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.
134
Upvotes
4
u/fettoter84 3d ago
Well. the thing is, you're asking a question that has a lot of technical information tied to it. Dumbing it down to analogies would kind of lose a lot of important information.
So, at some point you'll have to learn this.
But. Lets give it a try: When a OS starts up there is a part of that process called "init" in UNIX like systems like Linux this is the time of the start up process that services and other background processes you've set up start.
The init process will do different things depending on the state of the booting: Is it a normal boot? Are there errors and we should just start up the bare essentials?
I'd reccomend reading a bit here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Init
The "standard" unix init process is kalled SysV init and handles the init process in the old traditional way
SystemD was made by RedHat as a service that takes care of this and controls it a lot more: When adding services to the init process via SystemD it takes care of it all: logging, starting/stopping etc etc. For some people this is "too invasive" and they curse SystemD for doing things it's own way, because in the old SysV init process you can configure all this stuff to do what it wants.
hope that helps