this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
97 points (75.1% liked)
Technology
81606 readers
4632 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You motherfucker I can barely breathe right now!
Did somebody let Lennart out again? You know he shouldn't be walking around alone outside, he's just going to get himself into trouble.
On a slightly more serious note: systemd does some things nice, a lot of things it does very badly, and it really seriously needs to stop trying to push it's grubby little fingers into every sub system out there.
All that is one thing, but the main issue with systems always seemed it's main developer, Lennart Poetteting who was never one to shy away from drama and controversy, and not in a good way.
ew ai “””art”””
I tried to stop worrying and love systemd, but it really is terrible to deal with sometimes.
Fucking slop images contributed less than nothing to the article.
/etc/init.d, uh, finds a way
Logged logs logging loggily
Go off, king. Great points. I can't bring myself to give a shit about anything this person has to say if they feel the need to interject Marvel quips into their own article.
Jurassic Park.
Not sure about the other one, but I don't shun people for having their fun. Technical articles can be quite dry.
I recognize the reference, and am also not actually against people having joy in their lives.
My problem is with the use of a tool that is built on a corpus of unlicensed works (regardless of how you feel about the current copyright system, which imo is broken af) and has caused significant environmental and economic damage to the world.
Its success is mitigated by how difficult it makes networking with . All I want to do is write out the config and have it work. I don't want networkd or resolved mucking around with stuff. You end up having problems like this guy: https://piefed.social/c/linux/p/1796382/oddness-with-systemd-resolved
Yeah for that I like Canonical's way with netplan. Write a very short and simple yaml, "netplan apply", 'k tx bye.
Systemd killed my father, but it's okay because he was Darth Vader anyway.
I honestly don't get what people were so up in arms about, besides just not wanting to change what already worked for them.
I'm so tired of reading this stupid argument. "People only dislike systemd because they're afraid of change." No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here's the real issue:
Do you really think it's a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?
Let's consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users' default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn't conform to its "standards" in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome's engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.
That's exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.
Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do....
But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering's new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.
That’s not to say it’s bad, just a different design. It’s actually very similar to what Apple did with OS X.
On the plus side, it’s much easier to understand from a security model perspective, but it breaks some of the underlying assumptions about how scheduling and running processes works on Linux.
So: more elegant in itself, but an ugly wart on the overall systems architecture design.
It uses a completely different paradigm of process chaining and management than POSIX and the underlying Unix architecture.
I think that's exactly it for most people. The socket, mount, timer unit files; the path/socket activations; the After=, Wants=, Requires= dependency graph, and the overall architecture as a more unified 'event' manager are what feels really different than most everything else in the Linux world.
That coupled with the ini-style VerboseConfigurationNamesForThatOneThing and the binary journals made me choose a non-systemd distro for personal use - where I can tinker around and it all feels nice and unix-y. On the other hand I am really thankful to have systemd in the server space and for professional work.
I'm not great at any init things, but systemd has made my home server stuff relatively seamless. I have two NASs that I mount, and my server starts up WAY faster than both of them, and I (stupidly) have one mount within the other. So I set requirements that nasB doesn't mount until nasA has, then docker doesn't start until after nasB is mounted. Works way better than going in after 5 minutes and remounting and restarting.
Of course, I did just double my previous storage on A, so I could migrate all of Bs stuff back. But that would require a small amount of effort.
I've started doing podman quadlets recently, and the ini config style is ugly as hell compared to yaml (even lol) in docker compose. The benefits outweigh that though imho.
I agree that quadlets are pretty ugly but I'm not sure that's the ini style's fault. In general I find yaml incredibly frustrating to understand, but toml/ini style is pretty fluent to me. Maybe just a preference, IDK.
Technically, sysv everything was just a file full of instructions for the shell to parse and initialize. Human readable "technically". It was simple and light weight. SystemD is a bit heavier and more complex as a system service binary. But that load and complexity is generally offset by added features that are extremely nice to have. Providing much more standardized targets and configuration iirc.
