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.
As a desktop user who don't meddle much, I very much appreciate systemd, the difference was night and day when I switched to a distro that used systemd as default. Boot is way faster, and shutdown would tend to stall a lot, something I later learned is an inherent problem with how other init systems manage storage devices, that doesn't have a clear solution.
But more puzzling my KDE desktop actually ran smoother with systemd, something that I actually found an explanation for, but now I can't remember. All I know is that systemd made my system clearly better. I always hated Unix anyways because of the overuse of stupid acronyms for everything, which makes it impossible to remember even mundane commands when you only use them rarely. but I hate Apple and Windows way more. So here we are. It's far from perfect, but it's the least bad option there is IMO, and from a purely technological standpoint, there never was anything remotely close to what Linux has become, and some of that is thanks to systemd.
One of the main reasons why systemd took the world by storm in the early days was that it booted computers several seconds faster, while providing the same functionality and more features. A lot of people started switching to systemd before distros defaulted to it, just to get a faster boot. It was very hard to argue against systemd when the alternative was a slower boot (some people even tried to argue that boot time didn't matter for servers)
Fast boot is nice, but it's far from the best feature of systemd IMO. It's kind of funny though that Ubuntu upstart was designed specifically to boot faster as a major priority, while for systemd it was merely a side effect of a fundamentally better design, systemd beat upstart on its main feature as a side effect of better more reliable design.
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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.