[Nettly_]

systemmd is okay, just  a little complex tho

[Chunchunmaru_]

I appreciate the simplicity of inits like the ones from FreeBSD or OpenBSD (Gentoo openrc too) but honestly for me this just looks like developers arguing about bad software design, which no consumer cares about at all (Like they do or not about Windows being bloated and bad designed as it is) and there are some things imo in the Linux ecosystem really wrong, and worse, I can make a few examples about ALSA, pulseaudio, jack, for the audio ecosystem, Dbus for IPC, etc...

It also eventually became a meme too, it's pretty insignificant to most of people liking or not systemd

[Dat Guy]

7 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

developers arguing about bad software design, which no consumer cares about at all

They probably prefer systems which boot and shut down nicely though...

[Chunchunmaru_]

3 minutes ago, Dat Guy said:

They probably prefer systems which boot and shut down nicely though...

I admit it is a bit stupid sometimes even with startup, I ended up editing the fstab manually because of an usb device I unplugged I used to automount, which systemd would complain about and refused to continue the init process, and for no reason sometimes it would wait for some unknown processes to shut down (1 minute and 30 seconds exactly), unless you spam ctrl+alt+canc lol

Edited April 28, 2019 by Chunchunmaru_

[elsandosgrande]

14 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

I admit it is a bit stupid sometimes even with startup, I ended up editing the fstab manually because of an usb device I unplugged I used to automount, which systemd would complain about and refused to continue the init process, and for no reason sometimes it would wait for some unknown processes to shut down (1 minute and 30 seconds exactly), unless you spam ctrl+alt+canc lol

Not sure about the fstab thing, but the only process I ever wait for is SDDM when it locks up, and even that's rare. Your mileage may vary, I guess.

 

14 hours ago, Dat Guy said:

They probably prefer systems which boot and shut down nicely though...

Yeah, I don't see how that's not the case when using systemd.

[Dat Guy]

8 minutes ago, elsandosgrande said:

I don't see how that's not the case when using systemd.

There are numerous accounts of broken runlevels with systemd.

[Breadpudding]

If the kernel is the King of the machine, that makes systemd the Queen of Linux. The reason people don't like systemd is because it controls everything without being the kernel. Personally, I don't see a problem with it, but it can be a single point of failure at times. For example, if you told systemd to log several gigabytes of information, you'd have a real pickle on your hands because you may not have that much memory. That's right! The system daemon ignores standard memory allocation in favor of something that may try to reserve more RAM than you actually own! I believe that it may be patched now but it used to be fun to cause computers to crash by sneaking a small prank application on your friend's computer just to watch the whole thing come to a screeching halt. In short, there's nothing wrong with systemd other than its ability to become the reactor on the first Death Star.

[wasab]

I don't see what the fuse is. Most Linux users probably find this debate irrelevant since they rarely touch system services. 

[Koeshi]

It is partly a philosophical thing.  Whatever your view on the quality of the code itself a lot of people have an issue with systemd consuming other services and bringing more failure points into itself whereas traditionally your init system was a very one function utility.  I have also seen a lot of admin complaints about the fact that systemd decided logs should be in binary rather than a standard text file,s o now if there is any corruption you can lose the whole log and logs can't just be opened in a standard text editor as they could previously.

 

Personally I dislike systemd based on philosophy but not enough to move away from Manjaro for the time being.  Depending on how OpenRC distros develop I may change my mind in the future (eyes on Artix), but for now I am not willing to put in the work that smaller distros require (with the exception of MX, that seems good to go, but I want my KDE and rolling release ).

[DevBlox]

I'm onboard with it. I'm really pretty much done with boilerplate init scripts, I like just getting a simple service from a simple service file that's easy to type out from memory even. I find using the basic facilities nicer too. The amount of stuff you get from just having that tiny config file is worth it to me. Unlike init, where it all depends if that status part was built comprehensive or not and differs by project all the time. Anyway, I get to mess about with those files when setting up services (I'm DevOps), occasionally have to write my own for a service that does not yet have one, I run everything I can on it. Systemd makes my life painless/scriptless.

 

I'm not sure about if I'm okay with it having a million features, but I don't really mind if I get a standard tool that works a certain predictable way. I never had any trouble with it though, might be another story if it was otherwise. Init is also a single point of failure, it itself does not fail - it's too simple. But IMO the complexity just ends up elsewhere, beyond init's reach.

[Dat Guy]

1 hour ago, DevBlox said:

I like just getting a simple service from a simple service file that's easy to type out from memory even

So are runit service scripts.

[SilverSoul]

People are angry that it does more than what a "normal" init system is supposed to do. I see no problem with it as it's not exactly bloated.