I had to search and dig trying to figure out how to set up services properly for my distro, back in the 90s. And when/how to start/restart them. There wasn't one way to do it all. SysD made it all much more standard, simple, and clear. It's biggest sin, is that it's one more binary attack surface that might be exploited.
Yeah, sysv init is all just scripts under the hood, and it's a bit fragile/arcane. You have to write a bunch of files by hand, reference them correctly, and place and link them in the right directories. Systemd is a bit better, I have to admit that.
Why are binaries uniquely attackable in a way that init scripts aren't?
Init scripts are just scripts. Technically, they don't introduce any unique vulnerabilities of their own. Just the flaws in the shell itself or server binaries. A poorly written script absolutely can and will still fuck your day up.
SystemD is a program. Which could introduce its own unique buffer overflows or use after free opportunities. I've not heard of any. But its possible. However, its standard set of interfaces and systems make the risks of writing your own bad scripts or just using other people's random bad scripts like we used to much less an issue.
Nobody is packaging a standard init script across all distros, basically. A script is expected to be unique per machine or at least per admin setting up a set of machines. A binary could have a secret exploit installed in it that nobody can see/audit before it's too late.
At least that's the theory. Personally I love systemd
load more comments
(2 replies)
Any recommendations for a good book or online resource to learn about systemd? Not "how to use it" or "ten tricks for systemd users", but how it works, what makes it tick, basically a systematic overview, end then a dive into the details.
Diving into Systemd would be a book written by Nietzsche.
"Und wenn du lange in Systemd blickst, blickt Systemd auch in dich hinein."
I'm not experienced at it either and don't know the best resources.
But what I can usually recommend in case you don't want to see the usual "THIS-IS-A-PIECE-OF-THE-PUZZLE---COME-BACK-REGULARLY-FOR-MORE-CONENT" stuff, but more in depth stuff: Enter "filetype:pdf systemd" in your search engine. Google or DuckDuckGo will then only spit out pdf files about that topic... And the people who write PDF files are usually more experienced with the topic than those who write blog posts or "how to's".
Let me know if that helped in your case... :)
load more comments
(2 replies)
this one is gonna be controversial.
Yup.
I don’t think I could name one thing that systemd improved for me. But I can name at least one major annoyance that made things worse for me.
The real issue is the backwards incompatibility which essentially forced everyone to switch instead of being able to choose.
For that alone I will keep disliking it.
Not specifically about systemd, but some things can't be backwards compatible because they might want to just do things different.
Nobody was forced to change, the distros saw the options and decided in favor of systemd, the same they decide a million other things.
Nobody was forced to change,
Red hat dominated the market and pushed it on out. You must remember this, don't you?
I'd encourage you to go read the discussions Arch Linux and Debian before deciding to go with systemd
If you shoot the competitors and reject questions and dissent, then you win. Good job, IBM !
Here we go again with the conspiracy bullshit
Didn't expect this topic to still be that controversial... Maybe I'm too young to know, but how was IBM involved?
Ibm owns red hat
can someone please tell me how to make .mount files start at boot for smb shares ffs? is the only thing systemd is failing for me.
I dont know what you are doing, but I have my smb shares simply in fstab and never heard of any .mount file
On modern systems, fstab entries are read by systemd and .mount files are automatically created for each entry. 😄
load more comments
(1 replies)
Systemd can use .mount files to make services and stuff depend on the availability of a mount. They can either be created by hand or are created automatically from fstab.
My nfs mounts always add 1:45 to my boot even though I added _netdev to their lines in fstab. I don't get it.
Use
_netdev,nofail,x-systemd.device-timeout=10s
nofail doesn't interrupt the boot and 10 seconds is a more sane timeout. You can also use
x-systemd.automount
And it will automatically mount the directory the first time it is accessed.
thanks everyone.
IIRC You simply write/change the fstab as in every system. Then you say "systemctl daemon-reload" once, and this (re)creates your .mount files. Then "mount -a" or whatever you need.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Samba#As_systemd_unit
That's the guide I followed on my desktop and laptop.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
view more: next ›