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Is Systemd that bad afterall?
(sopuli.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Speaking as someone who uses OpenRC on all my machines . . . no, systemd is not necessarily slow, and personally I don't care about the speed of my init system anyway. Thing is, systemd also has nothing that makes it more useful to me than OpenRC, so I have no incentive to change. Plus, I dislike the philosophy behind it, the bloat, and the obnoxious behaviour the project showed when interacting with others in its early days. I'm a splitter, not a lumper, and systemd's attempts to absorb All The Things strike me as rather . . . Windows-like.
So, in a technical sense I have no reason to believe that systemd is inferior to OpenRC + sysv, and it may be superior for some use cases which are not mine. I don't spend a lot of time ranting about it, and I see no point in trying to convince people not to use it if it fits their needs. But I still won't use it if I have another option.
I agree. SystemD is a great service daemon (or, sigh, unit daemon in the stupid parlance). I like unit file syntax and I like the ergonomics of
systemctl. It's solid and I appreciate the feeling of consistency that systemd lends to the otherwise chaotic landscape of Linux distrobutions.It's for this reason that I'm willing to forgive SystemD overstepping the boundaries of services somewhat. System init/mounting? Sure, that's a blurry line after all. Logging? Okay -- it does make sense to provide a single reliable solution if the alternative is dealing with dozens of different implementations. Network resolution & session management? Fine, I'll begrudgingly accept that it's convenient to be able to treat logins/networking as psuedo-services for the sake of dependencies.
If that's as far as the scope crept, SystemD and I would be cool, but the so-called "component" list just keeps on going. SystemD has no business being a boot manager, nor a credential manager, nor a user manager, nor a container manager, nor an NTP client. I understand why they can't deprecate most of this junk, but why can't they just at least make this cruft optional to install?
Systemd (PID1) is not your boot manager, network deamon, resolver, user manager or ntp service.
Those are entirely independent deamons that happen to be developed under the systemd project umbrella but can be exchanged for equivalent components.
Tkey are gully optional.
In many cases, the systemd project's one is one of the best choices though, especially when used with other systemd-developed components.
In some cases, there is no other viable choice because the systemd-* is just better and nobody wants to deal with something worse.
In all fairness, a lot of it is sort of optional if you're compiling your own copy from source . . . which no one outside of Gentoo (/Funtoo/Pentoo/Sourcemage/LFS) ever does. I just had a look at the ebuild for systemd 253.5, and there are 37 USE flags, most of which translate directly to build options. Just figuring out which bits you want could take hours.