[Dat Guy]

Just now, SilverSoul said:

it's not exactly bloated.

Why does it have an NTP client and a console?

[elsandosgrande]

On 5/12/2019 at 12:25 AM, Dat Guy said:

Why does it have an NTP client and a console?

I did not know that it had a console, but I do like its NTP capability (it manages time through timectl, so it might as well have a way to update the clock if need be).

 

I am not sure if I should mention this, but you can add a USE flag in Gentoo's make.conf to include bootctl with systemd (I wish it were not UEFI-only though, as my school's computers all have BIOS-only motherboards). I believe Arch includes systemd-boot by default. Also, it is available as a separate package in Gentoo, but only if you're not using systemd already.

[Dat Guy]

No, thank you.

[cretsiah]

@elsandosgrande

I'll use my anecdotal evidence for dislike of systemd as a potential graphical end user. some people however dont except anecdotal evidence for things being problematic.

 

I have found that Systemd appears to require minimum 2.5GHZ Cpu's, 4gig ram, SSD's to be functional.

 

OpenSuse, Manjaro, Ubuntu, Linux Mint with Systemd on my systems have been unuasble. this is using XFCE, LXDE, LXQT,

Sluggish to boot. (at least as long as OpenRC usually worse).

Sluggish to move around Graphical Interface (windows bloat equivalent)

Constant loss of Wifi connection.

 

MX Linux doesnt/didnt suffer wifi connection loss but was still sluggish but usable.

 

Majaro OpenRC, Devuan

boot time average (not fast, but not waiting for ever either)

Graphical Interface Speed more than usable/functional.

no loss of wifi connection.

 

Conclusions I came to:

Regardless of the mass inroads Linux Gaming has made, with the gear I have available to me to use, Im no better off with Linux vs Win7 (no we wont debate Linux vs Win10 lol).

SSD's read/write speeds hide the true speed of Systemd compared to Systemd on HDD's. (making Systemd useless on old hardware).

you can have lots of ram, Hdd space, but without a fast cpu dont bother (tested with a 1.6GHz cpu, 64-bit, 8gig ram, 500gig Hdd and a 32-bit Medion computer 4gig ram, 3.5-4GHZ cpu, 1 terabyte Hdd ) .

 

 

 

 

[elsandosgrande]

On 5/21/2019 at 1:39 AM, cretsiah said:

@elsandosgrande

I'll use my anecdotal evidence for dislike of systemd as a potential graphical end user. some people however dont except anecdotal evidence for things being problematic.

 

I have found that Systemd appears to require minimum 2.5GHZ Cpu's, 4gig ram, SSD's to be functional.

 

OpenSuse, Manjaro, Ubuntu, Linux Mint with Systemd on my systems have been unuasble. this is using XFCE, LXDE, LXQT,

Sluggish to boot. (at least as long as OpenRC usually worse).

Sluggish to move around Graphical Interface (windows bloat equivalent)

Constant loss of Wifi connection.

 

MX Linux doesnt/didnt suffer wifi connection loss but was still sluggish but usable.

 

Majaro OpenRC, Devuan

boot time average (not fast, but not waiting for ever either)

Graphical Interface Speed more than usable/functional.

no loss of wifi connection.

 

Conclusions I came to:

Regardless of the mass inroads Linux Gaming has made, with the gear I have available to me to use, Im no better off with Linux vs Win7 (no we wont debate Linux vs Win10 lol).

SSD's read/write speeds hide the true speed of Systemd compared to Systemd on HDD's. (making Systemd useless on old hardware).

you can have lots of ram, Hdd space, but without a fast cpu dont bother (tested with a 1.6GHz cpu, 64-bit, 8gig ram, 500gig Hdd and a 32-bit Medion computer 4gig ram, 3.5-4GHZ cpu, 1 terabyte Hdd ) .

 

 

 

 

And I'll throw my opposing anecdotal evidence onto the pile.

 

I've run Ubuntu 18.04 on my mom's laptop without issues (actually, it ran much better than her Windows 10 installation, at least I could play YouTube videos in something other than Edge; Edge is not bad, but YouTube on it unfortunately was). My mom's laptop was bought in a store (Techno Shop, if that means anything to anyone outside of Bosnia) in 2014 (mom tells me that it was the only one she could find with Windows 8.1 preinstalled, as the rest were empty in that regard). It sports a 1.35GHz dual-core AMD APU without any dedicated graphics, unlike my laptop, has a 5400RPM 500GB drive (not sure what manufacturer, but it's the same RPM at half of the capacity of mine), a Qualcomm-Atheros wireless chip (it actually worked right away with Bionic Beaver, while my chip requires kernel 4.16 or later to have both Bluetooth and WiFi working properly out of the box; RTL8723BE if you're curious) and 4GB of RAM (500MB allocated for the GPU inside of the APU).

