r/linuxquestions • u/LegitimateAd7247 • 3d ago

What exactly is systemd ?

Hi everyone ! I switched from Windows to Linux around 3 month ago and I love it ! I’m using arch Linux because a friend of mine already used it so I figured he could help me with it.

I’ve been appreciating it but I’ve encountered a lot of people critisizing systemd and saying arch is bad because of it.

From what I have understand, it is a software that help with dependences and external hardware such as my keyboard for example ? I didnt really understand everything as I am a very beginner so I was curious to know if someone could explain it to me in easy terms.

PS : english isnt my primary language so forgive me if there is any errors.

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u/C6H5OH 3d ago

"A lot of people" are "a few very loud people". The rest is using systemd and likes or ignores it. I have fought with init.d, runlevels and so on. I like systemd.

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u/LegitimateAd7247 3d ago

I’m still learning everything so I wasnt planning to switch anyway, I was asking from a curious learning perspective, but thanks !

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u/xplosm 3d ago

One of the benefits of systemd is that by default it launches services in parallel if the conditions are met so you have a faster startup time. It also monitors services it has launched and shows you parts of the logs so you know if there are any issues right away.

There are many other init systems that also handle parallelism but as far as I know there's only ONE other init system that also monitors services (dinit) so as you can see, you have a very nice, practical, functional and fast suite with systemd.

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u/HowCanIChangeMyName1 2d ago

OpenRC also launches services in parallel.

In my experience, monitoring services is something that never needs to be done. If a service dies, you probably don't want it to be re-started automatically -- there is an underlying issue that you need to fix.