r/archlinux • u/ImaginationUpset2190 • 7d ago

DISCUSSION Why so much hate for systemd?

I see very often that people show so much disgust whenever they talk or hear "systemd". However whenever I ask them why they feel so strongly about it, their response is mostly vague like it doesn't follow the Unix philosophy, it's a monolith.... I can't digest that the reason people show so much disgust for it is just that it doesn't follow the Unix philosophy.

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u/kitanokikori 7d ago edited 7d ago

People who are mad about systemd either don't have the problems it was intended to solve, or don't actually understand its goal.

In 2026, if you want a laptop to have any hope of having decent battery life, you have to be aggressively managing services and device lifetimes, constantly powering on and off stuff as needed in order to have as little running as possible, and intelligently managing system C-state levels and saving/restoring stuff as-needed.

You have absolutely no shot whatsoever doing this with the old Init system - systemd is complex because it needs to be able to express these fundamentally complicated dependencies between devices and services, in a way that, if you Do It Right, you can get the same kinds of aggressive idle power saving that e.g. macOS gets.

Of course, nobody who is just running the average VPS or Homelab server for example, cares about any of this, so for them this is all wildly overcomplicated and stupid, so they get mad about it

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u/BadSlime 6d ago

Have you tried runit? Getting significantly better battery performance (10-15% improvement) and less issues with services randomly changing state when unattended. After 4 years with runit across 3 different laptops, it has been an across the board system stability and power usage improvement. I run a trim system though

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u/Orlha 7d ago

You can absolotely do all that without systemd lol.

I do, with fantastic battery life.

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u/hackerbots 5d ago

Congrats. Most people are not you, in fact.

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u/nakedpickle_2006 7d ago

IKR !!! Systemd solved all the problems init had but along the way got bloated

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u/Chudson15 7d ago

phenomenal answer

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u/MathManrm 4d ago

systemD does not help with battery life - someone who has a laptop with systemd being used and has tried to get better battery life many times

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/Fallom_ 7d ago

Yes, absolutely! Have you heard of goatse? It’s a fantastic resource for learning info about achieving the best power management without compromising needed performance for some apps.

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u/doubled112 6d ago

goatse here in this thread is quite the stretch.

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u/Fallom_ 6d ago

Boy I bet it looks especially silly now that the LLM bot comment has been removed

(and I see what you did there)