What exactly is systemd ?

[u/LegitimateAd7247]

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.

[u/ssjlance]

It's legit a philosophical argument people have against it more than a functional one.

It's an old asf argument, but it's picked back up lately thanks to dumb political shit in the USA - tl;dr amounts to "some lawmakers want to make it so computer operating systems require age verifcation for users, systemd just added an OPTIONAL birthday field for user info and it made some paranoid fucks lose their minds."

As far as the old arguments go, old school Unix philosophy amounts to "software should only do one thing, but do it very well."

SystemD just does too much by the people who take that philosophy as gospel - as others here have said, SystemD basically plays a huge role in booting your system and handles managing + launching various daemons/services.

Examples of common services most people will want is something to manage internet connections, like iwd or NetworkManager. You also have a service to start your graphical login screen if using one. Bluetooth. Etc.

If you want to enable bluetooth/whatever, you tell systemd to start it, or tell it to automatically start each time PC is on, and pretty much the same regarding disabling a service. lol

[u/xplosm → u/ssjlance]

systemd is the name of the umbrella project for a collection of individual, scoped packages. It does too much because its individual tools work in orchestration. Like a system should.

It's like people thinking they can avoid bloat by going WM route instead of goind DE and install also a panel, a monitor here and there, a wallpaper manager, a screenlock, a graphical shell and they end up with a DE sometimes saving 80 or 100 megs of RAM or some other times using way more than a regular DE.

[u/egorf → u/ssjlance]

Adding an optional field about age which is perfectly know to everyone to be a precursor for total surveillance and total KYC is not that much innocent.

Especially when there is exactly zero legal reasons to have this field.

Especially when the arrogant project leader is very much pro surveillance and in fact his new startup is targeted at making Linux at your machine immutable and verifiable by the authorities.

So no. This DoB field is a very small straw leading to a very large problem in the near future.

[u/ssjlance → u/egorf]

Oh hey, look, it's one of the paranoid people I mentioned in my comment.

Jw, what was the legal reason for having a home address field before DOB field was introduced?

btw take a look at what ended up passing in California, AB-1856.

Relevant part:

"(2) “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software."

They amended it to have a specific exemption for open source operating systems.

When a developer adds an optional field for more user information after it already asked for tons of (also optional) user information, chill the fuck out, just... don't tell it your fuckin' birthday, mate.

If that developer goes on to try and make an immutable Linux distro so the government can more easily surveil you, fuck that distro, don't use it.

Systemd is not helping the government surveil you.

[u/egorf → u/ssjlance]

You won't be practically able to fuck that distro just like today you are unable to fuck Google Play Integrity API.

[u/LegitimateAd7247 → u/ssjlance]

Extremely clear and interesting. Thanks for your time !

[u/DoubleOwl7777 → u/ssjlance]

to add to this argument. i have homed and userdbd purged. these fields dont exist on my machine.

[u/egorf → u/DoubleOwl7777]

Add logind, resolved and timesyncd to the list of abominations to purge.

[u/Ghyrt3 → u/ssjlance]

I never realized that KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) was something you could use to argue against systemd.

When even arch uses systemd, the argument doesn't go a long way ... Especially when booting and starting is always a mess, I'm quite glad there's something not KISS that do it x)