systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
What’s wrong with systemd?
It tries to do everything.
Think of a thing you want to do in Linux and there is a systemd plugin for it. It’s not the unix way
Systemd is broken down into smaller parts. You don’t need to use it for everything.
Not everything is a file either. I don’t see many complaints about that
A fellow Plan 9 enjoyer?
Bun spotted
General principals are great until you take them to an extreme. There’s always cases where you need to do something a bit different
Wait until you learn about the Linux kernel and the plethora of modules and patches
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Care to elaborate?
All I hear about it is that it doesn’t follow the Unix philosophy of a program should do one thing and do it well. And while it does seem quite large and do a lot of things, out of all the times I have broken my system, systemd has never been to blame.
Edit: deleted duplicate comment.
Wait until people find out about the Linux kernel. It does so many things!
I personally do not like that systemd gets more and more integrated with other software. For example Gnome. That makes it harder to use that software on non systemd linux, or other OS.
Alpine. It’s very lightweight.
It is clumsy in my experience. It also would benefit a lot from systemd since openrc is a pain to use and is slow. If they don’t want systemd for some reason they could switch to busybox init.
There is a reason postmarketos switched to systemd
My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can’t install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.
It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.
I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.
I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.
After having a lot of sysvinit experience, the transition to setting up my own systemd services has been brutal. What finally clicked for me was that I had this habit of building mini-services based on shellscripts; and systemd goes out of its way to deliberately break those: it wants a single stable process to monitor; and if it sniffs out that you are doing some sketchy things that forks in ways it disapproves of, it is going to shut the whole thing down.
Sorry if it wasn’t obvious, I’m using sysvinit.
It was obvious, don’t worry.
I just thought of the joke, and thought it was funny.
Devuan is doing the Lords work
I suppose that would be Android, since that’s the only non systemd OS I use.
Same here. Has to be degoogled though.
I used to use AOSP without google apps. But I’m a bit less strict now, after I bricked a phone because I fucked up.
FreeBSD.
And you can run Linux stuff just fine.
OpenWRT
Slackware linux
Alpine
macOS. I find it to be the least inconvenient for most of my needs.
Forced to use macOS at work, and for me it sucks (only slightly less than Windows):
- Slow UI (have to wait several seconds after login before spotlight is able to execute custom scripts)
- Finder is a PITA and one of the dumbest file managers I was ever forced to use
- No easy way to provision the system
- Annoying nagging to use all the Apple services/login with Apple ID
- Shitty software management (instead of a descent package manager, every fucking application has a popup for its own updates after opening, which breaks my flow)
- macOS only interacts decently with other Apple devices (iPhone etc.) and has its own ‘standards’, taking away my freedom to choose what I want to use.
Of course, your needs are your needs and if macOS fits your needs the best, all power to you.
Those seem like reasonable points, I think.
I don’t use any other Apple devices, so I have no opinion on that. And I don’t often find myself provisioning macOS, but I use Nix to manage my system, so transferring to a new MacBook has been pretty easy for me.
I tend to do a lot of Linux-ey things, and macOS (Unix-based) is much closer to that than Windows is. Also, I often see programming languages/runtimes that require extra/different steps to get up and running in Windows vs. Linux and macOS.
Sure, Windows has WSL, but every time I’ve needed to do some IO-heavy operations with it, it was extremely slow. (Though it has been a few years, so maybe it’s better now?)
I also do a lot of web dev, so macOS offers a few more tools. If Safari wasn’t so terrible, then macOS would become less necessary. But AFAIK (I haven’t checked in a while), macOS is the only environment that can run Safari in an iOS emulator.
My second choice would be NixOS… or maybe Ubuntu.
Windows seems a bit bloated to me. I remember seeing something in the Start menu about X-Box, and I couldn’t uninstall it, for some reason. I could remove the icon from the menu, but it still linked to some binary that was installed with the OS. I’m not a gamer, why do I need that on my system? Also, why did I have to uncheck so many data harvesting options during setup? I’m not very comfortable with things like that being built in to the OS, and enabled by default. I remember a time when things like that were commonly known as “spyware” – I guess it’s just normalized now. (To be fair, I’m not a fan of having to decline Apple Intelligence multiple times on macOS either.)
They use the spiritual predecessor of systemd, launchd, so I’m not sure if this counts.
Same here. Got a MacBook from work, it launches a browser, it’s almost all I need.
Add android to the mix.
Unpopular opinion but I respect it
I misread and wondered when did systemd release cat as in the software not the animal.
Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn’t need Linux for work reasons.
This feels like an “I would switch to Linux if I didn’t need Windows for work” comment from another universe.
BSD is to Linux users what Linux is to Windows users.
Not sure what you want to express. I actually used BSD a long time back, and the quality/documentation/coherence/beauty of the system are/were just on another level… Running Debian for nearly a decade now, because of compatibility (with hardware and software I need)… Linux improved a lot in the last nearly 3 decades and I am happy it exists, still I would be more happy if the BSDs would have stayed at least on an equal footing.
I think the comment speaks for itself. There wasn’t anything deep behind it. It literally just mean “Linux users look at BSD users how Windows users look at Linux.” Bewildered, mystified maybe? It’s just lower on the “food chain”, and they are surprised to see people using it because it’s missing “X” feature they can’t live without, for many people that being gaming. I’m in the same camp.
It was not a comment on the quality of the software, as I have never used it. I would love to tinker with it one day to see the differences, but I can’t see myself ever switching to it, even if I admire/envy some of the better parts compared to Linux.
Thanks for clarification!
… and I think you are point on, by now, the ship has sailed. I could use FreeBSD/OpenBSD on servers, but I’d rather run Debian everywhere. On desktops and for day to day usage, the BSDs are no viable options anymore, they simply lack support for common hardware (Wifi etc.) alone and the BSDs will realistically never be able to catch up the chasm anymore.
I feel there’s a similar relation between Mac :: Ubuntu (me) :: Arch.
I try to explain to folks that I have very little interest in anything outside of /home. I truly use Ubuntu because I like the desktop and Steam works and I have all the dev tools I need. But a certain type of otherwise competent Mac-using developer thinks I must be a 1337 h4x0r to even dare to use Linux for actual work.
Any “hate” in regards to you using Ubuntu is more likely to do with controversy involving Canonical than it is you using a beginner-friendly distro. People are more likely to be kinder to the Mint user.
Fediverse has its own baseline.
Fair point. :-)
At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done… if it is macOS or Windows, that’s okay.
In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)
Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).
GrapheneOS, I assume
In terms of Linux, either Devuan sysvinit, Void, or Alpine.
I am also a fan of BSD.
Kolibri, which only needs a handful of RAM and disk space
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd? I use Mint and I don’t remember having to interact with that kind of low-level nonsense. The distro maintainers can use whatever reasoning they want to pick these details.
If you are just a user, in that a computer is just a tool you use, then you’re right, there’s comparatively little reason to be concerened or even know about the underlying details of the system. If you go further and start making changes to your system, or even building more complex systems, over time you will find yourself forming quite firm opinions about various parts of the underlying system, especially if you’ve had experience with other options.
As a user, why should I care whether the distro I use uses systemd?
Um, because as a user you may have to deal with services, or other systemd features?
Let’s say you want to start
ssh-agentwhen you login to your desktop environment. Well, there’s a systemd service for that that you can enable, and on another distro you’d have to do it another way (autostart script or something).Tribalism exists in every circle, perhaps moreso in tech circles. Ironically anyone who hates on a distro could just switch, or build their own distro if they were so inclined, but it’s often the hating that people participate more in than using their system. Use what works for you, and if it no longer works for you use something else.
