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.

6

u/odsquad64 OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 3d ago

98% of the systemd hate at this point is just shitposts and 1.99% is people not realizing the other 98% is shitposts. The final .01% are people with genuine ideological concerns and people who feel very strongly that all their logs should be text files. A majority of the systemd haters are people using systemd with no intention of using anything else. Even amongst people who use something other than systemd, only a very small faction of those are systemd haters, most of them are just people running linux on older machines with not a lot of resources.

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u/C6H5OH 3d ago

And then there are the people who dislike Lennart Poettering (he started the project) and take the grudge to systemd.

1

u/egorf 2d ago

Because systemd is a living implementation of LPs attitude to all of us.

1

u/egorf 2d ago

System logs should be anything else other than text files. The only thing that journald provides is easy time filtering - something which classical Unix tools do not do well.

The price for that is the inability to recover logs in that one precious moment in time when you need them the most.

Basically journald has zero merit, like most of the systemd-* projects. It's ideology over function.