 

I have also run Lubuntu on two ~2005 desktops from my school. Well, one was a server, but both were really weak.

The regular desktop has a single-core ~1.1GHz Pentium, if I recall correctly, with unknown on-board graphics (I didn't look into that at the time), 512MB of RAM, an old 80GB hard drive (I don't know the details) and a TP-Link WiFi card. The WiFi worked just fine. I couldn't easily get any high resolutions, but it didn't matter, since the thing would "screech" when it came to anything visually demanding (VLC visualizations). LibreOffice was fine, but I only ever got Firefox to open once. There is not much more that I can say.

The server was slightly beefier (the motherboard sadly died; the model listings, it was one of the lower-end ones with a redundant power supply). It was modified with an AMD AGP card (not sure which one; it had 256MB of RAM if I recall correctly), an extra 80GB IDE hard drive and an extra 1GB of RAM for a total of 1.5GB of RAM. It played YouTube at up to 480p without stuttering. It could even run FreeCAD.

 

Oh, also, there are my friend's laptop and my professor's laptop. One is a relatively cheap Toshiba (not sure how old, but it came with Windows 7) and the other is an HP EliteBook with SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 certification (yet the ACPI is wonky in a way that basically turns the back light off when the charger is plugged in, but I worked around it and it might have been fixed in a newer kernel release; it too comes with Windows 7; here's a service manual that I found; here's a PDF oriented at the end user). Both run Ubuntu and Kubuntu respectively just fine (both better than Windows 7 as well).

[cretsiah]

@elsandosgrande I am glad in your experience it was much better than mine.

 

hardware recognition wasnt an issue.

ability to play youtube or open a webrowser want an issue

 

my issues for usability were:

booting from cold took 5- 10 minutes

1.5 minutes to get mouse from botom-left to top-right of monitor screen

- 17inch square (aka crt style)

- 15 inch widescreen (laptop style)

programs/ aplications took 3-5 minutes to open with only one running (not including background junk)

browser 3-5 minutes (when it opened youtube was fine)

webpages took 2-5 minutes (depended on sites programs aka plain text took the lower took 2, while drupal, wordpress styled ones took 5)

task manager would take 5 mins

 

on a non-systemd distro

boot up took longest at maybe 2 minutes

programs/ applications were almost instant (less than a minute)

mouse was fully responsive (to the point I nearly had to tone it down

webpage response times were less than 30 seconds regardless of type.

 

I'll be a little bit of smarty pants /conspiracy theorist, here and maybe my issues were more related to subjugation by the 5 eyes group PMSL (which Bosnia is not a part of, to my knowledge).

[elsandosgrande]

On 5/26/2019 at 3:02 AM, cretsiah said:

@elsandosgrande I am glad in your experience it was much better than mine.

 

hardware recognition wasnt an issue.

ability to play youtube or open a webrowser want an issue

 

my issues for usability were:

booting from cold took 5- 10 minutes

1.5 minutes to get mouse from botom-left to top-right of monitor screen

- 17inch square (aka crt style)

- 15 inch widescreen (laptop style)

programs/ aplications took 3-5 minutes to open with only one running (not including background junk)

browser 3-5 minutes (when it opened youtube was fine)

webpages took 2-5 minutes (depended on sites programs aka plain text took the lower took 2, while drupal, wordpress styled ones took 5)

task manager would take 5 mins

 

on a non-systemd distro

boot up took longest at maybe 2 minutes

programs/ applications were almost instant (less than a minute)

mouse was fully responsive (to the point I nearly had to tone it down

webpage response times were less than 30 seconds regardless of type.

 

I'll be a little bit of smarty pants /conspiracy theorist, here and maybe my issues were more related to subjugation by the 5 eyes group PMSL (which Bosnia is not a part of, to my knowledge).

So, boot takes five minutes, but my hard drive is a 5400RPM one and my /home folder is in excess of 250GB (probably even 300, and that's with my dozen virtual machines being moved to my external hard drive). It takes 15 seconds to load Firefox Nightly and 2 minutes to load all of my pinned tabs (20, all of them with dynamic content; Khan Academy, Duolingo, KissAnime, this forum and the Level1Techs forum just to name a few tabs). Htop loads in an instant and KSysGuard takes <10s if swap is not in use.

 

By the way, here's proof for the skeptical amongst you.

 

Post Scriptum

Gwenview is much more of a memory hog than even Chromium is, at least with 4k images (yes, a Galaxy S4 GT-I9505 can take 4k images, they're just not that high quality for the resolution). Oh, and sorry for being basically MIA here, school is a pain (but hey, it's the final stretch now, the 21st and I'm free).