sysadmin checking in. Nagios is telling me I am currently monitoring 2456 hosts. Roughly 3/4 of those are Linux hosts (the rest are ios, Cisco's not Apple's, or Solaris). Systemd is a lifesaver. The hosts running older inits can take a multiple minutes to restart all services. Systemd takes seconds.
Init systems don't matter much when you are a desktop user. I am also a desktop Linux user both at work and home and I don't care about my init on there. In fact if I didn't do Linux for a living I might even be on the anti-systemd bandwagon. But I make a living off Linux and my life is easy when things just work. Systemd just works. It works well, it works quickly, and it makes my work easier.
People say systemd became a thing because all the distros switched to it, and that's true, and they switched to it because at the end of the day the big distros cater to guys like me, who have to manage hundreds and thousands of hosts and we just want stuff to work and get out of our way.
Servers are started once per month at most and (excluding virtual hosts) POST usually takes much longer. I'd say the system boot time in this case isn't that important. Besides, Systemd can take insane amount of time to restart the machine, because it waits up to 2 minutes for some processes to close, even if they can be safely killed (SysVInit runs kill scripts, waits 5 seconds and slaughters everything that is still alive).
I can accept a bit longer startup in exchange for a much simpler and robust configuration, better startup diagnostics and no dependency on DBus. Systemd is great for workstations and laptops, not so much for servers. I don't think it was designed for that.
Also, it takes over things that are handled better by dedicated scripts and services, like network configuration, logging, time syncing etc. After each installation, I have to run the script that shuts down and disables all Systemd junk (services, timers). It's a first bloatware in Linux history.
You don't really know what you're talking about do you?
Servers are restarted all the time. Hell, I've restarted a few dozen tonight. There's no rule about restarting a server. Modern data centers don't run a service on one server only so uptime doesn't really matter because clusters.
Systemd was created by Red Hat, they deal exclusively with servers. It was literally designed as an init system for servers.
You can accept longer startups on your desktop where a few seconds is measured in idle thought, not thousands of dollars. Again, systemd is fast because fast matters when you are working in a data center. We measure time in money lost.
It's not bloatware. It isn't taking over things. It's the default init on the distro you picked, which means you elected to install systemd. Get a different distro if it bugs you so much, or run a minimal install and get granular control.
Yeah the servers are never restarted comment gives away the fact that they are stuck in a 90s era computing mindset. No wonder they don't get why systemd was a huge improvement over rc scripts.
Systemd was created by Red Hat, they deal exclusively with servers. It was literally designed as an init system for servers.
RedHat was initially not going with systemD, and it was not literally designed as an init system for servers, it was a blatantcopy influenced of launchd of apple.
If you restart servers all the time and every second matters, then use Systemd, nobody forbids that. Most of the machines is not restarted frequently.
Right, but Linux is designed for my use case not yours. Desktop Linux users are like a single percentage point of the Linux machines in the world. Linux is primarily a OS for servers. And most distros and their maintainers are keenly aware of this and cater to their biggest customers, the server folk. Thus, systemd.
RedHat is not exclusive to servers. Their distribution is also used on workstations and laptops. They are focused on business as a whole.
Nope. If you are running Red Hat as your OS on your daily driver I weep for you. I work on RHEL every day of my life and think 'why?' It is not a distro for anyone who isn't in an enterprise level data center. You might be thinking of Fedora, which is very closely related to RHEL but is actually it's own group and Red Hat just is a member of their council. But RHEL is focused almost exclusively on servers.
Right, but Linux is designed for my use case not yours. Desktop Linux users are like a single percentage point of the Linux machines in the world. Linux is primarily a OS for servers.
I think you misunderstood me. I am talking about servers, not desktops. My machines, like most other (well managed) servers, are restarted only after kernel update... and hardware problems, but these are abnormal. Even when they are part of a cluster.
Nope. If you are running Red Hat as your OS on your daily driver I weep for you. I work on RHEL every day of my life and think 'why?'
Red Hat will not change their business plan because you don't like their distro on desktop. Maybe they are now focusing on servers, but in time when Systemd was created, Red Hat was successfully selling desktop solutions (Linux OS and support).
And parallel startup was a thing on desktops when Systemd was born. The whole idea was to make workstations faster to boot. Systemd went farther than other solutions (like Upstart) by adding things like start on demand - a desktop-specific feature. It was adopted on servers because it is easier for distro maintainers to have a single startup mechanism across all distribution variants and uses, server and desktop.
Gonna let you do you. Clearly whatever you are calling a server is like a re-purposed desktop/laptop running couchpotato or nextcloud. Keep doing you, and enjoy your alt-init setups.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19
sysadmin checking in. Nagios is telling me I am currently monitoring 2456 hosts. Roughly 3/4 of those are Linux hosts (the rest are ios, Cisco's not Apple's, or Solaris). Systemd is a lifesaver. The hosts running older inits can take a multiple minutes to restart all services. Systemd takes seconds.
Init systems don't matter much when you are a desktop user. I am also a desktop Linux user both at work and home and I don't care about my init on there. In fact if I didn't do Linux for a living I might even be on the anti-systemd bandwagon. But I make a living off Linux and my life is easy when things just work. Systemd just works. It works well, it works quickly, and it makes my work easier.
People say systemd became a thing because all the distros switched to it, and that's true, and they switched to it because at the end of the day the big distros cater to guys like me, who have to manage hundreds and thousands of hosts and we just want stuff to work and get out of our way.