Why Would You not Use Systemd?

[zangoku]

I often see posts elsewhere about some folks not using systemd nor having any interest in using. It raises a few questions:
What is wrong with systemd?
What do you benefit from by using something like openrc?
What is your favourite systemd replacement and why?

[jonathon]

Flames… incoming…

[dalto]

The whole systems vs no systems topic has been debated to death for many years. Here is my opinion from a couple of years ago. It hasn’t changed

What's the deal with Systemd?

Historically, there were many reasons people disliked systemd, which are mostly irrelevant at this point. systemd was a massive departure from how init and logging systems worked at the time. It meant a lot of re-learning for long-time Linux users and some people dislike change. At this point, it is ubiquitous so most people have learned how to use it. People feared that systemd would homogenize Linux since most Linux distros of the time had init differences. In point of fact, this did happ…

[flyingcakes]

More post by dalto

Systemd free?

That is a pretty accurate summary. First you should know that this is something that some people a very passionate about. For the record, I am not one of those people. From my perspective much of the systemd debate was nothing but baseless FUD. There are some historical issues that played into the discussion. At the time systemd was introduced it brought a monumental change to how things were managed. Many people don’t like change. On top of that, systemd …

[dalto]

The good news is that at least I seem to agree with myself

[jonathon]

@dalto

at least I seem to agree with myself

You’re lucky.

[zangoku]

Thank you! From what you seem to be saying, not using systemd would not change anything for my own use of things other than making it more complicated

[dalto]

At some point some folks with the opposite opinion will pop in as well and then you will have both sides to consider.

[Zircon34]

I actually always asked myself the same question… Do I have something else to do than worrying about whether I use systemd?

! maybe offensive to some

Yes , I don’t care whether I use systemd

[dalto]

To be honest. I think those who are pro/anti systemd make a small minority.

I think the majority of Linux users don’t care at this point. It is just that those people are much less vocal than the ones that do care.

[Zircon34]

But seriously, I was also wondering what the deal is with systemd, I mostly hear certain people complaining about it but never understood why. In some instances people are repeating what other people say just for the sake of it. I mainly heard about the issue because of the distro Devuan.

[JKMooney]

I recall a lot of arguments around this, most of which beyond my level of expertise. My “reasonably competent amateur” impression is that systemd has a cleaner and easier to understand command structures. So, I kind of like it better.

[codic12]

I’ve been working on my own init system as a small project for a while now, but for most of my time on the linux desktop I’ve used systemd. Why? simply because most distributions ship it by default (though I have used artix quite a bit and still do on some other systems) and it’s fairly convenient.

That being said I refuse to use it on servers because I don’t want a 1300000-line codebase that leaves a lot of room for security holes. But on my desktop I don’t really care. Most of my data is on an external encrypted drive and backed up securely in other places, anyways.

Philosophically systemd sucks, IMO. We have an init system, sure it’s great and all, I like the way it’s laid out a lot. But why do we need all this stuff like udev and logind inside the init system? But in practice it works fairly well, and I don’t think the issue is as huge as some make it out to be.

[keybreak]

Let me be quick:
Sosystemd is BLOAT!!!11111111111111111

[lucidae]

Which init system most closely follows the KISS mentality? OpenRC? Runit?

[Kresimir]

On Arch/EndeavourOS you have no choice but to use systemd. If you want Arch without systemd, use Artix Linux.

There are several things wrong with the whole concept of systemd, but there is also much confusion and people seem to hate it without understanding why they are hating it.

Here are a few things I don’t like about it:

1. It’s bloated. Too many lines of code, nobody really knows everything it does.
2. Potential for undiscovered security vulnerabilities (due to such bloat in code).
3. It’s slow, the boot time is significantly slower with systemd.
4. The main developer working on it has somewhat of a reputation of being rather incompetent when it comes to writing bug-free, secure code – he is also the author of PulseAudio, and that’s not a good reference…
5. It does too many things, contrary to UNIX philosophy, which says that big, monolitic programs with many features are to be eschewed in favour of modularity: small programs that do only one thing, do it well, and can interact with other such small programs in complex ways. Systemd is completely in opposition to this approach, being a monolitic, bloated program with many features and being much more than an init system.

On the other side, systemd makes system administering very simple and, for the most part, it works well enough. It is now fairly mature software, it has received many bug and security fixes and, at least on modern computers, it runs satisfactorily quickly. The other init systems, while being less bloated, are also used much less, and could actually be more vulnerable simply because of such small user base.

[dalto]

At this point, systemd is much more than an init system. It is a systems management framework.

I don’t think there is much point in comparing it to init systems at this point.

Of course, this is one of the things that people who don’t like systemd dislike about it.

[sandman]

Leaving aside the Linux phylosophy arguments, what bothers me most is that Systemd is more or less forced. There are dependencies built in where there really are none. I just don’t like to be forced to do something.

Before EOS I have not used a distro with Systemd for 8 years. But the air is getting thinner and thinner, the number of distros without Systemd is getting more and more manageable and also the suitability for everyday use of some non-systemd distros is rather not given.

[Kresimir]

Yeah, systemd emerging as the dominant init system (and everything else it is) has really reduced the amount of choice for Linux users. At this point you may as well call our operating system a systemd distribution, instead of a GNU/Linux distribution.

[ricklinux]

I don’t care what it is as long as it works. BTW i use rEFInd!

Edit: With KDE of course & Firefox!