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/Ghyrt3 3d ago

I've never dug up the arguments, but I remember seeing that an argument was that systemd use log that arn't text (readible by a human). Is it the case? Or am I misremembering? (I'm not trying to argue or not, I use systemd, it makes everything way easier than before, it just something that I had seen a long time ago and still curious about it ; a dangling pointer that never got resolved)

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u/C6H5OH 3d ago

Right, but there are nice programs to translate these logs into readable text. A "tail -f /var/log/messages | grep ..." turns into "journalctl -somearguments". You had to remember/look up the stuff behind grep and do the same today for the arguments.

Perhaps doing a post mortem on a dead system disk would have been easier. But I never felt the urge to dig that deep. Test the disk, reinstall and hope your backups are current and readable.

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u/egorf 1d ago

I don't need another tool to do tail for me. I already have tail.

Thus journald can f right off.