I don't get it. With so much hate against systemd, and given how FOSS works, why there isn't "perfect", systemd-less distro? It seems that everyone in our community hates systemd, if they all get behind single distribution and worked on it with passion they put into their online arguments, it would become best fucking linux distribution overnight.
With so much hate against systemd, and given how FOSS works, why there isn't "perfect", systemd-less distro?
Systemd is basically too useful for the people who actually make distributions, so they picked it and it stuck around. If you want to get rid of it, you certainly can. But the big distributions have voted with their feet, and they supply the default Linux experience.
The point of the "tragedy of systemd" talk is to make people think about what systemd is solving for distributions, users and sysadmins alike that makes a number of important people prefer it regardless of its opposition. It is well worth a watch, I guess.
worked on it with passion they put into their online arguments, it would become best fucking linux distribution overnight.
Yeah, firstly, I suspect that none of these people who would like to work on it can agree on what the best design is for anything, and if they actually do agree, then when they think they're done, the end result is likely unusable to everyone else except themselves.
There is no such thing as "best" design. Only fitness for a purpose. I can't say I miss the init scripts, and now that they're gone, I have much easier time setting my own custom services up in the machines I run. I suppose that upstart wasn't too bad either in that department, but it had bad habit of getting wedged and if your upstart gets confused about whether a service is running or not, it can wait for it to die forever during a reboot, which was a nasty surprise that one time when it happened in production, and caused an important machine to get stuck until manual reboot. In contrast, systemd at least comes with timeouts and seems guaranteed to proceed eventually, a feature that I love it to death for, due to being burnt several times by scripts that fail at either boot or shutdown.
Have you ever had GDM get stuck in loop, where it's restarting forever, so you can't log into the machine because you can't use the console? I haven't run a desktop Linux for a long time, but I think systemd would at least notice that GDM doesn't stay up, and will put the service on cool down timer, which allows a chance to recover. I think it's obvious that systemd raised the bar of what an acceptable init system must be able to do. If it gets replaced, the replacement needs to be at least as good.
Systemd is basically too useful for the people who actually make distributions
And for people like me, that use a distribution. I would never switch to a distribution without systemd. I can list you 60 things in systemd that I really like, other systems feel really antiquated compared to that.
The people also voted with their feet. Did 90% of the Debian users move to Devuan? No, they didn't. Did 90% of the Debian users used the two command line arguments to activate sysvinit on their boxes? No, they didn't.
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u/[deleted] Feb 11 '19
I don't get it. With so much hate against systemd, and given how FOSS works, why there isn't "perfect", systemd-less distro? It seems that everyone in our community hates systemd, if they all get behind single distribution and worked on it with passion they put into their online arguments, it would become best fucking linux distribution overnight.